Price supports rarely benefit small farmers.
Sicilian Dreams
Last week, we closed an hour early on Saturday night to host a dinner party for the Pour Richard’s staff. and family. We had decided on a Sicilian theme: blood orange ‘salad’, beef involtini, a lasagna of tiny meatballs and bitter greens, accompanied by Sicilian wines. It was a lovely evening-rollicking good fun with the people I love best, with WAY too much food and wine. In other words, perfection.
Good food, good wine and good friends aside, though, I *may* have picked Sicily just because I sorely miss being able to travel there in person. If I cannot breakfast on pistacchio granita, walk the street markets of old Palermo, and see two volcanoes (Etna & Stromboli erupting simultaneously, at least I can evoke those scenes with food and wine. But the second international travel becomes feasible again, I’ll be on a plane to Catania.
My husband does not share my love for this island. Where I see milennia of history, he sees trash at beach resorts. Where I see an eccentric, family-centered existence, he sees rampant corruption. Where I see food and wine so delicious as to bring tears to your eyes, he sees an autostrada that’s confusing and-when locals are driving 140+ km/hr-downright frightening. I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective.
That perspective is essential to understanding Sicily. When life is viewed through a lens of centuries and millennia, when every meal bears the stamp of multiple waves of conquerors, when your walls are composed of rock spewed forth from a volcano, it’s perhaps easier to take the long view. In California, a winery is considered OG at 30 years; our favorite Sicilian producer was founded in 1469.
I am not blind to the problems my husband sees: trash accumulating as a rural society with little or no disposable packaging suddenly becomes ‘modernized’, public works projects still languishing decades after inception. And the Mafia, although weakened by anti-corruption campaigns of the 90’s-is still a force, particularly in western Sicily. But I try to take that ‘long view’.
Sicily is not immutable. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, in Sicily’s seminal novel The Leopard, expresses this best: ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’. But the allegiance to history, the imprint of all the civilizations which have marched across and -briefly- conquered this land, the very personal story of families engaged in winemaking for centuries-these are the reasons I keep returning to Sicily.
I hope travel opens up again soon, so I can visit a Norman church built on the ruins of a mosque, itself constructed over a temple to Isis; sit in Taormina’s public square sipping a superb espresso while gazing at the sea in one direction, Mt Etna in the other; wander the narrow streets of old Ortigia while nibbling on an arancino.
Until then, I’ll open a bottle of Nero d’Avola and dream.
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