Helena Attlee

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THE LAND WHERE LEMONS GROW

The Story of Italy and Its Citrus Fruit

Contents

Citrus Crops in Italy

The Scent of Lemons

Curious Fruit

Citrus collectors in Renaissance Tuscany

Cooking for the Pope

Golden Apples

A case of taxonomic havoc

A Day in Amalfi

One of the Sunniest Places in Europe

Sicilian lemons, ‘like the pale faces of lovers …’

Antiscorbuticks

A Golden Bowl of Bitter Lemons

Extraordinary wealth on Sicily’s west coast

A Sicilian Marmalade Kitchen

Oranges Soaked in Sunsets

Blood oranges in the shadow of Mount Etna

The Runt of the Litter

Liguria’s cosseted chinotti

The Sweet Scent of Zagara

Dogged Madness

Limonaie on Lake Garda

Battling with Oranges in Ivrea

Green Gold

Calabria and the most valuable citrus in the world

Unique Harvest

On the Riviera dei Cedri

Notes

Selected Reading

A Citrus Chronology

Places to Visit

Acknowledgements

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PENGUIN BOOKS

THE LAND WHERE LEMONS GROW

‘A lovely exploration of citrus fruit in Italy’
Bee Wilson, Sunday Times, Books of the Year

‘A fresh chapter was opened in Italian garden history by The Land Where Lemons Grow, expertly unpeeling Italy’s citrus culture from Garda to Palermo’
Jonathan Keates, The Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year

‘It would be a treat to find under the tree’
Carolyn Hart, Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year

‘This is the first among my books of the year. Every page of Attlee’s subtle fusion of history and horticulture made me feel that it’s time to pack the bags again for Italy … this is very much a boots-on-the-ground narrative, as she clambers into abandoned Tuscan orangeries, decodes a Renaissance garden under a Genoese car park and penetrates the sanctum of the Calabrian bergamot industry. She sauces her erudite adventure with a scatter of citrus recipes’
Jonathan Keates, Literary Review

‘Inspired and inspiring, in prose as sharp as the fruit it celebrates’
David Wheeler, editor of Hortus

‘Fascinating, vivid, poignant, challenging, cheering … A distinguished garden writer, Attlee fell under the spell of citrus over ten years ago and the book, like the eleventh labour of Hercules to steal the golden fruit of the Hesperides, is the result. She writes with great lucidity, charm and gentle humour, and wears her considerable learning lightly … Helena Attlee’s elegant, absorbing prose and sure-footed ability to combine the academic with the anecdotal, make The Land Where Lemons Grow a welcome addition to the library of citrologists and Italophiles alike’
Clarissa Hyman, The Times Literary Supplement

‘Truly fascinating … For many years, Attlee has been collecting evidence for a story of citrus trees in Italy. The result, The Land Where Lemons Grow, is remarkable, excellently produced and essential for all lovers of Italy, their summer libraries and out-of-season itineraries … Attlee’s book is unmissable for anyone intrigued by the relation between humans’ travel, greed and ingenuity and the spread of the plants that we eat, smell and drink’
Robin Lane Fox, Financial Times

For Alex, of course

Acknowledgements

I began to gather material for this book long before I knew I would write it, and my thanks must go to all the citrus farmers, nurserymen and gardeners who have been so generously conversational over the years. I am especially grateful to Marco Aceto in Amalfi, Salvino Bonaccorso, Princess Maria Carla Borghese and Giuseppe Messina in Sicily, Paolo Galeotti, Gionata Giacomelli and Ivo Matteucci in Tuscany, Giuseppe Gandossi and Domenico Fava on Lake Garda, Pietro Donato, Antonio Miceli and his daughter Sara in Calabria and Danilo Pollero in Liguria.

I am much indebted to Professor Giuseppe Barbera for his kindness and enthusiasm, and for sharing his extensive knowledge of the political and economic history of citrus in Sicily, John Dickie for valuable insights into Mafia history, to Dr Chiara Nepi at the Natural History Museum in Florence and also to Stena Paternò, Giorgio Galletti, Ezio Pizzi, Vittorio Caminiti, Franco Galiano and Schmuel Keller. My thanks to Dr Cathie Martin of the John Innes Centre in Norwich and Professor Paolo Rapisarda of CRA in Sicily for generously sharing their research, and to Dr Justin Goodrich of Edinburgh University for patiently answering botanical questions.

