My Almond Archive

Angelica Calabrese | Longreads | July 7, 2026 | 4,311 words (23 minutes)

Your grandfather was a traditionalist, the farmer told me, in cadenced, emphatic Italian. He never wanted to get rid of the trees. But here, we have to get rid of them. He shrugged. Tutti li dobbiamo togliere, tutti. 

The farmer wore a dark blue jumpsuit and a cap, and had a round, lined face, one I might find kind if I hadn’t just watched him put a chainsaw to the trees on what was once my family’s land. Behind him stood his tractor, and behind me was an almond tree, sundered. The crown of the tree—in glorious, milk-rose, early winter bloom—lay prostrate on the ground. Tucked into its branches were carefully woven birds’ nests, now turned upside down. 

It was February, pruning season, and my aunt and I had come to San Gaetano to gather polloni from the figs to try to plant in our gardens. The figs at San Gaetano were colossal and ancient, with candy-colored fruit and crowns as vast as oaks. This piece of land—three hectares of vineyards and fruit trees on a sun-drenched rise just outside the town of Guagnano, 30 minutes northwest of the southeastern Italian city of Lecce, deep in the region called Salento—had been in my grandfather’s family for generations. My father and his siblings had grown up scampering into these trees’ branches for figs and peaches, and snacking from crates full of almonds each fall. After his children left home, my grandfather rented the land to a farmer; fresh vines were planted, the grapes harvested and sold each year. After my grandfather passed away, the land was inherited by relatives who had lost interest in farming and fruit trees. They quickly settled upon an agreement to sell the land to the farmer. Knowing that San Gaetano would soon change hands, my aunt and I had come for the fig sprouts, hoping to preserve some sweetness of this place in our own homes. 

We didn’t expect to find the trees splayed rather than stretched toward the sky. Wordless, I looked at the upturned birds’ nests as the farmer told us his plan to lay the land flat. The heritage fig trees; the vineyards; the peaches; all of the almond trees: they were old and unproductive, he said. Tutti li dobbiamo togliere, tutti, he repeated.

What will you plant, then? my aunt asked him. The farmer said he wasn’t sure. Maybe he’d plant vineyards again, or maybe olives. Maybe nothing at all. Later, after my aunt and I had gathered our fig cuttings, she mused that he would probably build himself a villa on the cleared land. 

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Back at home, I pulled a hefty book, Fave e Favelle, from the shelf in my kitchen. It wove botany alongside traditional southern Italian herbal and medicinal knowledge, and I consulted it often in moments of curiosity or crisis. I turned to the entry on almonds. There was the scientific name, Prunus dulcis, followed by its etymologies and common names, in Italian and its dialects: mandorlo, amàndua, amendulàra, ammènola, mandla, màndola, mandolèr, manèle, mèndula. Then, its botanical description and medicinal properties:

Deciduous tree, with clustered leaves, having a lanceolate blade and serrated edge. Flowers with five pink, sometimes white, petals. The fruit is a gray-green, hairy drupe. It blooms from January to March. Cultivated. Anti-inflammatory, emollient, intestinal regulator, refreshing. 

I wasn’t certain what “emollient” meant, so I found its definition online: not only “having the quality of softening or soothing the skin” but also “attending to avoid confrontation or anger; calming or conciliatory.” I thought of the almond’s upside-down branches, still lively, and of my mute rage. 

To disturb one element of this landscape would prevent the whole from doing, thinking, feeling, being.

I had considered buying the land at San Gaetano from the relatives that inherited it. It was just over €20,000—expensive, but not unthinkable. At least it would stay in the family, I thought. But vineyards are hard work, an uncle told me. It will just be money down the drain; leave it to the farmer who knows how to tend to it all. He thought I was being ridiculous. Maybe I was. I don’t spend as much time in Salento as I should, and I’m not a farmer. I don’t know how to prune grapevines, make wine, or manage property. And yet.

Later that afternoon, I returned to San Gaetano one last time. I sat down beside the tree and pulled out my sketchbook, setting down the lines of the trunk, which forked in two and then curved back on itself. When I looked at what my hand had put down on the page, I saw the V-shape, one edge curving toward its center, a half-heart. 

In the distance, a chainsaw roared to life. I thought of the almond’s names and their soothing qualities, their m’s and l’s and soft d’s that disappeared into n’s. As I closed my notebook, I repeated them like a balm: mandorlo mandula mènnula. 

