LETTUCE

Its origins are not certain; for some, lettuce is nothing more than a variety of wild lettuce, still today a spontaneous and very common plant throughout the northern hemisphere. Lettuce has been cultivated for millennia in China and was appreciated by the Greeks and Romans; Pliny and Columella wrote about it. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance it was cultivated for medicinal uses and only later did cultivation for food use spread. From Italy lettuce arrived in France and, apparently, in the sixteenth century also in England.