Early Arrival and Adoption of Cucurbita (Pumpkin, Squash) in Renaissance and Post-Renaissance Italy

Pumpkins, Cucurbita species, are native to the Americas and were introduced to Europe shortly after 1492. By 1518, Cucurbita pepo L. and C. maxima Duchesne had arrived in Italy, and within several decades were adopted in Italian cookery for use of both young and mature fruits. By the early seventeenth century, round and elongate young fruits of C. pepo had entered Italian kitchens as separate culinary items, and the latter soon largely replaced the longstanding culinary use of young, elongate bottle gourds, Lagenaria siceraria (Mol.) Standl. By the eighteenth century, the long-fruited cocozelle squash, C. pepo subsp. pepo Cocozelle Group, had become established in the environs of Naples. A particular extant cocozelle, ‘San Pasquale,’ named after a Neapolitan neighborhood, was known by 1811. The C. pepo subsp. pepo Zucchini Group originated in the environs of Milan around 1850, as evidenced by similar descriptions of the zucca verde quarantina in an agricultural book from 1855 and the zucca quarantina vera nana in a horticultural book from 1892.  The nana di Milano in the 1891 seed catalogue of Fratelli Ingegnoli also likely refers to the zucchini. The word zucchini in reference to squash and the C. pepo cultivar-group Zucchini originated independently but nearly concurrently. The earliest appearance of the word zucchini/e in literature that we found dates to a Tuscan botanical dictionary of 1809, in reference to small, mature dry bottle gourds, L. siceraria, used for storing tobacco. By 1844, the term appeared in Tuscan cookbooks to indicate culinary fruits of C. pepo.  Use of the word zucchini spread across northern Italy during the second half of the nineteenth century, entering the Standard Italian lexicon by 1875, and gradually displacing older dialect terms, such as zucchette and zucchettine, which had been in use regionally for various young squash. Today the word zucchini is used in Italy much as the term summer squash is used in American English. Zucchini was applied in the U.S.A. to a uniformly cylindrical, intensely colored squash that had been imported from Milan not long before 1918. In the U.S.A. and elsewhere outside of Italy, the word zucchini then came to signify exclusively uniformly cylindrical, intense-colored squash.