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In the early 19th century, Karl Friedrich Burdach, a German physiologist and physician, began studying the brain. Burdach was part of a scientific and philosophical movement in Germany called Naturephilosophen. For students of Naturephilosophen, materiality was essential. Understanding the physical form of things—their shape and texture, their branching or rooting qualities—was key to understanding their being, their life force, their essence. Burdach and his contemporaries believed that keen observation and aesthetic sensibilities could reveal fundamental truths about the subject being studied. This was the birth of morphology: the study of shape and form.

Burdach practiced this approach in his study of the human brain. Of Structure and Life of the Brain, his three-volume anatomical treatise published between 1819 and 1826, distinguished the discrete structures that made up the brain, gave them names, and proposed notions about their function. Like Greek and Roman anatomists before him, Burdach turned to the natural world as a point of reference. The brain structures he observed became hillocks and hollows, shells and seeds: an interior landscape of meaning-making. 

In his study, Burdach identified a twinned pair of oval-shaped bundles of neurons that sit at the center of the skull, nestled between the lobes of the brain. He noticed their color and shape: gray matter, oval, with a narrowed tip. To him, the bundles resembled two almonds, tucked between small hills and ridges. He named them after the sweet nut: amygdala, from ἀμυγδάλη—an ancient Greek word for almond.

Burdach did not hypothesize much about the role of these two brain-almonds that make up the amygdala. But he argued that the amygdala did not work in isolation, that it was an integral part of a coherent, life-determining whole. To disturb one element of this landscape would prevent the whole from doing, thinking, feeling, being. 

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Like many Italian regions, Salento has its own dialect, a unique variation on Italian. In Salentino, mandorla becomes mènnula. You can improvise with a Salentino dialectal word like mènnula. From noun, it becomes verb: mènnulando, for example. Almonding. The word has a roaming, mobile quality. 

A friend of mine, a basket-weaver here in Salento, calls himself a mènnularo, an almond man. Tucked in his pocket, he always carries a napkin full of toasted almonds. At the bar, or after a concert, he pulls out his napkin and unfolds it in his large, skilled hands and offers up the sweet nuts, warmed from his pocket against his body. Almonding as gathering, as delighting. We gather like birds to peck from his open palm. 

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I first saw San Gaetano in fall of 2021, from the window of Nonno’s SUV. I had just moved to his small southern Italian town of Campi Salentina from the US, where I grew up. Nonno was 91, and yet he behaved as if he was decades younger, zooming across Salento in a vehicle that he borrowed from one of my uncles after crashing his own. Even at 91, he was still reckless, playful, an artist. 

One afternoon, he took me on a drive past the two lingering pieces of family land, Lu Leccisu and San Gaetano. His family had been a family of doctors and pharmacists, small landowners whose properties had been passed from generation to generation for centuries. Nonno had abandoned the family profession and become a sculptor instead; Lu Leccisu and San Gaetano were the last fragments that Nonno had stubbornly held onto, more for their aesthetic and ecological qualities than any other reason. Neither was particularly lucrative—the farmer who rented San Gaetano paid around €150 per month—but Nonno loved the way each small piece of land gently curved under the wide sky, and he loved sharing them with a curious grandchild. He promised to bring me back soon. 

Later that year, on his way home after a friend’s funeral, Nonno slipped and fell headfirst into the stone wall of the chiesa madre. His neck was reduced to fragments, though no one knew it then. He refused to get X-rays, and stayed in bed for weeks. By the following summer, he was back on his feet, and back behind the wheel of the SUV, even though he could no longer properly turn his head. 

One afternoon, Nonno proposed a drive. First, to Lu Leccisu, which was all golden summer grasses, swaying in a stink that blew in from the waters of the nearby sewage treatment plant. “Beautiful land,” he said, “but it smells.” We continued north, the car careening over potholes and down country roads, past olive trees and vineyards. 

At San Gaetano, Nonno pulled onto the narrow, overgrown path, lined by thick, veined grapevines, and drove to the end of it, parking just under the almond tree. He pulled a pair of pruning shears and a plastic grocery bag out of his trunk, then handed me the bag. It was late August, and he had brought me here for the grapes and the figs. 

