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Wednesday, November 4, 2026
✨ Black Friday Starts Early for Our Referral Crew
Saturday, October 31, 2026
Modica and the Femminello Night Bandits (II)
Modica and the Femminello Night Bandits (II)From a balcony in Modica, a journey back to a lemon grove in 1859.
This is the second half of Part 7 of 8 of The Citrus Kingdom. If you’d rather experience the entire chapter in one sitting, the complete, illustrated story is waiting for you on Notes from the Road. The eighth and final chapter of The Citrus Kingdom arrives in two weeks. Back in Modica, Iva and Ivan have settled in for breakfast on Corso Umberto, the main street. They’ve found a cafe that serves fagottini filled with Nutella. A fagottino is a little bundle of puff pastry folded over itself like a letter. Ivan eats one with great seriousness, then a second with less seriousness. Then we go shopping for nail polish. Iva finds her perfect bottle after testing it on her thumbnail. Then she buys two. That afternoon we drive to Ragusa. While Modica drapes itself on the slopes of a gorge, Ragusa goes even further. The old town, Ragusa Ibla, is built up on its own island of limestone. It’s like an ark surrounded by gorges, terraces, stone walls and steep staircases. From the road, all the domes and bell towers seem to float. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more beautiful small city. I say so out loud. “It’s like any other European city,” Iva says. Ivan agrees, and he reminds me again that they grew up among old stone towns, and I have to understand that if you grow up in places like this, there is nothing special about them. He tells me the same thing he told me in Cefalù. If he were to visit the small towns of Minnesota, now that would be interesting to him. I grew up loving places that aren’t easy to love, and finding beauty where nobody expects it is still the greatest joy I know. When I travel with people, I put all my energy into getting the people I’m with to share that joy. I take friends on what I call “yes trips”. The only rule of a yes trip is that whoever is with me has to say yes to everything I suggest. That may sound like I am trying to coerce them into doing something I want to do, but that is not true. I am working to make memories. Iva and Ivan would excel at no trips. Ragusa Ibla is so stunning that I can only sit at dinner through the appetizers. We decide to split up; Jane and I will walk, then take a taxi home. We follow the edge of the old town, the slopes falling away below us, everything lit by a full moon. It’s hard to believe that the story of the Sclafanis and this evening are happening on the same island. But they are, and when we get back to Modica that night, I start to think about my Conca d’Oro. A VisitorThe courteous man arrives in the valley in the spring of 1863. He wears a good coat, and waits at the gate to be invited in. He is about forty years old, clean-shaven and soft-spoken. He compliments Antonino’s lemons, and asks about Rosalia’s health, and he knows about their three boys, including that the middle son fought at Milazzo. “I admire a man who defends what’s his,” he says of Pietro. He explains that the men who protect all the neighbors could protect the Sclafanis too. It’s pretty simple. It’s pretty affordable. I mean, ask the Lo Cascios and old Ferrante, and any other family on this road. It’s just a small payment, after each harvest. The thieves will go elsewhere. Antonino tells him that the Sclafanis protect themselves. The man gives a look that suggests that he appreciates this answer. That it’s the right answer. He thanks Rosalia for the water she brought him. He is thoughtful, and never threatens. He simply leaves. When he closes the gate behind him, he does so with a careful precision, which Salvatore will remember about him.
After that, the thieves come more often, but they take less. Some nights they take nothing at all. They break branches. They knock the stones off the wall. Once they fire a shot into the farmhouse door and run. The Sclafanis have three guns now for their night-time watches. Salvatore has his old rabbit gun. Pietro has his military musket. Nino, who is now fifteen, bought a shotgun off a shepherd and sawed it short himself. That way, when he walks in the orchard, the barrel won’t hit the low lemon branches. The shepherds call a gun like this a lupara. Then the shooting comes. Usually, the night is quiet, just the same as it was that first night. Then a few seconds of noise and light. Pietro fires like a soldier, and Nino’s lupara goes off like a cannon, lighting up the whole grove. Salvatore is still fumbling with his old powder and cap when the men in the dark are already running away. Nobody ever gets shot, nobody ever gets caught. Every morning after this happens, there are broken branches and lemons on the ground. The Sclafanis are winning. They’re keeping the bandits at bay. Pietro says it plainly: “Every fight is a win for the Sclafanis.” But the fights are not where they are losing. But the fights are not where they are losing. That summer, there are fewer pickers. One of them has a sick mother, and another has found work closer to the city. The carter who has taken the Sclafanis’ lemons to the port for the past eleven years tells Antonino his mule is lame. But the next week, Antonino sees the same mule pulling the Lo Cascios’ crates. The port merchant doesn’t look Antonino in the eye anymore, and while he still buys from them, it’s not at a good price. The neighbors begin to treat the Sclafanis differently. While they used to call them brave, now it’s stubborn. And at Mass, they no longer sit next to them. Rosalia doesn’t get much sleep. Sometimes it’s no sleep at all. And the boys begin to fight amongst themselves. Pietro says he wants to shoot the thieves in broad daylight, make them pay. Salvatore is ready to start paying. Nino sits on the courtyard step in the evenings, the shotgun across his knees, oiling the lock.
