> But if you plant tomatoes, you'll get pretty much the same thing you started with.

Unfortunately this is not true. Many tomatoes with the best disease resistance are hybrids, and seeds will not produce the same plant with the same disease resistance. Heirlooms varieties will “generally” produce the same plant but you have to be careful about inbreeding.

> It turns out that his family had brought over a variety of tomato from Italy as immigrants and had cultivated it for generations.

The funny part about this is tomatoes are a new world veggie! So the plant went from America to Italy, and then a new variety was brought back to the homeland. I’d love to try this variety!