Most of the grapevines at San Gaetano were Negroamaro and Malvasia, whose grapes were dark and small with a thick, waxy skin. But there were a few old plants of uva da tavola, table grapes, tucked in the center of the rows. The sun was strong and angular, and a persistent tramontana wind battered us as I followed him through the rows of leafed grapevines. He was more unsteady than I had seen him, shuffling along the grapevines in black dress shoes and a pale blue polo shirt. Finally, he found the vines that he was looking for: muscled trunks standing to about chest height, with grapes draping from the vine in clusters of deep pink. 

Uva cardinale, Nonno told me. He clipped a handful from the vine; he and the farmer had an agreement whereby he could always harvest a bit of fruit for himself. We ate it in the sun, his face splitting with delight, his eyes playful and curious, looking over at me to make sure that I was sharing in his same joy. We moved down the row, stopping here and there for him to clip cluster after cluster into his large hands. He carefully dropped each cluster into the plastic grocery bag that I was carrying, which grew heavy as we moved through the rows. 

I hadn’t come with a bag or a basket; instead, I stuffed my pockets with the hard, pockmarked shells, some still tucked into their jade velvet robe.

When we had harvested our fair share, we passed below the fig trees, standing on our tiptoes to reach the tips of the branches. There were pale lime-skinned figs with lemon-yellow insides, mauve figs with strawberry insides, striped with pale-rose. We sought out the honey drop at the base to check for ripeness; here, too, we ate as we went, drunk off the sweetness of the afternoon. 

In the shade of San Gaetano’s almond tree, we loaded our harvest into the car. On the way back toward town, beneath a row of sturdy pines, Nonno caught sight of a dumpsite, a mound of discarded construction materials. He swerved off the road and pulled the car to a swift stop. Nonno loved detritus and dumps, places where the discarded and forgotten became found treasure. The sun was setting, throwing a golden shadow across the afternoon. I followed him as he clambered over the debris, searching for a shard of pottery, a ceramic tile. His hands sticky with grape and fig juice, his broken neck bent toward the ground as he sought a glimmering something. 

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In Salento, each town nestled into a shallow valley or slim rise has its own dialectal name for the almond in its varied manifestations—as tree, as fruit, as orchard. In Otranto, the almond tree is amenduléa, whereas in Ostuni, it becomes árvulu də aménulu. In Copertino, the almond fruit or nut is méndula; which becomes méngula in Castro and ménulə in Cisternino. Near Taranto, it becomes aménələ, then amënulə in nearby Martina Franca. The almond orchard or mandorleto in standard Italian, has its own names too: mendulára in Lecce; mindulítu in Mesagne. 

There are names for when the fruit is still fresh and green (mendulidda), and names for the nut while it is still tender and watery (mendulícchia). There are names for the different varieties of almond—the bitter almond, the almond of Carovigno, of Barletta, of Ceglie Messapica, the hard almond, the fragile almond, the oval almond. The catuccia, the pizzutella, the principálli, reale, rivezzo, tondina. The list goes on. 

This precision is a testament to the intimacy that exists between plant and place, an intimacy born of centuries of people and landscapes coming into being together. The fruit, the seed, the tree, and the words used to describe them—each is an integral part of a coherent, life-determining whole.

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One autumn evening, after my grandfather died and before the land was sold, I drove out to San Gaetano. The sun was setting; a mauve blanket descended over the countryside. It was October, too late for almonds. Still, I wanted to try. I had never harvested almonds before, and the ones that still clung to the tree seemed desperate for a loving hand. I stood on my tiptoes, plucked the nuts from the branches one by one. I hadn’t come with a bag or a basket; instead, I stuffed my pockets with the hard, pockmarked shells, some still tucked into their jade velvet robe. I shook the branches to loose the nuts to the earth, and I plucked them from the ground. I gathered from the trees near the road, whose almonds were a different shape—rounder, with a peaked, pointed tip. I filled every crevice with anticipated sweetness. 

Later, I spilled them onto my kitchen table and sorted them by shape and size. I ate one of the rounder ones, with the peaked points, and it was violently bitter. I frantically Googled it and learned that I had eaten a bitter almond, which are poisonous and contain cyanide. I called poison control to ask if I was going to die. They assured me that I wasn’t. I was only slightly reassured. 

While I awaited illness and possible death, I collected the sweet almonds in a glass jar, tucked them into a shelf in the kitchen. No illness arrived, no death came for me. I saved the bitter almonds, too, in a jar that I labeled do not eat. When I want to taste that October afternoon, I crack a sweet nut and the mauve light washes over me. 

