Conca d’Oro and the Last MandarinThe rental car is due back in Palermo. One fruit is left, and it ripens late.
The Citrus Kingdom finale has arrived. Part II arrives Saturday. If you’d rather not wait, the whole finale is already up on Notes from the Road, with large-format watercolor sketches. There’s also an epilogue: the Sicilian Citrus Family Tree, showing how every fruit in the series is related. It’s quiet in the rental car. Ivan is back at the wheel, Jane and Iva are in the back, and nobody has said anything for a while. We are headed north from Gela on the Sulfur Road, and I am looking out the window at this sun-parched land, all ochre grasses and red earth.
Then a long, winding belt of green. A jungle on either side of a lazy river, the Fiume Maroglio. Beyond it are greenhouses and rows of oranges and olives, side by side. For just a second, something brilliant flashes out of that green. Turquoise and electric azure and terracotta, with near-black flight feathers. It’s a European Roller, and the first time I’ve ever seen one in flight with all its colors. To my mind, the roller is Europe’s second most beautiful bird, after its cousin the bee-eater. But with its wings open and in perfect light, it gives the bee-eater a run for its money. I keep it to myself. A bird would only make Iva unhappy, and the car is quiet anyway. Weeks after we get home, Jane tells me she saw it too.
I look over at Ivan, which reminds me to ask: would you mind joining me just once more on a trip back in time? I know I promised in Modica that would be the last one. Let’s stand on the rooftop of this old tuna cannery and look down at us, two days ago. There’s Erik and Jane, walking alongside Iva and Ivan in the coastal fishing village of Marzamemi. Iva suggests that tonight in Modica, we should skip dinner out and just eat something at the house. Look at Erik, I tell you. Look at how this is music to his ears. Ivan agrees with Iva, and suggests we find a grocery on the way back. But almost as he says it, he notices a fruit cart on the side of the road and starts chatting up the vendor. He buys a whole bag of small, oblong tomatoes and a Femminello lemon. At the cannery, they pick up some tuna and sea salt. “We really don’t need to find a grocery anymore,” Iva says. “We have just about everything we need.” Let’s follow them back to Modica, up the eight flights of stairs, past the alley cats and the capers growing out of the old walls. Almost immediately, Iva slips out again, and she’s gone for some time. When she comes back, she is carrying a bottle of Sicilian wine. She has also visited two salumerias, and she has two sausages and a local cheese. Ivan improvises with his handful of ingredients, slicing up the tomatoes and mixing them with capers, olive oil and tuna, with the Femminello squeezed over the top. There they are on the balcony, and Modica is all lit up, twinkling in the dark. It is our best meal in Sicily, partly because of the food and partly because of the donkey raiders. Since our first days on the island, Ivan and I have been building a saga about a band of donkey raiders terrorizing northern Sicily. Tonight Ivan invents the raiders’ simpleton helper, the one who feeds the donkeys, and he cracks himself up so badly he can’t stop laughing. Ever since Iva and Ivan have been on their journey to fix the dent, their urge to turn this into a no trip has melted away. Some of the best food I have ever eaten was made by Iva or Ivan. My favorite pizza was made on their kamado grill, with mushrooms they had foraged themselves. There are no Instagram, TripAdvisor or TikTok reviews. And you can almost see it in Ivan’s face while he’s chopping vegetables in front of a city of magic, a quiet recognition that maybe Dassel, in Meeker County, Minnesota, might not offer everything that Modica does. Iva points up at the bats darting over the rooftops. I don’t tell her those are swifts.
