'Italia' Sweet Pepper

Capsicum annuum

Origin: Italy via Maine

Improvement status: Cultivar

Seeds per packet: ~30

Germination tested 11/2023: 99%

Life cycle: Annual

This corno di toro (“horn of the bull”) type sweet pepper is one of the best-tasting and earliest sweet peppers you can find. While they look like long hot peppers, with curved, tapered fruit that mature from green to red, they are actually very sweet with no heat. Upright plants grow 14-28" tall with not much branching. Mature fruit reach 5-8.5" long and 1.5-3" wide (the attached photo, the only one we could find, is decidedly at the small end for this pepper). Introduced in 1987 by Johnny’s Selected Seeds of Albion, Maine. Green peppers as early as 55 days after transplant, ripe red peppers after 70-80 days.

Our seed comes from Chris Smith of The Utopian Seed Project in Leicester, North Carolina.