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A sun-ripened fig, a pocketful of nuts, a broken shard of glazed pottery. What is it that draws us to gather, to collect, to tuck things away and store them for the future? 

In her short essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. Le Guin argues that this instinct to hold and preserve is essential to our humanity. The story of what it means to be human has often been told as one of violence, Le Guin writes. She recounts a prehistoric tale, in which a man with a big stick bashes in the head of another being in order to win food, or land, or some other good. This is the heroes’ journey, a story structured by challenge, victory and transformation—but this story is toxic, Le Guin says. It obscures the work of harvesting, and collecting; of noticing what is beautiful, useful, tasty, and keeping it for a future moment of delight. These careful practices are far more meaningful than conquer and conquest. Le Guin writes:

If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you; home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then the next day you probably do much the same again—if to do that is human … then I am a human being after all.

Drawing on Virginia Woolf, who once defined heroism as “botulism” and the hero as “bottle,” Le Guin instead proposes the bottle as hero. “Not just the bottle of gin or wine,” she writes, “but bottle in its older sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else.” The heroic acts of gathering, holding, and containing are the real life-giving work, she suggests.

Why do some memories persist, surfacing occasionally like round, river-turned stones, while others return to the ocean?

Nonno’s ground-floor studio contained his collection: ancient Greek pottery, 15th-century manuscripts, 18th-century paintings, Chinese sculptures, and Obama bobbleheads. His sculptures were full of found objects, too: leafs, keys, locks, a bowl of plastic pasta. He had a story to tell about each object he had carefully brought home. My grandmother, too, was an attentive artist and collector. She kept a chest full of plant specimens, each one carefully studied, labeled, categorized and another, larger chest of her drawings of these plants. Together, they gathered what they found delightful or meaningful, to weave new relationships and to make sense of themselves in space. They gathered to pass on to those of us who would come after. 

Le Guin writes that the stories we tell must do the same work: attend to wonder, bring us into relationship, weave together place, past, future. Stories that become carrier bags, collections, medicine bundles for the future. 

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On a recent afternoon, I walked the hillside bordering the town where I live. These walks are a bit feral: I trespass, wandering through others’ properties and olive groves and abandoned houses, in search of wildflowers. The walks are a practice, inspired by a book of poems and drawings that my grandmother composed in this landscape over 30 years ago, just before I was born. 

The collection is organized by date; it begins in early February and ends in late May. When I walk, I am guided by her words. On this date, her poems and drawings describe a burbling stream of daisies, the naked vine, a cascade of almond blossoms. The day is gray and windswept, as is common in February. I find no daisies, but I come across a branching almond. There is no central stem of this tree—just forking paths, parallel lives, an open hand to the sky, slender fingers bedecked in cream-colored blossoms. Behind it, the hillside unfolds in prickly pear and ploughed fields gone green, olives, stone huts, a spindled pine and circling hawk. 

There is something about this almond that catches me. I spend 20 minutes drawing its branching lives, its flat cuts. Its shape is a record of its relationships with others: with the humans who trimmed its trunks and branches for firewood or for aesthetic delight; with the soil whose nutrients sustained its growth, or not; with the light and the sun and the warmth, which determined its blooming and its fruiting.

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While reading, I encountered a phrase on a web page detailing the role the amygdala plays in the brain. I trip over it, am caught by it: L’amigdala è l’archivio della nostra memoria emozionale. 

The amygdala is the archive of our emotional memory. 

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The Salentino dialect still contains traces of almonds. There are references to the way farmers looked to their blossoms to plan their year and determine their harvests; to the labor sedimented in its thick, pocked shell and tender seed; to the branching network of relations that somehow holds things together. In Fave e Favelle, that hefty tome guiding my almond research, the authors collect the idiomatic expressions to which the almond gives shape:

Ménnula ca fiorésci ti scínnaru no nni minti allu panaru (Uggiano La Chiesa) 

The almond that blossoms in January won’t fill the basket. 

Faa face biáa e mméndula face ulía (Lecce) 

Flowering fava makes a good grain harvest; flowering almonds make a good almond harvest. 

Quannu cazzi le méndule, tannu mpari cce ssu’ toste (Lecce) 

When you crack the almonds, you learn that they’re hard.

Va’ scórciula ménduli! (Maruggio) 

Go crack almonds—

or, in other words, Go to hell. 