On the Sulfur Road headed west, while I stare out the window, Iva and Ivan reckon with the fact that we are mere hours away from the rental car parking lot. And, despite the fact that the paint job and the nail polish job were of premium quality, something else is needed. Something to conceal the crime. If perhaps the nail polish sparkles just a little too much, maybe a little dirt could lure the rental car agents off the scent. As we drive past almond farms and dry, red-earth valleys of olives and tomato greenhouses, Ivan says that all we need is mud. But there is no mud in Sicily in July. But I’m not thinking about mud. I’m thinking about the orange groves and the lemon groves. I’m thinking about the one Sicilian citrus fruit that we have yet to discover. It turns out, there is one more, and it is, in every way, the last. Tonight, we will return the car in Palermo. The rental lot is on the edge of the city, out on the plain the Sicilians have always called the Conca d’Oro, the golden shell. This whole series began in the Conca d’Oro. But on this trip, I was only there briefly, as we left the rental car parking lot. So before we arrive, let me tell you about it. And let me tell you about the last fruit, because it grew there too. The Last FruitOf the four wild ancestors we met at Vendicari, the citron, the pomelo, the papeda and the mandarin, the mandarin is the one that has waited the longest. The mandarin is one of the oldest citrus lineages, and it is the very last to arrive in Sicily. As we have learned, the citron came with the Arabs, as did the sour orange, and the sweet orange came later on Portuguese ships. The mandarin came with the British. In the early 1800s, when Napoleon held most of Europe and the Bourbon king had fled Naples for Palermo, the British Navy was all over the island. A British ship brought a few mandarin trees from China, and around 1810 they were planted in Palermo’s new Botanical Garden. From the garden, the trees went out into the Conca d’Oro, and from the Conca d’Oro to the rest of the Mediterranean. I have always loved oranges, but you have to fight an orange. You dig your thumbnail into it and tear the peel off in pieces. A mandarin you can peel with your thumb, in one long spiral, and it gives itself up in segments. It is the easiest citrus fruit there is. Our most typical winter breakfast is two soft-boiled eggs and two satsuma mandarins.
The Golden ShellThe first time I saw the Conca d’Oro, I was driving back to Palermo from the west, and below me Palermo was spread along its bay, and all around it, filling the space between the mountains and the sea, was a place I had trouble deciphering in the haze. The Conca d’Oro is the wide plain that surrounds Palermo. It’s a bowl of flat land that is ringed by mountains on three sides and by the Mediterranean on the fourth. For a thousand years, the Conca d’Oro was a massive garden, a paradise that could be mistaken for a work of nature. But the reality is that Sicilian soil was never easy, and of course Sicilian summers are hot and dry. This plain of paradise was built by man, and it was built with water. It was the Arabs who first brought citrus and rice, both of which needed enormous amounts of water. They built the system that fed their crops — the wells and channels, and those sophisticated water tanks and mule-driven wheels. When the Normans conquered Palermo, they knew to embrace this technology, and their kings ringed the city with pleasure gardens like the Favara, a palace whose orange trees were reflected in artificial lakes. Throughout this thousand-year history, travelers kept writing about it. In 1184, Ibn Jubayr, a Muslim pilgrim en route to his home in Spain, described the Conca d’Oro as “Proudly set between its open spaces and plains filled with gardens, with broad roads and avenues, it dazzles the eyes with its perfection.” In 1787, Goethe wrote, “It is the most wonderful place in the world: regularly laid out by art, it still looks a fairy spot; planted but a short time ago, it yet transports you into ancient times.” By the nineteenth century, when the mandarin joined the other citrus, the Conca d’Oro was one vast citrus grove. The French novelist Guy de Maupassant gushed over it, calling it a fragrant forest. The Conca d’Oro was a monument to human ingenuity, as great as any cathedral in Sicily. It was alive, and it fed a city. Out the window, a greenhouse flashes white in the sun, and then another. Ivan is watching the ditches along the road. He’s looking for mud.
