When a seven-eared stem emerged from the ground, it seemed like a miracle. What Claudio Grossi had unearthed was an ancient grain that proved to be an answer to some modern problems

Photographs by Clara Vannucci

November 2026

At his farm near Parma, Italy, Claudio Grossi offers a visual history of his miracle grain in photos, crackers and loaves. Clara Vannucci

Sometime in the early 1990s, Claudio Grossi, a 40-year-old farmer in Parma, in northern Italy, was cleaning his attic when he turned up an old sack full of seeds that he couldn’t identify. The bag, he was sure, had been left by his late great-grandfather, who’d started the farmstead around 1915. Grossi had no idea how long the seeds had been sitting there, deprived of water, soil and sun. Dry and cracked, the kernels looked so old in the palm of his hand that he doubted anything would ever sprout from them.…