Then, in August, the water stops. The well and the mule wheel can keep Rosalia’s garden going. Four hundred lemon trees need the Thursday turn. On the first Thursday, Antonino opens his gate to the channel after dark and listens. Frogs. Nothing else. He’s still there at first light. The next Thursday he stays in the courtyard with the door open, and goes to bed at the morning bells without a word to Rosalia, who hasn’t slept either. He walks up the hill to the fontaniere’s house. “Antò, what can I tell you? The springs are low. Somebody upstream is taking more than his share.” On the way home he passes the Lo Cascios’ grove. Their channels are full. By the second week the leaves are folding along the midrib in the afternoon. They open again overnight, until one morning on the young trees by the wall they don’t. The old tree by the cistern drops its green fruit into the dry channels. The gebbia is down to cracked mud. The frogs are gone. The courteous man comes back on a Sunday. When the courteous man shows up, Antonino wastes no time in inviting him in. The two of them sit in the courtyard and Rosalia brings them wine without sitting down. The courteous man asks about the painted chest against the kitchen wall. It’s lovely, he says, just like the one his mother had. Antonino and the courteous man never get into a showdown or a shouting match. Or even a disagreement. The man offers a number, and Antonino accepts it. That Thursday, the water comes. Antonino is there waiting for the sound of a trickle, and then a gurgle. By morning, the grove smells like wet earth again. The thieves never come back. And there is no reason to keep watch. Salvatore sleeps through the night and Pietro hangs his musket on the wall, and Nino keeps his lupara under the bed. The Sclafanis make their payments after every harvest.
By the autumn of 1882, Antonino still visits his groves every morning. But instead of walking them, he stops by the old tree at the cistern and puts his hand on it. Salvatore has taken over the farm, and his two little girls are chasing frogs in the gebbia. A young man arrives at the gate for payment. This is someone new, because the courteous man hasn’t been on the road in years. When the Lo Cascios’ grandson had a falling out with old Ferrante’s widow, there was no need for anybody to go to the new Italian courts of Palermo, because the courteous man could take care of the dispute and get everybody back to work. The young man takes the money, asks about Antonino’s health, and leaves. Pietro has returned home. He works for a merchant in Palermo, exporting lemons and oranges to Liverpool and New York. Nino isn’t at supper. That’s not unusual these days, because Nino is often out. Rosalia clears the old farm table under the vine and sees Nino out at the gate, talking to the carter, polite as can be, in new boots, with a shiny watch on a chain. He rests one hand on the gatepost, perfectly at ease. She knows that way of standing. She saw it almost twenty years ago, when a man in a good coat waited at that same gate to be invited in. She knows that way of standing. She doesn’t call him in for supper. Instead, she goes to the painted chest, folds the clean linens in among the lavender and lemon peel, and closes the lid. Then she sits down beside it and listens to the water running in the channels. Nobody steals another lemon from the Sclafanis, ever. Palermo, 1872The Sclafanis never existed. But a Palermo doctor named Gaspare Galati did. In 1872, Galati inherited a lemon grove of about four hectares, a short walk from the city walls. His brother-in-law, the previous owner, had died of a heart attack after a string of threatening letters. Galati studied the letters and discovered that they came from a man named Benedetto Carollo. This was the grove’s own warden, and he had been skimming a fifth of every sale. But he was also letting lemons disappear, and quietly running down the grove’s reputation. That way, he could buy it cheap. So Galati fired him and hired a new warden. On the night of July 2, 1874, the new warden was shot dead in a lane beside the grove. The killers had built a firing platform behind a stone wall to wait for him. Then the letters started arriving at Galati’s door. When the police failed to protect him, he fled Sicily and wrote to the Minister of the Interior in Rome. The investigation that followed gave us one of our earliest glimpses of how the citrus groves of Palermo became the incubator for the dark business that would define the next chapters of Sicily’s history. By then it had a name. In 1863, a popular Palermo play about prison bosses, I mafiusi di la Vicaria, put the word mafiusi on stage, set in the same Vicaria prison the Sclafanis feared. Two years later, a government report from Palermo used the word mafia officially for the first time.