I have travelled all over Italy in pursuit of citrus, journeys that would have been impossible without the kindness and hospitality of many people, including Margherita Bianca, Rudolf and Benedikta von Freyberg, Rachel Lamb, Marchese Giuseppe and his daughter Giulia Paternò Castello di San Giuliano and Cristina di Martino in Sicily, Lucia Rossi in Ivrea and Nick Dakin-Elliot in Tuscany.

As ever, I am grateful to my dear friends Valeria Grilli in Rome and Jenny Condie in Venice, whose enthusiasm and practical help have been essential at many stages of my research, to Alex Dufort for kindly testing the recipes in the book, to Sue MacDonald and Boxwood Tours for support in so many ways, and to Natoora (London) for generously supplying the fruit used for recipe testing.

My thanks also go to Anthony Ossa Richardson for his translations of Giovanni Battista Ferrari’s Hesperides and to my agent, Antony Topping, of Greene and Heaton for good advice, humour and unstinting support. Thanks to all at Penguin, and in particular to my editor, Helen Conford, for her enthusiastic and incisive input.

Above all, thank you to Alex Ramsay and our three daughters for years of encouragement, and for their patience during my long absences, both in Italy and at my desk.

The Scent of Lemons

I remember when planes were so expensive that people usually made the long journey from England to Italy by ferry and train. Once you got to Paris it was easy because you could catch the Palatino, a sleeper that sped you through the night towards Florence and Rome. I first made that journey over thirty-five years ago. At dawn I lifted a corner of the curtain in the stuffy couchette and realized we had already crossed the border. We were somewhere near Ventimiglia on the Italian Riviera, and there were lemons growing beside the station platform, their dark leaves and bright fruit set against a backdrop of nothing but sea. I never forgot those trees, or the way they charged the landscape around them, making it seem intensely foreign to my very English eye.

I didn’t know it then, but travellers from northern Europe have always been thrilled by the sight of Italian citrus trees, and so my reaction was entirely predictable. Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish author and poet best known for his fairy tales, visited Italy in 1833, and when he saw citrus groves for the first time he responded with the mixture of rapture and envy that Italy can still provoke among visitors from colder and less romantic countries. ‘Just imagine the beautiful ocean and entire forests with oranges and lemons,’ he wrote to a friend; ‘the ground was covered with them; mignonettes and gillyflowers grew like weeds. My God, my God! How unfairly we are treated in the north; here, here is Paradise.’¹ A sun-soaked, poetic image of Italy was particularly powerful in Britain after the First World War, when soldiers returned from the freezing trenches of Picardy and Flanders dreaming of the sensuous and hedonistic lifestyle they associated with the Mediterranean.² Captain Osbert Sitwell chose Sicily as the antidote to his bleak experience of war, a journey he describes in Discursions on Travel, Art and Life, published in 1925. Here the orange serves as a symbol for all he loved about the Mediterranean. ‘Where it grows,’ he says, ‘you will find the best climate, the most beautiful European buildings.’³ And as his train trundled through orange groves outside Palermo, he remarked, ‘About the whole tree there is a design, a balance, a geometrical intention and sense of grouping, an economy and right use of colour, that make it rank almost as high as a work of art.’⁴ D. H. Lawrence, never a soldier, began the period of voluntary exile after the war that he referred to as his ‘savage pilgrimage’, a journey that took him to Sicily between 1920 and 1922. In ‘Sun’, a short story set in his sexually charged version of the Sicilian landscape, he returns again and again to images of citrus trees and their fruit, making Juliet, the angry and frustrated American heroine, meander naked through a ‘dark underworld of lemons’, discovering freedom and sensuality for the first time in her life.⁵

