Palermoand theCitrus Kingdom

When I last visited Sicily, I noticed the citrus the way you notice weather: everywhere, but not yet meaningful. Returning now with Jane and our friends, and with plans to drive east from Palermo, I realize that there is more to Sicily’s love affair with citrus. Perhaps Sicily itself can be best understood by the citrus fruits it cultivated, transformed, and ultimately helped give to the world.

A few years ago, Jane and I were having breakfast in Central Oregon with Iva and Ivan, which of course meant a jar of Nutella and homemade crepes. If I have a lifelong love of oranges and other citrus, then our two Croatian friends have the same passion for Nutella, the creamy Italian cocoa and hazelnut spread. They are so devoted to it that they distinguish it by where it is made. Canadian Nutella is decent. Mexican Nutella is terrible. Nutella manufactured in Italy is the best.

Knowing our Croatian friends, I announced that I wanted to pitch parent company Ferrero on a new Nutella flavor. It would be orange-flavored Nutella, built around that balance you get when chocolate and nut spreads meet citrus. I would call it Nutella Naranja.

Iva slowly put down her knife and fork. Suddenly she was no longer relaxed. The sound of the silverware hitting the table let me know I’d crossed a line. You could even say she looked disgusted.

“Nutella is Nutella,” she said. “You can’t mix it with something else. I find that idea so ridiculous.”

Of course, I had only brought it up because I knew it would provoke exactly that reaction. But somewhere along the way the joke turned into a project. I began experimenting with different orange products, mixing them with our favorite alternative to Nutella, a palm-oil-free hazelnut spread.

After months of experimentation, I discovered that a blend of sixty-percent hazelnut spread and forty-percent orange curd produced something genuinely amazing: sweet, rich, and bright. I even started designing Nutella Naranja artwork, making sure to keep Iva and Ivan updated, hoping to elicit that not so sweet and bright expression from Iva each time.

Sicily is branded around the world as a place that is pure, ancient, and unchanging. It is as old as the sinister melody of The Godfather; frozen in Greek columns and the distant sails of Syracusan triremes. Iva and Ivan, who grew up in a heavily Italian-influenced part of Croatia, expect the Mediterranean to remain exactly as they imagine it: timeless, familiar, and reassuring. Like Nutella, it shouldn’t change. Then, just days before we land in Palermo, Ferrero announced the first new Nutella flavor in the brand’s history—Peanut Nutella.

Sicily is not a story of purity. It’s a story of invention. The fruits that arrived on these shores over the last thousand years didn’t stay what they were—somebody grafted them, or crossed them with something else, or figured out how to keep them watered through an August that should have killed them. Nearly everything that makes Sicilian citrus famous today exists because someone was willing to mess with it.

We exit Palermo’s airport and hail a cab van. Our driver, whose real name eludes us but who we later called Vito, is young, thin, bug-eyed, and driving as though the highway owes him money. He immediately begins weaving through traffic, tailgating cars, and throwing his hands in the air.

But one car, a blue Škoda Favorit, and one very elderly man driving that Czech hatchback, has thrown Vito into an absolute tizzy of anger. He guns the taxi van engine and rides the tail of the tiny car. The elderly driver isn’t actually driving slowly. Vito seems enraged simply because the old man looks like someone who should.

While Vito is swerving left and right, Ivan dismisses the action, “This is just the way it is in Sicily. Everybody does this.” This is Ivan’s first time in Sicily.

At the first opening, Vito cuts through an S-curve between lanes and dives in front of the little Škoda, braking hard behind a tanker.

I’m sitting shotgun, and I turn around to look at Jane and our fellow travelers.

I look in my sideview mirror, and Sicilian Grandpa is now behind us. An absolute Pixar character sketch. A defeated old man!

He pulls up alongside us and looks at me as if to ask whose side I’m on. I give him a subtle Hawaiian shaka. Then he threads the Škoda between a Fiat Panda and a Dacia Duster, surging past us, and reclaiming his place ahead of the tanker. From his rolled-down window, he gives us a sustained middle finger. Ivan says again, “This is the way they do things in Sicily.”

The next day, I leave Jane and our friends and head toward the waterfront in search of Palermo’s feral cat colony. I had already covered eight miles in sandals today, and I want to catch the seaside cats at sunset when they begin emerging from their daytime bunkers. The walk takes longer than expected, carrying me through quiet alleys where people sit on their front steps escaping the heat, while laundry hangs four stories overhead.

