farro

Farro is the Italian name for three ancient wheat varieties: einkorn, emmer, and spelt. The Italian word descends directly from Latin far, the generic term for spelt or emmer wheat that was the dietary staple of ancient Rome. For centuries, far was so central to Roman life that the word for flour, farina, derived from it, and farro is simply far with Italian inflection.

Latin far was the grain of the Roman legion. Standard military rations through the Republican period included a pound of far per soldier per day, ground into flatbread or boiled into puls, a porridge that sustained the army on campaign. Pliny the Elder, writing in 77 CE, noted that far had fed Rome for four centuries before bread wheat varieties from North Africa began displacing it.

As bread wheat became cheaper and more available in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, farro retreated to the Italian highlands, particularly the Garfagnana region of Tuscany. It survived there as a local crop, grown in thin mountain soils where modern wheat varieties cannot compete. In 1996, the Consortium for the Protection of Farro della Garfagnana secured an IGP geographic designation from the European Union.

The word re-entered international English in the 1990s, when Italian cuisine began influencing restaurant menus beyond pasta and pizza. Farro appeared in the United States as a restaurant grain, then in specialty groceries. The Latin root far also gave the Roman patrician marriage rite its name: confarreatio, in which the couple shared a cake of spelt, binding themselves through the same grain that bound Rome together.