For one brief, shining period during the seventeenth century, there was a form of landholding that had the potential to create the conditions for an agricultural renaissance in Sicily. It was called the enfiteusi ("emphyteusis") and involved long-term leases (sometimes as long as twenty years) whereby the tenant farmer rented small parcels of land for his home and his farming. He also had the legal right to prepay the balance of the long-term lease and effectively buy this land. The word enfiteusi derives from a Greek verb that means “to plant and to graft.” In other words, this form of long-term tenancy gave the peasant farmer the opportunity to plant his crop, harvest it, and then select which plants to graft to improve his crop. This form of farming is precisely the kind that fosters the careful cultivation of grapevines and olive and fruit trees, with crop rotation and selection for quality improvement. This was the method of farming that in northern Italy and France permitted the selection of vine varieties and other crops for quality over centuries. The use of the enfiteusi was concentrated near Menfi in the Val di Mazara, Vittoria in the Val di Noto, and Mount Etna in the Val Demone. Nobles who acquired licenses from the ruling Spanish viceroys in Palermo created hundreds of new town settlements throughout the island built on this form of land tenancy in the 1600s. Sadly, this experiment in land reform did not survive into the eighteenth century beyond specific locales. Barons were desperate to revert to shorter-term tenancies that gave them greater protection against inflation. The degeneration of Sicilian agriculture throughout most of the island was ensured.
It is no coincidence, however, that in two of the areas where the enfiteusi leaseholds were most firmly rooted, Mount Etna and Vittoria, grapevines were systematically planted and wine production thrived through the end of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, the bishop of Catania, in his capacity as the count of Mascali, granted long-term leases in tracts of land on the fertile plain between the Ionian coast and the eastern slopes of Etna to bourgeois families in exchange for their payment of the tithe based on the land's annual production. These families, in turn, subleased parcels of their land to long-term tenant farmers, who transformed Mascali from an uncultivated forest into the flourishing wine zone that it became by the eighteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Mascali had more land under vines than any other area of Sicily and was a vibrant center for wine production and export to England, Naples, and Malta. Mascali's success as a wine-producing area created the conditions for the freer flow of capital and a nascent middle class to take hold. In the growing towns of Giarre and Riposto, wine merchants, barrel makers, shipbuilders, artisans, shopkeepers, lawyers, and other professionals all played vital roles in strengthening the agricultural and maritime economy of Mascali during this epoch.
From the beginning of the eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century, three succeeding foreign powers, the Piedmontese, the Austrians, and the Bourbons, recognized the need for fundamental, islandwide reform in Sicily. They had concluded that with its fertility and other natural resources, there was no objective reason for Sicily to be destitute. The island exported raw materials such as silk, cotton, sugarcane, and sulfur as commodities to overseas commercial industries, only to buy back the finished goods at a premium. Four principal reforms were required. First, the rule of law would have to be restored and enforced if Sicily ever hoped to develop the conditions for entrepreneurship and commerce. Second, land reform would be required to improve the agricultural economy in Sicily. Third, Sicily would need a public infrastructure of roads and bridges to facilitate the movement of people and goods. Fourth, the hundreds of different weights and measures used across the island would need to be made uniform. In response to the various reforms proposed by these successive foreign rulers, the Sicilian baronage actively resisted and ultimately defeated any changes that would diminish its own wealth or stature.
The Sicilian nobles were extravagant consumers of foreign luxuries such as clothing and wine. With limited exceptions, they had the affectations and pretenses of northern European nobility without the commensurate education or culture. They imported French chefs, called monzù, for their kitchens and French wine for their cellars. Rather than improve domestic sugarcane production by allowing the imposition of an import tax on refined sugar, the Sicilian nobles refused any such reform that would raise the price of their most precious imported commodity. In 1839 Sicily spent twenty-five times more on sugar than coal.37 The Sicilian nobles jealously vied for social status based on the outward demonstration of wealth, not its production. A continuous cycle of social engagements—weddings, baptisms, promenades, balls, theatergoing, gambling, religious festivals, funeral ceremonies—consumed the competitive zeal and precious capital of the Sicilian nobility. As a class, they demonstrated little attachment to the people or fruit of their lands, just the lavish trappings bought (and more frequently borrowed) with its revenue.
With the exception of select Sicilian nobles and clergymen who vigorously improved their lands and advanced the science of agriculture in Sicily, the larger story is of a noble class that abandoned its responsibilities to the land. At a time when the ruling classes of England, France, and Germany were embracing revolutionary improvements to the sciences of agronomy and botany and increasing their agricultural output dramatically, the landed nobility of Sicily were robbing Sicily and its true farmers of their agricultural patrimony.
In his iconic novel The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa (himself the last prince of an old-line impoverished noble family on the verge of extinction in the late 1950s) provides a nostalgic look at the fading baronial class on the eve of Sicily's unification with mainland Italy in 1860. The protagonist is the prince of Salina, Don Fabrizio. He is the Leopard of the novel's name, an archetype of the noble class that had ruled Sicily since the fall of the Norman/Swabian kings. He dabbles in astronomy and neglects the productive use of his vast lands. In the center of the book, the Leopard is offered the opportunity to become a senator and represent Sicily in the national parliament of the newly unified Italy. In declining this honor, he declares that nothing in Sicily will ever change and that its history is doomed to repeat itself. In his flowery soliloquy, he states that “in Sicily it doesn't matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all.”38 This is Sicilian fatalism in its purest form. The Leopard's words are often quoted, even by modern-day Sicilians, as prophetic. But they are not. The Leopard of Lampedusa's book is not the sympathetic Burt Lancaster figure of Luchino Visconti's film. He is no prophet. He is the ghost of Sicily past, a man of great privilege who, in keeping with his decadent class, has squandered the opportunity to do something fruitful with his life.
When the reader first meets the prince of Salina in chapter 1, it is in the formal garden of his Palermo palace. “It was a garden for the blind: a constant offense to the eyes, a pleasure strong if somewhat crude to the nose. The Paul Neyron roses, whose cuttings he had himself bought in Paris, had degenerated; first stimulated and then enfeebled by the strong if languid pull of Sicilian earth, burned by apocalyptic Julys, they had changed into things like flesh-colored cabbages, obscene and distilling a dense, almost indecent, scent which no French horticulturist would have dared hope for.”39 Lampedusa's vivid description of the rotting garden is the perfect metaphor for what the garden paradise of Muslim and Norman Sicily had become in the intervening centuries. When the prince of Salina visits his country estate in the second chapter, he wanders through the garden gazing at the nude statuary and lost in his aimless musings. It is his young and vital nephew, Tancredi, who calls to him to take notice of a grafted peach tree that has yielded beautiful fruit.
“Uncle, come and look at the foreign peaches. They've turned out fine.” . . . The graft with German cuttings, made two years ago, had succeeded perfectly; there was not