Most of the buildings that I see are Spanish and Baroque. They are built atop much older Arabic foundations. Very few of Palermo’s residential buildings from around 1000 AD survive today, but later builders would preserve the inward-facing footprints from that time, so that today’s buildings imitate yesterday’s. Every so often I catch a glimpse through an open gate into one of those hidden courtyards. Some are quite large, their purpose changing over the centuries into garages, workshops, or stables.

As I walk, I keep trying to subtract a thousand years from these courtyards. Strip out the parked Vespas and the propane tanks, and what’s left is an open-air garden. There would have been a well, or a cistern for catching winter rain—rain matters here, there isn’t much of it. A fountain, if the family could afford one. Vines going up the walls, herbs in pots, maybe a loggia for sitting out the afternoon heat. And at the center, I’d like to think, a tree somebody fussed over. Across the Islamic world these inward-facing gardens were built as private glimpses of paradise—which in a hot, dusty, crowded city meant something very specific: water you could hear, shade you could sit in, and a plant nobody else on your street possessed.

What tree would a wealthy Arab family in Palermo have chosen to complete that vision?

After finding the colony cats wandering along the rocky Mediterranean quay, masters of improvising in a human world, I am completely parched. And I still have another two miles to walk before meeting Jane and our friends.

I stop at a fruit stand looking for something cold to drink. In the freezer is a bright acid-green soda, and on the label, a woman whose dress is in the shape of an alien citrus fruit—lumpy, like an overgrown lemon with a skin disease. The label calls it Cedrata, which translates as Citron soda. Cedro is the Italian word for citron. This is confusing, because in many European languages, citron translates as lemon. But citrons are not lemons!

I knew immediately that this was my kind of citrus. Cedrata wasn’t competing with orange soda or lemonade. It tasted botanical rather than fruity, like someone had carbonated the aroma of a citrus grove instead of its juice. Perfume, almost—citrus zest and pine resin and grapefruit. The soda made me stop walking so I could concentrate on what I was actually tasting.

Citron did not first arrive in Sicily to become a beverage or dessert. It produces remarkably little juice; its value lies almost entirely in its thick aromatic rind. It first arrived because it was something altogether different: an exotic tree. A tree from paradise.

Yet the citron’s story in the Mediterranean began long before Palermo became an Arab city. For centuries it had wandered west from India through Persia and the Levant, appearing in Greek and Roman gardens as an exotic curiosity. Sicily itself may have known citron long before the Arabs arrived.

But under Islamic Palermo, the fruit entered an entirely new world. The Arabs inherited an old tree and placed it inside a culture obsessed with gardens, irrigation, grafting, and the movement of useful plants. What had once been a curiosity became the opening chapter of something much larger.

Standing on Palermo’s waterfront, I couldn’t stop thinking about the ships. About how and why those oversized, deformed acid-colored weirdo fruits made it here.

It’s a story that begins on the other side of the world.

To the people of Palermo, India was not merely far away. It was almost mythical.

A thousand years ago, this harbor sat at the far western edge of a trading world so large that almost all the people working its docks would never see the other end of it. The ships came in on every tide. The Arab merchant vessels were the ones to watch. They were long and lean, running under huge triangular lateen sails that could pull wind out of a dead Mediterranean afternoon. Their hulls weren’t nailed but stitched, pegged together from teak and cedar, and they groaned coming in, ropes splashing down and hauled tight around bollards that centuries of hauling had already worn smooth. The dockside noise was Arabic, mostly, but also Greek and Berber and Sicilian, plus donkeys, plus a fishmonger somewhere losing an argument. When a pepper sack tore, and one was always tearing, the dust joined whatever else the morning air was carrying: tar, salt, wet hemp, cinnamon, and smells that didn’t yet have names in any language spoken west of Alexandria.

The cargo seemed almost impossible. Porters came down the gangplanks bent under sacks of black pepper—Malabar pepper, from India’s western coast, worth more per sack than almost anything else coming off the ship. Cinnamon you could smell before you could see it. Then the rest, in no order the dock cared about: cardamom, ginger, cloves, frankincense. Bolts of Chinese silk that shimmered wrongly in the Mediterranean sun. Cotton out of Gujarat. Glazed ceramics from Persia, and paper—paper was still news here, and sugar, grown in the irrigated estates of the Islamic world. Some cargoes fed people. Others clothed them. Others still carried knowledge itself. Along these same routes came algebra, astronomical tables, agricultural treatises, improved irrigation, grafting techniques, and new ways of understanding the natural world.

Yet somewhere among all those practical cargoes arrived something far stranger. A living tree.

