Kalabrian

Greetings to all,

I thank all of you for the warm welcome and the kind interest.

I am also glad that you appreciated the introduction in spite of its lenght and of my questionable English.

Unfortunately in these days I have been so busy that I did not even have the time to upload few photographs.

The Sicily Musa is very similar to the Orinoco as I said. Thus I think that right now it would be unuseful for any of you to afford the expenses to import one in your area. That's the same reason why I did not buy a Orinoco until now, considering the shipping costs. I would buy it if sure that it's a different variety, I do not want to find myself with the same plant after ordering it from across the ocean. So, what we could try to do is to follow the process of growth (I can upload photos in the future) and then, if we see that there is a significant difference between it and the Orinoco, we can reason about exchanging them.

Bob, can you recall which parts of Sicily they come from?

Damaclese, I am sure that I will not have problems with altitude. It is funny that in a region where there is an endemic variety of Musa on the coast, people have not attempted the cultivation of it in the inner land. This is much more funny when knowing that, if you consider the morphology of the land, you discover that there is not an inner land which is far from the coast more than 30-35 kilometres! In the past, this was due to difficulties in communication. But for the present, the reason is that there is not a general interest for the plant, not even on the coast. Because of the history of the land, which is reach in resources but has always been poor in economy, people now are very pragmatic in managing their recently-won economic facilities. Thus people focus on important crops. Also if on the coast people can have a plant that make fruit, it is not safe and it has never been tried to initiate a commercial venture with bananas, because a business production would need safer conditions and it would be impossible to compete with the over-production of tropical countries. Thus, since agriculture is the main resource on the land, in general very few people are interested in the growth of this plant. Much more this is true for people living on the hills. People (rightly in part) focus on their true activities of growing citrus and olives which make them getting their daily bread.
Anyway I will glad to know which varieties bore you fruit at your altitude.

Have a nice day!