A few years after my first glimpse of lemons I returned to Italy as a student. I had chosen to live in Siena, and although Tuscan winters are much too harsh for citrus trees to grow outside all year, I got used to glimpsing pots of lemons in the sunny courtyards of city palaces and on terraces in front of country villas. When they disappeared from sight in winter I learned they had been taken into the shelter of purpose-built lemon houses, or limonaie. At first I assumed that Italians took their citrus trees for granted, rather as we do our apples in England. As my Italian improved, however, I began to realize that the trees and their fruit had a special place in the Italian imagination. When Galileo wrote Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the book that would lead to his conviction for heresy in 1632, he used oranges to illustrate the absurdity of the different values we give to the objects around us. ‘What greater stupidity can be imagined than calling jewels, silver and gold “precious” and soil and earth “base”?’ he wrote. ‘People who do this ought to remember that if there were as great a scarcity of soil as of jewels or precious metals, there wouldn’t be a prince who would not spend a bushel of diamonds and rubies and a cartload of gold just to have enough earth … to sow an orange seed and watch it sprout, grow and produce its handsome leaves, its fragrant flowers and fine fruit.’⁶ With citrus on my mind, I returned to England for my final year at university. Here I fed my nostalgia for Italy with ‘I Limoni’, a poem published in 1925 by Eugenio Montale (one of the most important Italian poets of the twentieth century). Montale’s lemons are not the romantic trees that provoked Hans Christian Andersen’s outburst, and they do not grow in the sultry, sensual landscape of D. H. Lawrence’s Sicily. Instead, they can be found on prosaic patches of rough ground at the end of rutted tracks, or beside miserable city streets in winter. And yet the perfume of their blossom (or zagara as it is in Italian) transforms even the bleakest and most banal landscape. It is both infinitely precious and freely given for anyone to enjoy. As Montale says, ‘qui tocca anche a noi poveri la nostra parte di ricchezza/ ed è l’odore dei limoni’ – ‘now it’s our turn, us poor ones, to have a share of riches/ and it’s the scent of lemons’.⁷

For many years my working life has been rooted in the elite world of Italy’s gardens, both as a writer and as the leader of garden tours. This has made it easy to pursue the history of citrus as an ornamental garden tree, and yet as my interest grew, I realized that those pot-grown trees represented only a fragment of the whole story. During journeys that have taken me from the bergamot groves of Calabria, on the southern tip of the Italian peninsula, to lemon houses set against the snowy backdrop of the Alps, I found that citrus trees and their fruit have had a radical part to play in Italy’s political and social history, and have brought extraordinary wealth to some of the poorest places in the country. Unlike those cosseted garden specimens, these trees grew in open ground, and like the oranges known as wu nu, or ‘wooden slaves’, in ancient China, ‘they worked tirelessly to make and keep their families rich’.⁸

To find out about the working life of citrus I had to leave the comfortable territory of villa and palace gardens in Tuscany, Lazio and Umbria, get in among the trees of commercial citrus groves in southern Italy, and meet the men and women who spend their working lives there. I crossed the Strait of Messina to Sicily, where the best blood oranges in the world grow in the shadow of Mount Etna on the eastern side of the island. Travelling west, I found orange, lemon and mandarin trees in a strange liminal landscape between Palermo, the mountains and the sea.

Many citrus farms in Sicily and southern Italy are in remote and deeply rural landscapes, where foreign visitors are rare and only dialect is spoken. I soon discovered that a penknife came in handy in the orange groves of those places, because most fruit clings to the tree and, unless you cut the stem from the twig, you risk tearing its skin. I also learned that an orange is never peeled in the field. There’s a ritual to observe, and that’s another reason for an orange farmer to carry a penknife. First he holds the fruit in the palm of one hand, stem side up. Then he makes a horizontal cut to divide it neatly in half. The juice of a fresh orange is lavish, uncontrollable, and scent explodes into the air. He tosses the top half into the long grass because, in the orange, both juice and sweetness are concentrated in the bottom, furthest from the stem. Then he cuts a slice and offers it on the flat side of the knife’s blade. I’ve taken part in this tiny ritual in fields all over Italy, but it’s always a strangely touching moment, and I enjoy its intimacy just as I used to love it when someone lit a cigarette for me. The flavour of an orange straight from the tree is incomparable.