Early in the morning on Monday, May 13, Vittoria Brambilla will open her technological treasure chest at the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of Milan. In jargon it is called a phytotron and is an air-conditioned room. Here are kept 400 precious plantlets, ready to be transferred to Italy’s first experimental field of the CRISPR era, with the blessing of the Ministry of Environment and Energy Security. Fertile soil awaits them in which to sink their delicate roots, and then sun, wind, rain and perhaps drought and pests. All that changeable stuff happens when you grow outdoors instead of inside a laboratory.” To learn all about this field debut (the first after a 20-year wait in Italy), the trial that is about to begin and who made it possible, there is my new piece for Le Scienze, with comments from Vittoria Brambilla, Roberto Defez, Elena Cattaneo, Roberto Schmid and Federico Radice Fossati, the ag entrepreneur who offered his land for the trial. For more technical details on this fungus-resistant rice there is the article I had published in Nature Italy. In the gallery above, meanwhile, you will find: the researchers of the laboratories directed by Vittoria Brambilla and Fabio Fornara, the sign posted outside the experimental field, the climate-controlled chamber holding the edited seedlings until next week, one of the trays in which they will be transported, the cage delimiting the experimental field, yet to be completed with the upper part (28 square meters in Mezzana Bigli, in the province of Pavia, northern Italy).