In 1876, Leopoldo Franchetti, a young Tuscan aristocrat, came to Sicily to see the problem for himself with his colleague Sidney Sonnino. Together, they traveled the island for months under the assumption, or perhaps the bigotry, of educated northern Italians that violence grows out of poverty. So they were looking for the origins of the Mafia in the wrong places: in the parched interior and among the wheat estates and the poverty-stricken sulfur towns. Then they came to the edge of Palermo. What he saw there was not misery. It was the most beautiful farmland in Europe. Orange and lemon trees, bright fruit glowing in the dark foliage. Stone walls and villas. If any place in Sicily looked peaceful, prosperous, and orderly, it was here. But why then, pondered Franchetti, was the violence the worst here? These were the gardens of the Conca d’Oro! Wealth, not poverty, had bred it. He called it an “industry of violence.” Wealth, not poverty, had bred it. For more than a century, historians have followed Franchetti into those groves. Salvatore Lupo titled his history of the Mafia Il giardino degli aranci, The Garden of Oranges. John Dickie’s Cosa Nostra, perhaps the best-known English-language history of the Mafia, begins with Dr. Galati and his lemon grove. But in 2017, three economists, Arcangelo Dimico, Alessia Isopi, and Ola Olsson, tested the idea with numbers. In the early 1880s, there was a vast parliamentary study that asked local magistrates across Sicily to describe the most common crimes in their districts. When the economists mapped the answers against the crops from each district, one crop stood out. Citrus. Not wheat or olives or vineyards. Lemons and oranges. They traced the Mafia’s rise to the enormous surge in foreign demand for Sicilian lemons that followed once James Lind’s experiments helped convince the British Navy that citrus prevented scurvy. They called their paper “Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons.” Lemon groves were among the most valuable farmland in all of Europe, but unlike many other crops, they were very much exposed. The fruit hangs out in the open. The trees take years to grow, and a grove can lose its value in a single night. The Bourbon state that had ruled Sicily before was always weak in the countryside, but the new Italian state was distant, and just as weak. There were men who knew how to sell a very real product: protection. The sociologist Diego Gambetta has argued that this is what the Mafia fundamentally is: a business that sells protection. The genius of the Mafia is that it can manufacture the demand for its own product. The economist Oriana Bandiera studied why the Mafia spread like it did. When land was divided among many small owners, each grower who paid for protection pushed the thieves onto neighbors who hadn’t. The Citrus Kingdom has been a story of human ingenuity. Arab engineers who taught a valley to hold water. Gardeners who grafted a citron onto a sour orange. A colonel who spent five years on two hundred grafts to make a lemon ripen early. And those growers who learned to starve a Femminello so it could flower in summer, when profits were highest. All of this was ingenuity that was rewarded by the extraordinary value of citrus. In the same groves, under the same trees, men discovered that the threat of violence could be harvested like fruit. So the Mafia was ingenuity too. There were other industries in Sicily where the Mafia flourished. The sulfur mines of the interior for example, where there was sudden wealth in places that couldn’t be protected by the state. But, it turns out, lemons and oranges in the groves around Palermo were by far the fullest breeding ground for the Mafia. Even the Mafia’s favorite gun, the lupara used by Nino, came from the countryside. The gun became so closely tied to the Mafia that a Mafia killing came to be called simply morto di lupara.
