The Land Where Lemons Grow

In Catania a glass of selz al limone e sale is still considered the ideal thirst quencher for a summer’s day. You can order one at any of the beautiful art nouveau kiosks in the city centre and watch it being made while you wait. I once

A common orange, like the Navel or Valencia, has a sugary, one-dimensional taste. Eating a Sicilian blood orange is a much more complex experience. Take the Tarocco: its meltingly soft flesh also has a high sugar content, but its sweetness is balanced by high acidity. The result is a complicated, multi-dimensional flavour that unfolds slowly, subtl

marmalade was not made on a commercial scale until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when stormy weather forced a Spanish ship laden with Sevilles to take shelter in the harbour at Dundee. James Keiller, a local grocer, bought the cargo at a very low price, only to discover that the oranges were sour, not sweet, and he was unable to sell the

Giovanni Battista Ferrari in Hesperides (1646). He believed that a Genoese missionary had brought an orange to Sicily from China that tasted strangely like a grape and he remarked on its ‘purple’ flesh. This distinctive colouring is due to the blood-coloured pigments called anthocyanins that are also found in red, purple and blue ‘super fruits’ suc

The arrival of the first consignments of fresh bergamot made headline news in Cologne, and women brought small children to the distillery, lifting them up to its high windows so that they could inhale the intense, health-giving scent of the fruit.

It rained early on my first day at San Giorgio and I learned the truth of a popular saying used all over Italy, Il buon contadino va in cantina quando piove, which translates roughly as ‘When it rains the sensible farmer goes to the pub’,

Lemons first grew as an under-storey in forests on the foothills of the Himalayas, and according to Tyôzaburô Tanaka, the great Japanese citrus expert of the twentieth century, all oranges came from Assam and Burma, where they were known as naranga, a name thought to derive from Tamil, in which the prefix nar- denotes fragrance.3 However,

‘Apple’ was a generic word for fruit in ancient Greece and Rome, and the golden apples were originally depicted as quinces, as they were in the frieze in the Temple of Zeus,