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 much fruit, a dozen or so, on the two grafted trees, but it was big, velvety, luscious-looking. . . .
“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