Leaving ModicaIn the morning, I meet Jane, Iva, and Ivan at the rental car. Iva is standing beside the driver’s door with her arms folded. She is holding two empty bottles of nail polish. I look at the scrape. Then I look at it again. The free paint job the couple coaxed out of a mechanic in Marzamemi had dried like a dull white bandage on a glossy white car. Iva’s theory is simple. The repair didn’t look wrong because of the color, but because it didn’t shine. Car paint shines. Nail polish shines. Therefore, nail polish. So she has painted the entire repair with clear nail polish. It turns out that she wasn’t looking for just any clear nail polish, but the kind with a little purple glitter. In the morning sun, the scrape glitters. It catches the light from thirty feet away. It’s still a dull patch on a rental car. Now it’s a dull patch on a rental car in evening wear. “Better,” Iva says. It is lipstick on a pig. Sparkly lipstick. We leave Modica, and Iva insists on driving. And to be honest, Iva has a right to drive the car now. It’s sort of even hers. She is the one who restored it. The panel sparkles in the sun as we make our way out of the gorge. As we climb toward the plateau, the Sclafanis are still on my mind, and I tell Jane that this area, the area that looks most like the international depiction of the island, is the place that held out against the Mafia the longest. This area, the Ragusa province, was called the provincia babba, the naive province, for most of the twentieth century. In addition to growing carobs and almonds, Ragusa grew lemons and oranges too. But there was something about the province that made it almost immune to the Mafia. Nobody has figured out exactly what, but there are many theories. Some people think it’s because the farms were smaller, or that the towns had their own strong local institutions. Some people believe it was the aftereffects of the earthquake of 1693, which gave these cities newer and fresher arrangements of land and power. Which of those is true, I have no idea. But what I can say is that the Mafia grew in particular conditions, in a particular place, and only much later did it reach this corner of Sicily. The province isn’t so naive anymore. But the place where it was born is the place our whole trip began. I keep thinking about Palermo’s Conca d’Oro. It was as close to paradise as Sicily ever built. On that first night in Taormina, a man on his balcony told me that the history of Sicily and citrus is the history of water, and who controls it. Now I know who controlled it, at least for a while. I don’t yet know what they did with it.
The road curves ahead of us, and suddenly, there it is. The city of Ragusa in the morning sun. Its historic center is balanced on an island of limestone, stacked on the spine of a rock like the dreams of a fantasy illustrator. Iva gasps. She actually slows the car. “Look at that,” she says. She is awestruck by the magical city of honey limestone houses hanging off the ledges of every mesa. “That’s Ragusa,” I say. “No.” “That’s Ragusa. We were there yesterday. You said it was like any other European city.” “That is not the city we went to yesterday.” “It’s the same city. That’s Ragusa Ibla right there.” Iva shakes her head, eyes on the road, absolutely certain. “You are trying to trick me,” she says. “This is a different city.” Ivan, in the passenger seat, studies the view and says nothing at all. I have a theory about Iva, and it begins with Eurocrem. When Iva was a girl in communist Yugoslavia, before Nutella reached her corner of the world, there was Eurocrem, made in a factory in Serbia under license from an Italian company and sold in every shop from Slovenia to Macedonia. It came in two styles. One was a spread, but the other was a bar called Eurocrem Blok. Its defining feature was that it came in two colors, side by side. A dark brown half of cocoa. A pale half of hazelnut and milk. Some kids preferred one half over the other, and sometimes they argued about which half was better. But the two sides never mixed. Iva wanted Eurocrem the way the British Navy wanted lemons. When she wanted it, she found a way to get it. Consider the evidence. In Oregon, Iva informed me that Nutella cannot be mixed with anything else. Nutella is Nutella. On this trip, a matte white repair could not be allowed to sit beside glossy white factory paint; the two halves had to match, and if paint couldn’t do it, nail polish would. And this morning, a city that Iva had decided was boring could not also be the most beautiful city she has ever seen. Those are two different halves. They cannot be the same bar. So it must be a different city. I know, I know. History never has a single cause. It wasn’t lemons alone, or weak government alone, or land alone. I stand by every word of that. But Iva is not history. Iva is Eurocrem. She drives on toward Palermo with both hands on the wheel, the repair glittering beside her like a brooch, completely untroubled. Behind us, the most beautiful city she has ever seen, which is not Ragusa, slides out of view. Chapter 8 is out in two weeks. 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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