Italy’s streak of bad weather this year has been horrible for Italian cherry farmers, but much to everyone’s surprise, that hasn’t prevented Alberto and Giuseppe Rosso, cherry farmers from Pecetto Torinese, from earning themselves a Guinness World Record for growing the world’s largest cherry.
Pecetto Torinese sits four miles southeast of Turin, in Piedmont, a town that is world-renowned for cherry production. The Rosso family has been growing cherries there for more than a hundred years but had noticed recently that their carmen cherries were growing to impressive sizes.
“This year we decided to do things right and called a panel of experts,” Alberto Rosso told national newspaper la Repubblica.
The winning cherry, which weighs in at 33.05 grams, beats the previous record mark of 26.45 grams that was earned by another Italian farmer in February of this year.
Even though one out of every four cherries have been lost in 2021 due to bad weather, “Italy remains the main producer [of cherries] in the European Union, with almost 30,000 hectares cultivated, situated in Puglia, followed by Campania, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto e Lazio,” according to the Italian farmers’ group Coldiretti.
