The Tropical Fruit Forum

Hi everyone.
Another silly question.
I have read a bit around about mango cuttings. They have several disadvantages over grafting: poor rooting, weak root system once established etc.
Anyway i find them interesting, since it is a way to propagate mango without the need of a rootstock (the closest nursery selling mangos being 650 miles south of my house, and my summer being too short to let seed grow to an appreciable size before 2-3 years - this means that is hard to grow my own rootstock).
Apparently, as i have read, making the cutting roots isn't easy at all. Hormones and hot beds seems to be involved.
But i wonder if some of you have some direct experience with cuttings, and some suggestion for me if i wanted to try that way.
Thank you for your help! 

This thread wants to be a report of my experience with my attempt to grow and fruit sucessfully a mango planted in ground in central Italy, to be precise in Florence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence).
My hope is to make something new and usefull for every "zone pusher" who wants to grow his own mangos in his own backyard. Basically i noticed that on internet there is a lack of data on this issue, and most of people who write about mangos are either in one of those two situation: in a place where clearly mangos (or other tropicals) grow without any help (except maybe some cover during brief cold snap), or either in place where mangos need to be kept in pot and brought indoor because even the soil become too cold. I haven't been able to found nothing for people with a reasonably long and hot summer and a mild winter, but still too cold and long to keep mango in ground with a light cover. This is what brought me here.
As you may have already understood, english isn't my primary laguage. So, it very likely that this thread will be full of typos, sintax and grammatical error. I'm sorry for that.

The Idea.

Basically, the idea behind my experiment has been very simple. I knew that some people grew mangos in Sicily, because i bought some fruit at the grocery that came from there. I also knew that, with an insulated and heated greenhouse, you can also grow them in Germany. "So," i reasoned "there's a place between those extremes, where you can grow them with a simple unheated cover, removable in summer"
I started with some research at the end of 2010 and found that an user on gardenweb were able to fruit mango in middle California (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Rafael,_California ); that place has cold summer compared to ours, but also hotter winters. Still the user had used a very minimal cover, and i planned to cover my plant much more.
Moreover i found on gardenweb the struggle of puglvr1 with freezes and her ability to minimize and keep mangos in pot, wich gave me the convinction that i could manage the size of my plant and keep even a plant like a mango under control. This was essential because the cover, once built, had to be kept of fixed size.
The more i read about mango, the more i convinced myself that even if most of their biology is similiar to a tropical plant, as far as tollerance for cold, mango beahave in a similar manner to a very tender subtropical, being able to withstand even extended periods of low temperatures and even some dip under 32°F (0°C) if they are brief enough.