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Why do some memories persist, surfacing occasionally like round, river-turned stones, while others return to the ocean? Because they are gathered, tumbled, rounded, and held by the amygdala. 

In scientific studies on brain activity, Burdach’s amygdala lights up with strong emotions: fear, love, grief, joy. Neuroanatomists believe that this increased amygdala activity sends a signal to other parts of the brain: Remember me. The more amygdala activity associated with an experience, the stronger the emotions, and the more likely it is that the experience will be remembered. 

People with amygdala damage do not experience fear; with damaged amygdalae, memories have no emotional valence. In these cases, memories exist as flat images, without feeling. Researchers report that once memories and emotions are unstitched from one another, both lose meaning—memories exist only as scenes and objects, and emotional experiences become difficult to recognize both in oneself and in others. The wince of fear or flash of joy that sweeps across someone’s face is reduced to a muscle contraction. 

A larger amygdala, on the other hand, often signals greater social-emotional intelligence: a greater capacity to feel one’s own emotions, to recognize emotion as it moves across the body and expressions of another being, and to respond with compassion and attention. A greater capacity to gather, and to remember. To put things, people, and places back together again. 

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All across Salento, trees are falling apart. Olive trees, desiccated from the Xylella fastidiosa bacterial epidemic, are consumed by fire and slump to the ground in a burnished black heap. Fig trees are eaten from the inside out by the recently-arrived fig weevil. Violently hot summers have sucked peach, pear, persimmon, and other trees dry. The almond persists. Until it doesn’t. 

A tree can tell you the story of a family, of past care and present abandonment, and of visions of the future.

My grandfather held the plot of land at San Gaetano together as a coherent whole, seeking to safeguard its beauty. He held the whole family together in the same way, in his steady, skilled, sculptor’s hands. But after his death, questions of inheritance emerged: what to do with all that he had gathered, held close? Should we, could we, steward it with the same care? If one piece is loosed from the rest, will the whole hold its shape? Some decided to sell, and others to renovate; still others chose to hold everything close. Critiques and jealousies festered. In the year since his death, the family has splintered as readily and unexpectedly as the regions’ trees. 

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What if the almond trees are the amygdala of Salento, the archive of its emotional memory? The names it is given, the sayings it gives birth to, the cuts made to give it shape and encourage it to bear fruit: all these store and transmit ways of knowing and inhabiting this remote limb of the Italian peninsula. Its pale blossoms give rhythm to seasons and to lives. Its sweet scent carries memories of late winter afternoons in campagna beneath blustery gray skies. 

Unlike the olive or the grapevine, often planted and cultivated for large-scale production, the almond is familiar, intimate. A tree can tell you the story of a family, of past care and present abandonment, and of visions of the future. Of what it was, and what it might yet be. Anti-inflammatory, emollient, soothing, refreshing. 

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That final afternoon at San Gaetano, after I had drawn the tree, the farmer came back to continue cutting. Before he began razing the trunk, I asked him to snip the bird’s nest out of the tree’s fallen crown. The nest was carefully woven of thin, flexible branches, its form hardened with carefully gathered mud, its base soft with dried grass and pine needles. I couldn’t bear the thought of this carefully-built home being burned or chipped to pieces along with the rest of the tree. That afternoon, alongside my fig cuttings, I brought a chunk of almond tree home to the family apartment, and tucked the branch and its nest into a corner of the terrace. The jar of bitter almonds is still there, too, on a shelf in my kitchen. 

The bitter almond is often used in southern Italian cooking. Its touch of cyanide is an essential ingredient of many Italian pastries, including any good pasta reale, the traditional almond paste of many southern Italian sweets. Just a few bitter almonds per kilo of sweet ones does the trick and doesn’t kill anyone. One day, I’ll use them—to prepare amaretti cookies, or pasta reale for a sweet Easter lamb or Christmas fish. When I do, I’ll invite the family around the same table again; I’ll share the bits of beauty that I have held close, tumbled in my warm pocket, and I’ll ask them to do the same. Come, I’ll say. Gather around this open palm.

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Angelica Calabrese is a writer and educator with a background in anthropology. She currently thinks and writes about wild plants, botanical drawing, family archives, and practices of care from a home base in Lecce, Italy. Her writing has appeared in Robida Magazine, Roads & Kingdoms, and Atlas Obscura. When she’s not at work on her creative projects, you can find her traveling the globe as a program director for Where There Be Dragons.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens