An Island Orchard, a Strange Lemon, and a Name from the Making of ItalyAn island orchard, a strange lemon, and a name from the making of Italy.
This is Part III of The Citrus Kingdom. This chapter can also be read on Notes from the Road, where it appears with high-resolution photographs, sketches, and illustrations from the journey. Boarding a ferry is always a heart-pounding moment for me, as it is now in Milazzo, where we are boarding for the crossing to Lipari, the most populous of the Aeolian Islands. Above the port, a Bourbon castle sits on its headland, pale against the dry hills, watching the boats come and go the way it has for centuries. Ferries are one of the best ways to see birds you can’t see anywhere else — but not if you’re stuck among the throngs of boarding passengers. The ideal is a perch on an outside deck, high up. This ferry, I’m discovering, has indoor seating only, so while everyone else listlessly finds a seat, I’m hunting for any clean view of the open sea.
There’s a second floor. It’s air-conditioned, has no sweat-smell, and holds three people. The windows are cleaner and the view over the water is higher. It isn’t first class; nobody just bothered with the staircase. I claim the cleanest window, then run back down to rescue Jane, Iva and Ivan. The Croatians, listless and tired after breakfast, give a light shake of the head: there is no reason for them to move. While Jane reads, I scan the sea. The odds of seeing seabirds in this calm, sunny, waveless water are near zero. But you see the darndest things out here — dolphins, whales, flying fish, weird-ass jellyfish, flotsam and jetsam, maybe a wholphin. It’s extraordinary how many butterflies end up in the middle of the ocean; with binoculars you can often ID them. And it isn’t only seabirds up here: over 300 land bird species cross the Mediterranean every year, wintering in Africa and beyond to summer in Europe. Most of that happens around May — but anything is possible.
One of those species has captivated me for fifteen years. The European Bee-eater is one of Earth’s most multicolored birds — burnished chestnut, coppery russet, saffron, crimson, turquoise, cobalt, emerald, malachite — citrus on wings. Because I live six thousand miles away, luck and timing have always ruled against me. Jane and I once talked a friend of Iva and Ivan into driving us out to some Slovenian saltpans where bee-eaters were said to nest in the sandy banks. After four hours of nothing, I remember apologizing to him: “This is just how it is sometimes.” I was sure Sicily would finally do it. I studied the eBird data, learned the liquid calls, marked the sandy banks on the map. Then something I read devastated me: historically, only about four breeding pairs a year, on an island larger than Massachusetts. I looked again and saw what I’d wanted not to see — most of the sightings were migrants, way back in May. I can see several of the archipelago’s seven islands from here, including Stromboli, its thin plume of volcanic smoke unraveling into the deep blue sky. The Aeolians sit almost absurdly close to the historical center of the Mediterranean world, in seas crossed for millennia by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, merchants, navies and migrants. But life on small islands has always meant isolation. Almost everything in the Aeolians must arrive from somewhere else. Even water. Offshore, an enormous blue tanker sits motionless in the bay, pumping freshwater onto the island through a floating hose.
When we arrive in the port in Lipari, we find Iva and Ivan stuffed like sardines between sweaty Europeans in the heat, just waking up from their ferry nap. Did they choose the middle seats because they were the darkest? Our hotel sits just outside the town of Lipari, the main settlement on Lipari Island. It is nestled on a limestone hillside just above a small boatyard, some apartments and aging estates covered in prickly pear and agave. The natural setting of the hotel reminds me to turn on my phone’s Merlin ID app, which listens for bird songs and calls. The hotelier comes out to greet us. He is impeccably dressed, and his black Italian hair is slicked back. He exudes the word persnickety so well that our lexicon needs a new word — a persnicketeer. English for the Italian root: Persnicchettiero. With his hand gestures, he moves us into the lobby to begin our ... Merlin on my phone pops up. European Bee-eater. Merlin just heard a Bee-eater. No, Merlin did not just hear a Bee-eater. Merlin is often wrong. When Fritz, my fat cat, meows at four in the morning, Merlin thinks he’s a Great Horned Owl. I know there are no Great Horned Owls in my neighborhood because when I play Merlin’s recording of the incident, it is clearly Fritzentrapper with his is-it-breakfast-yet meow. From here, I enter into a flow state and somehow the phone has already convinced me to type “European Bee-eater” in Google and I place it in front of the face of the hotelier. He has these red reading glasses, and he peers over them and then looks me in the eye. Jane and Ivan are handing him passports and he places them neatly on the edge of his desk, stacking them into a perfect tower with his fingers while looking me in the eye and saying, “no.” And then he says, “I mean there are birds on the property. Is this one an Italian bird?” We head into town that evening, and I have forgotten about my false-positive on Merlin. We find a restaurant with outdoor seating just off the central Il Corso street. It’s one of the few restaurants in the islands that serves authentic Aeolian dishes, and I order ravioli di pescato del giorno — ravioli with the day’s catch. It is a lovely meal, and as we finish, our waitress brings us a lemon sorbet and a limoncello. In both, you can taste the freshness. Mild and floral, the lemon is less sharp than I expect, with the faint bitterness of the peel still there. The restaurant’s owner made both from lemons he grew in his own backyard. As Palermo and Cefalù made me start thinking more about what citrus is in my food, I wonder if the backyard orchard I had seen in the late afternoon was owned by this restaurateur? The orchard had several lemon trees, and each grew very different lemons. None of them looked like the common Femminello lemons you find in Sicilian supermarkets. Rather, they were all imperfect. Some were small, green and nearly round. Some were pale yellow and relatively smooth; others were deeply ridged and misshapen, like the fruit had been squeezed and stretched while it grew. There are also large, thick elongated lemons, which intrigue me the most. Were they the ones in my sorbet and limoncello? They are the weirdest-looking lemons I’ve ever seen. Long, knobbly and with big nippled tips. Is it possible that these are local Aeolian cultivars, their ancestors brought over to the islands hundreds of years ago?