Or perhaps only a bundle of carefully wrapped grafts, their cut ends sealed with wax and damp moss. Or maybe just seeds—a handful of them, wrapped in cloth, gathered from a tree in some orchard thousands of miles east. Seeds take up no room on a ship. What they take up is attention. Somebody had to water them with fresh water on a vessel where fresh water was rationed, keep the salt spray off, keep them out of the worst of the sun, and then keep doing all of it, week after week, when it would have been easy to stop. A sack of pepper survives being forgotten. A seedling doesn’t.

The tree’s story didn’t begin in Sicily, or even in the Mediterranean. Long before Palermo’s gardeners prized citron, its ancestors had already been making their slow journey west for centuries. The story reaches back to the humid foothills where India, Myanmar, and China run together, monsoon country, where wild citrons had been growing since long before anyone thought to move one.

Say the first cutting went out on a dhow, broad-beamed, its lateen sail leaned hard against the monsoon. Ships like that had been crossing the Arabian Sea for centuries. Their captains didn’t consult the monsoon so much as live by it; the wind blew west one season, waited, then blew everyone home.

A gardener planted the citron.

Years later another gardener took a cutting.

Another ship. Another port. Another garden.

Where did it go first? Gujarat, probably—the ports there saw everything—then across to Muscat or Sohar on the Omani side. Some descendant of that first tree rode up the Persian Gulf to Basra, a city of canals cut through date-palm country, the water traffic so thick with Persian and Indian and East African merchants that a potted sapling wouldn’t have rated a second look. From Basra a cutting went inland by camel caravan to Baghdad, three weeks of swaying through desert nights, under stars no Sicilian sky has ever managed.

There, in the great Abbasid capital, scholars were doing more than collecting books. They were collecting the world itself—plants, medicines, seeds, and ideas. From Baghdad another generation reached Damascus. Another crossed Egypt to Alexandria. Another found fertile ground around Kairouan in present-day Tunisia. Every stop became a nursery. A tree produced another cutting. Another cutting began another journey.

Generation after generation, the citron crept westward, one careful handoff at a time.

Only after decades, perhaps centuries, did one of those descendants finally arrive in Palermo.

I imagine a wealthy merchant, judge, physician, or emir purchasing the young tree from one of the harbor traders. It wasn’t majestic. It may have been nothing more than a slender green sapling, its roots wrapped in damp cloth. Servants followed behind carrying jars of water as the little tree disappeared through Palermo’s narrow streets, behind a plain wooden door, into one of those shaded courtyards I had glimpsed on my walk to the cat colony. There, beside a cool fountain and beneath the shade of a loggia, someone planted it.

Visitors would stop beneath its branches.

“What is that?”

“Where did it come from?”

The answer was never simply India. It was monsoon seas and camel caravans, botanical gardens and palace courtyards. It was deserts and the edges of empires. It was scholars and gardeners, handing the thing off, one lifetime to the next.

Citron may have grown in Sicily long before this tree ever arrived. And Sicily wasn’t the kingdom of lemons yet—no mandarins, no blood oranges, no bergamot. The first tree is rarely the one that changes history.

What mattered was that, under the Arabs, citrus ceased to be an exotic curiosity and became the beginning of an idea. In Palermo’s gardens, supported by new systems of irrigation and generations of careful observation, gardeners discovered that these remarkable Asian trees could become something far greater than isolated treasures. After citron would come sour oranges, lemons, sweet oranges, and eventually varieties nobody in India could have imagined. Palermo was no longer growing imported trees. It was inventing new ones.

And the tree lived. It settled in, put out new growth, survived its first Sicilian summer—proof, if anyone was paying attention, that this island could keep an Asian forest tree alive. Palermo’s walls didn’t hold much back. Just outside them the land opened into a plain—flat, well-watered by Sicilian standards, and famous enough that people simply called it the Garden of Sicily. The Arabs looked at it and saw unfinished work. Their engineers sank new wells, dug reservoirs, ran canals out across the flats, until travelers coming through started reaching for the word paradise—and meaning it literally, a garden with the water built in. Eventually the plain picked up the name it still carries: the Conca d’Oro. The Golden Basin.

Today the Conca d’Oro evokes endless citrus groves, but the groves came later. First somebody had to find out whether trees from the far side of Asia could survive a Sicilian August at all. In the Conca d’Oro, they found out. The answer was yes—if the water kept moving.

Somewhere in one of those shaded Palermo courtyards, a gardener planted a skinny sapling from a land Sicilians would never see. He was just keeping a tree alive. He had no way of knowing he was starting a kingdom.

Part II of The Citrus Kingdom arrives next week. Subscribe on Substack to get it the moment it posts.