Cantello, a small village close to the Swiss border, owes its fame to the cultivation of a very particular type of asparagus, quite different to that normally found in commerce; it is a white asparagus, with a rosy tip, that retains its consistency and flavour even after cooking. It is said that the Baj family introduced the cultivation of this asparagus in Cantello, imposing it on the share-croppers and land tenants to make up for the limited productive and market conditions of the traditional agricultural cultivation of that period.

The fame of the Cantello asparagus literally exploded during the Thirties until the mid Sixties. In those years, with the advent of mechanisation, many producers abandoned the asparagus cultivation; however nowadays, after periods of scant production in the Seventies and Eighties, cultivation has picked up again, and from a yearly harvest of 20 quintals at the end of the Nineties, we have progressed to more than 150 quintals in 2004.

The asparagus that we eat as a vegetable, is actually the turion, the young shoot that sprouts from the underground rhizome. Picking starts at the end of March and continues through to May-June. The young sprouts withstand temperatures of even -15°, which makes cultivation possible on the hills and in the valleys of the Po Plains. Cantello, together with Mezzago (Mi) and Cilavegna (Pv), are the last areas in which asparagus cultivation is found in Lombardy; every second Sunday of May a village feast is organised during which this delicious vegetable can be tasted as well as bought.