I want to believe these lemons are island natives, evolved into strangeness the way a Wall Lizard does when the sea cuts it off from everywhere else. But lemons on small islands are not wild species. They are carried here by boat and grafted, and they are unusual not because they are an isolated population susceptible to speedy evolution, but because some family that grew them decided to keep them. On the mainland, the weird citrus oddities have less room. Citrus growers want dependable lemons that resist disease and ship well, and so old varieties get cut so something else can grow on the rootstock. So the Aeolian Islands act like a vault, and the sea protects rare citrus in a different way than it creates rare lizards and wildflowers. One of them reminds me of a lemon I have been reading about since Palermo ... the Interdonato, a hybrid a nineteenth-century colonel bred on the mainland coast across from these islands. The next morning, we meet Iva and Ivan for breakfast at our hotel. Ivan is wearing his is-it-breakfast-yet look when a bird lands on a yucca tree about a hundred feet in front of me. At first, I think it’s a small crow of some kind and I pull my binoculars up to my eyes. I’m momentarily distracted by two bees that come into focus before the bird. It looks like a crow because it’s backlit by strong morning sun. When my eyes adjust, what I see is Picasso with feathers. A European Bee-eater, right in front of me. At breakfast! And here in Lipari, where none should be! Iva, in the seat opposite me, is eating a Nutella cornetto. She does not turn around to look. “I do not like birds,” she told me yesterday. “They smell.” The bee-eater launches off the yucca, catches one of the bees, then circles back and takes the second buzziero. It is a fantastic moment of turquoise and orange and green in motion. And like that, my life-quest is over before Iva finishes her cornetto.
This little bird is about to appear on European money. Millions are voting on designs for the new 20-euro banknote, and the European Bee-eater is the likely winner — running, of all things, against Marie Curie. Five of the ten shortlisted designs are the bird; the other five are the physicist. They make an odd pair. The bee-eater is the ultimate specialist, evolved to hunt bees and wasps and to fly as far as 4,000 miles each way to keep doing it. Curie represents the opposite. She was a tinkerer, an improviser and a generalist who crossed disciplines and borrowed one curiosity to illuminate another. Da Vinci was such a generalist. So was Humboldt. And so was Giovanni Interdonato. He was born in 1813 in Roccalumera, near Messina — the other mainland port serving the Aeolians — into a Sicily that was not yet part of Italy. In fact, there was no Italy. The island belonged to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Bourbon state ruled from Naples behind a standing army, warships and an active police state, and Interdonato grew up to despise it. He fell in with the revolutionary circles in Messina that had spent decades conspiring against Europe’s restored monarchies. When revolution broke across Europe in 1848, he was ready. As Messina rose against the Bourbons that January, he and his relatives began assembling bands of armed men — masons and fruitpickers suddenly expected to behave like soldiers, thrown against a real army with artillery and fortresses. This was the beginning of the military career that would leave him known locally simply as “the Colonel.” And he was more than a soldier: educated, politically radical, argumentative, a deputy in the short-lived revolutionary parliament. Then the Bourbons came back. Messina fell in September 1848, and after months of losing ground across the island, Interdonato escaped with his brother to Malta. But in exile, he did not stop. In Malta, he wrote, plotted and conspired; urging on the next insurrection.
