Abstract

In the last fifty years, the animal husbandry has undergone a great transformation because of a socio-economic context that aim to make the most of animal potentialities. In the field of pig breeding, in particular, it came up against an unrelenting process of substitution of the old local breeds with the more productive and “improved” ones, with a serious loss of genetic material of inestimable value to safeguard the bio-diversity. In Sicily, the Nero Siciliano pig is reared mostly in the woods of the Nebrodi mountain area characterized by arboreal and shrubby species typical of the Mediterranean area with prevalence of oak trees which provide the pig a feeding mostly based acorns.This type of breeding, beside characterizing a high quality product, gives the product an important “added value” coming from animal welfare and revaluation of woody patrimony which in the last decade is widely neglected. If this woody patrimony became the “cradle” of an appreciated niche product, it would probably be taken away from a progressive impoverishment. The aim of this study was to give a contribute to define the chemico-physical and sensory characteristics of fresh and seasoned products of Nero Siciliano pig and, in addition, to identify the best rearing system and the most suitable feeding protocol to guarantee the product typicality.

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