“They seem quite ripe. A pity there are too few for tonight. But we'll get them picked tomorrow and see what they're like.”
“There! That's how I like you, Uncle; like this, in the part of agricola pius—appreciating in anticipation the fruits of your own labors.”40
The “foreign peaches” are an exquisite symbol of Sicily's promise as a garden paradise governed by dutiful farmers (singular: agricola pius) who appreciate the fruits of their labor. In direct contrast with the prince's oft-quoted speech about the irredeemable Sicily, this small scene and Tancredi's simple words reveal what could have been a true path for Sicily's redemption. Unlike the French roses in the prince's Palermo garden, which had been left to wither in the blistering heat, the foreign peaches in his country garden are the product of the gardener's careful selection and a symbol of practical agriculture (as embraced by the foreigners of northern Europe, such as the English, the French, and the Germans). The prince seems disappointed by the small yield, but Tancredi intelligently appreciates the fruit's quality. At the end of this scene, the prince glimpses Tancredi's servant bringing a “tasselled box containing a dozen yellow peaches with pink cheeks” as a gift for the local beauty—who also happens to be the daughter of the mayor, a local strongman and the biggest new landowner in town.41 Even if only in symbolic terms (in place of the prosaic dozen roses), Tancredi surely sought to convey an enlightened noble's appreciation of his land and its promise with this offering.
One Sicilian noble who was guilty of the “sin of doing” was Prince Biscari, the antithesis of the fictional prince of Salina. In the eighteenth century, Prince Biscari, Ignazio Paternò Castello of Catania, personally funded the construction of an aqueduct to reach his rice fields, excavated the ruins of a Greek theater, created one of the most respected private museums to showcase Sicilian antiquities and natural history, imported foreign artisans to bolster the local production of linen and rum, and largely fed the entire city of Catania for a month. His palace and museum in Catania were must-sees on most grand tours in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prince Biscari surely was more deserving than the prince of Salina of the moniker the Leopard.
During Sicily's wine-dark ages there were other real-life Sicilians—nobles, clergymen, farm managers, peasants, and other boni homines—who contributed magnificently to their land and its culture. Antonino Venuto, a farmer (agricoltore) from Noto in southeastern Sicily, authored the first agricultural treatise in Sicily to focus exclusively on the cultivation of fruit trees and vines, De Agricultura Opusculum. This work, first published in 1516, has individual chapters for twenty-five types of fruit trees (including orange, mulberry, cherry, carob, fig, pomegranate, almond, pear, and apple) and an eight-chapter “treatise about vines and the soil they like,” describing how to plant, prune, and propagate grapevines.42 Another distinguished Sicilian from the sixteenth century was a Dominican friar named Tomaso Fazello. Fazello discovered ancient Greek ruins in Agrigento, Palazzolo Acreide, and Selinunte and wrote a multivolume history of Sicily from its earliest age. The work is a thousand-page tome called De Rebus Siculis and was published in 1558. Fazello's first volume begins by extolling Sicily's rich fertility. He describes fruit trees and grapevines planted in the mountains, where the richness of the soil, the sweetness of the water, and the freshness of the air made them as fruitful in winter as in summer. While chronicling Sicily's place in ancient history, Fazello makes reference to the area of Entella, modern-day Contessa Entellina, as celebrated since Roman days for its wines. King Acestes's gift of treasured wine to Aeneas comes to mind. Fazello states that by his time, Entella had been all planted to grain and thus was ruined for wine.43 This observation echoes the historical record that many small farms in western Sicily formerly planted with vines and olives were consolidated as part of latifundia planted almost exclusively with grain during this period. Regardless of this historical reality, Fazello claimed, whether from provincial or justified pride, that the Sicilian wines of his day were celebrated because they were as fine as any in Italy. He described them as sweet, soft, and good for the stomach because they were capable of long aging without the need for reinforcement with alcohol spirits.44 As evidence for Fazello's praise of Sicilian wine, a century before, King Alfonso, the Aragonese ruler of Sicily, commanded his Sicilian officials to send the wines of Trapani, Corleone, Aci, and Taormina to his court in Naples to prove they served him well. The wines he ordered from Trapani and Aci included “some newly pressed, some two to three years old and some ‘of the oldest you can find.’ “45
What is known about vine varieties and wine production in seventeenth-century Sicily comes directly from the written works of two other distinguished Sicilian clergymen, Francisco Cupani and Paolo Boccone. Cupani was a Franciscan botanist in charge of a botanical garden outside Palermo. He is the author of a book titled Hortus Catholicus ("Catholic Garden"), which was published in 1696 and formally classified Sicilian plant and vine varieties. Boccone was a Cistercian monk from a noble family who, prior to his entry into the Cistercian order, had been a professor of botany at the University of Padua and the official botanist for the grand duke of Tuscany. He wrote more than a dozen respected works on botany, including a classification of Sicilian flora.
At the end of the eighteenth century, a Sicilian clergyman named Abbot Paolo Balsamo became the first professor of agricultural science and political economy at the Royal Academy in Palermo. Balsamo had spent three years studying advanced agricultural methods and rural economics in England and France. He returned to Sicily armed with the conviction that his island home was capable of achieving agricultural excellence, asserting that if Sicily were “cultivated with the same attention and care with which England, for example, is cultivated, it would certainly produce at least four times more than it does at present.”46 In a published journal reporting on the state of agriculture in Sicily in 1808, Balsamo exhorted Sicily's landowners and farmers to dedicate themselves to “every sort of useful cultivation” based upon a “real love of the soil.”47 He describes a former feudal property that had been divided by order of the Bourbon king among many small tenant farmers. Prior to this division, the land “was wild and desert, and nearly a third of it barren and uncultivated, and from that time it has so changed in appearance and become so rich in farm houses, trees and shrubs of various sorts, that it may now be called one continued village, and one of the most delightful retreats. . . [, and] of the plantations that of the vine is beyond comparison the chief.”48 From this experience, Balsamo concluded that “the culture of the vine is superior in effective value to that of corn,” provided that the soil is adapted to it, the land is not too expensive, and the wine finds a ready market at a reasonable price.49
A Sicilian baron named Filippo Nicosia was one of Sicily's truly noble farmers. In 1735 this baron of Sangiaime published a manual on arboriculture that distilled decades of his personal observations and field experience. The book, called II Podere Fruttifero e Dilettevole ("The Fruitful and Delightful Farm"), paid homage to the glories of the fruit orchard and the cultivation of grapevines (probably not a book in the Leopard's library). As a young man, Baron Nicosia had inherited his country estate in the center of Sicily (near Enna), and instead of taking up residence in Catania, where his noble family had its origins, he went to live on and improve his farmland. He was among the first Sicilians, following Venuto, Cupani, and Boccone, to treat the science of agriculture in a serious written work. He understood that agriculture was the foundation of Sicily's wealth, and he dedicated himself to its betterment. Baron Nicosia represented the ancient Greco-Roman ideal of the agricola pius, who appreciated the fruits of his own labors. In tending his trees and vines with his own hands, he could never have been mistaken by any latter-day Odysseus as part of that arrogant race of Cyclops who planted nothing and plied no plows. While the Age of Enlightenment largely bypassed Sicily, there were Sicilians of both noble and humble birth who advanced their island's culture and carried the torch for Sicily during these wine-dark centuries.
2
THE LOST OPPORTUNITY
1775 to 1950
In 1774 a Florentine named Domenico Sestini came to Sicily to study the island's indigenous vine varieties, wine regions, and wines. A little less than forty years later he delivered a series of lectures titled “Recollections of Sicilian Wines” (Memorie sui vini siciliani) to the prestigious