The Rotella della Lunigiana Apple Business Network project was born seven years ago by the will of a group of producers united by the intention of saving and cultivating this native variety that has always been present in Lunigiana from Fivizzano to Pontremoli. It is an ancient variety and the first signs of its production are in the scientific description by Prof. Breviglieri on the occasion of the third national fruit-growing congress held in Ferrara in 1949. After the first world war they were marketed approximately 10.000 tons per year, exported for the most part in Austria to be eaten cooked on the typical stoves cast iron. After the second world war started the gradual decline of the production due to the exodus from the countryside of Lunigiana. Only at the end of the ’80s, the Institution of the Tuscan Agricultural Development and Forestry initiated a project of recovery of old cultivars, by selecting some plants with the original features, and it is in those years that the foundations were laid for the creation of the first specialised orchards of Apple Wheel of the Lunigiana. Until then that large strip of marginal land between the chestnut groves and the areas dedicated to vines and olives was reserved for cultivation, where it was made to grow on the “ronchi”, steep meadows not suitable for other crops. Our network was created to safeguard this ancient fruit, to enhance it by spreading knowledge and consumption, to overcome the criticalities in cultivation and post-harvest, to study it, and possibly use them, nutritional and pharmaceutical properties. Also today, in Lunigiana, juice is always produced and packaged from this fruit, jam and apple vinegar of the highest quality and genuineness.