The Late MandarinAt the southeast edge of the plain, below a mountain called Monte Grifone, is a small farm settlement called Ciaculli. It’s where the late mandarin was born. Sometime in the 1940s, in a grove in Ciaculli, a mandarin tree of the common Avana variety put out a single branch that behaved differently from the rest. Its fruit ripened late, long after every other mandarin, from January all the way into March. A grower noticed. Somebody cut that branch and grafted it onto other trees, and the late mandarin spread through the groves. Locals called it u marzuddu, the March one. Today it’s called the Mandarino Tardivo di Ciaculli, the late mandarin of Ciaculli. The Tardivo was prized because it was late, sweet and fragrant at a time of year when little other fruit was left on the trees. I should tell you now that I never tasted one in Sicily. We were there in summer. The Tardivo ripens in winter. The gardens around Palermo didn’t stop growing citrus when the nineteenth century ended, and the courteous man at the gate didn’t go away. By the 1940s, Ciaculli and its neighbor, Croceverde, were the heart of mandarin country. And they belonged, in every way that counted, to a family called Greco. One Greco managed an estate of about 300 hectares of citrus, most of it mandarins. When one of his sons was killed, the two branches of the family, cousins who had grown up among the same trees, went to war with each other. Just after the Second World War, they were fighting among the mandarin trees. The Grecos who survived became the most powerful family in the Sicilian Mafia. By the 1950s, one of them, Salvatore Greco of Ciaculli, sat at the head of its first governing commission. On the morning of June 30, 1963, a farmer in Ciaculli found a car abandoned on his land, among his citrus trees. The doors were open. One of the tires was flat. On the back seat were a gas canister and a fuse that had been lit and had burned out. He called the police. The police and the carabinieri came, and they called the army. Seven men gathered around the car among the groves. The youngest of the officers, Lieutenant Mario Malausa, was twenty-four. They were examining the car, looking for clues. Then one of them opened the trunk, where the real bomb was waiting for them. The bomb killed all seven of them. The car bomb was meant for Salvatore Greco, but it had stalled on a flat tire in a citrus grove. After the Ciaculli incident, the car bomb became the signature weapon of the Mafia. One of the first went off in mandarin country. After that, for a few years anyway, the Italian state came for the Mafia as it never had before. It arrested almost 2,000 people, and the Mafia’s commission dissolved itself. Salvatore Greco fled to Venezuela. But what were these mafiosi fighting for in the citrus groves? It wasn’t mandarins. The SackWhen we left Modica, I told you that I knew who controlled the water in the Conca d’Oro, at least for a while. I didn’t yet know what they did with it. After the Second World War, Palermo grew fast. People came in from the countryside and the interior, looking for work, and between 1951 and 1961 the city grew by a hundred thousand people. They needed somewhere to live. In 1958, a young Christian Democrat named Salvo Lima became the mayor of Palermo, and his ally Vito Ciancimino took charge of public works and building permits. In five years, the city signed more than 4,000 building licences. More than half of them were issued in the names of three pensioners who had nothing to do with construction. Three pensioners. Front men, names on paper, so that the people who were really building never had to appear. It was ingenious, in its way. And the land they were building on was the Conca d’Oro. The war that ended with the bomb in the grove was fought, in large part, over building sites and construction contracts. The battles were over who would get the permits. Who would supply the concrete. It was over who would pave the golden shell. In fact, the killing was the same business as the concrete. The bulldozers came; they surrounded the city like tanks, and groves that had taken a thousand years to build were gone in a season. The gebbie were filled in, and the stone channels that fed the groves were broken apart. The walled gardens and the old villas disappeared, replaced by apartment blocks eight or ten stories tall. They were all built as fast and cheap as possible, with no urban planning whatsoever. By the end, 3,000 hectares of the Conca d’Oro’s orchards and citrus groves were gone. The newspaper L’Ora gave it a name: il sacco di Palermo, the sack of Palermo. The agronomist Giuseppe Barbera remembers it as a boy. His family had a villa at Resuttana, in the middle of the Conca d’Oro, three kilometers from the cathedral. In the winter of 1965, his father kept finding excuses not to take the family out there. Barbera didn’t understand why. The concrete had surrounded it. Yes, this is a Mafia story. But the sack was more than mafiosi. It was mayors and permit officers. And it was contractors and banks. And it was planners looking the other way, and laws that bent when they wanted to be bent. The sack of Palermo was an inside job, and it was done by an alliance. Some people profited, but many more looked away, out of fear or because they had no say. The few who stood up to it all paid for it, sometimes with their lives. A thousand years to build a paradise. Twenty to bury. Tonight, when we return the car, we’ll be parking on that ground. In the side mirror, I can see the door where the nail polish is. In this light, it sparkles. The final chapter, Part II, arrives Saturday morning. 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