Eleven years later, the impossible opportunity arrived. In May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi landed in western Sicily with a thousand volunteers on two paddle steamers. Interdonato returned to the struggle at once. Garibaldi recognized Interdonato’s rank, and soon the colonel was charged to accomplish what he had twelve years ago: assembling an army. The decisive fighting came that July, in Milazzo, at that same pale fort I watched as we left the port for Lipari, dismissing it as scenery. Garibaldi’s first assault on the fort was thrown back, and for hours the army of laborers and farmers and craftsmen fought well-armed and trained infantry and cavalry. At last, they drove them back into their castle. A week later, Interdonato led his army into Messina. This was the same city the Bourbons had driven him from twelve years ago. Garibaldi had one job for him: gather the deserters running from the Bourbon forces and turn them into a battalion. So, now, here is Interdonato at age forty-seven. He is still improvising an army. The difference is that this time, the enormous, sprawling Bourbon state was beginning to falter around him. This time, he was about to erase the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from the map. And then Colonel Giovanni Interdonato did something almost as surprising as becoming a revolutionary in the first place: he stopped. After a life conspiring against the Bourbons, building an army, fleeing to Malta and joining Garibaldi to dismantle the hated kingdom, Interdonato decided to withdraw entirely from a military and political life. The colonel went home. He settled on his property along the Ionian side of Messina, in the valley of the Nisi, and redirected the same restless, experimental temperament toward an entirely different problem. He became a citrus grower. Rootstocks now, instead of rifles. Ripening dates. Acidity. The odd way a grafted tree passes its traits to the next. There was a reason a Sicilian gentleman could take lemons this seriously. By the time Interdonato began his experiments, Sicily had become a lemon kingdom — and the reason lay far beyond the island, in one of the great terrors of the age of sail: scurvy. In 1747, the Scottish naval surgeon James Lind tested different remedies at sea. After centuries of scurvy, he discovered that lemons and oranges actually worked. Drinking the juice of these simple fruits was all it took to cure the sailor’s worst enemy. The British Navy was slow to act, but fifty years later it began issuing lemon juice systematically to sailors. In the next twenty years, the Admiralty distributed some 1.6 million gallons of it. Suddenly, a fruit that flourished on a sunny island in the Mediterranean acquired strategic value to the greatest naval power in the world, and this would change Sicily’s trajectory forever. The consequences for the Citrus Kingdom were enormous. Before James Lind’s discovery, citrus was a Mediterranean crop. Now it was an export industry, and citrus groves became the most valuable agricultural land on the island. So when Interdonato walked among his trees in the 1870s, he was standing inside an industry that had already transformed Sicily. He was surrounded by generations of accumulated skill; the work of tinkerers and generalists. Merchants tracked prices in foreign ports, while growers read the weather and watched for disease. Down in the groves, men grafted and mended the irrigation walls. What Interdonato did was much more characteristic of him. He tinkered with the system. And he became obsessive about it. Between 1875 and 1880, Interdonato is said to have carried out something along the lines of two hundred grafting experiments, trying different combinations in search of a new fruit. The technique attributed to him was extraordinarily delicate. He took portions of buds from two different citrus plants, joined them longitudinally and grafted the combination onto a rootstock. What was that rootstock? The one that was driving Sicilian wealth: the sour orange, the same tree we discussed in Cefalù. And what was the citrus? One was a citron, the ancient, thick-skinned citrus we discussed in Palermo. The other was a local lemon known as the Ariddaru. Again and again he tried. Most experiments did not give him what he wanted. But eventually one did. The citron of Palermo’s Arab gardens conspired with the sour orange of Sicily’s Norman century and a plain lemon off the Ionian coast, and from the three of them came a fruit that was none of them. It was large, and looked like a stretched-out football, tipped on either side by giant nipples. Its rind was thin and smooth, and there were either very few seeds or none at all. Its juice was gentler. Less acidic than a regular lemon. This was a fruit that ripened in September. That was incredibly early, and later growers would refer to it as fino and speciale. For Interdonato, it was the one he decided to keep. Interdonato had spent his life gathering men, trying things that failed, and coming back after exile to help reunify Italy. Now, with citrus, he was doing the same thing. The enemy was no longer the Bourbon army, but probability. The battlefield had contracted to the width of a grafting knife. The thing that mattered about Interdonato’s lemon is timing. When the regular lemons of the Mediterranean were still green, the Interdonato was already on a ship. It was the first lemon to market, and that was worth serious money. The lemons I saw in the Lipari backyard may be a cousin, a household tree, not quite the Colonel’s working fruit. It was bred on the mainland, in the groves of the Nisi valley below Messina, and that is where the crop went to sea. Its mild juice became prized in Britain as a lemon for tea. The Interdonato surged in popularity in the orchards. It spread down the coast and across the sea to Turkey, taking root in the orchards of Mersin. Today, the terraces above Nisi still ripen before anything else each year, and the lemon still carries his name. Limone Interdonato di Messina is now one of only three Sicilian lemons the European Union guards with IGP status.
A few days later, we are approaching our ferry departure, and it’s time to check out. I have been seeing the European Bee-eater regularly. The persnicchettiero is waiting in black trousers and a crisp white short-sleeved shirt, carefully aligning our checkout papers before applying a stamp with the solemnity of a minor border official. “The bird really is here!” I tell him. I show him a photo of citrus on wings. “It’s an Italian bird!” He puts his reading glasses on and looks at the photo intently, and then he just has this wonderful smile on his face. “I had no idea we had birds like this in Italy!” And he looks out through the big glass windows at the shrubbery and the cliffs and the azure sea beyond. Part IV out next week. Notes from the Road is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Notes from the Road that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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