Made in Sicily - Giorgio Locatelli

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      At the heart of Sicily’s history is its food, and at the heart of its food is its history, but what comes through it all is a character that is only Sicilian. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote, ‘Sicily is Sicily – 1860, earlier, forever’ (1860 was the year of the unification of Italy), and that is what I feel. Sicily is Sicily, and like nowhere else, even though it is an island of great contrasts: in the way it looks, from the humble to the baroque, and in its food, so full of different, bold and vibrant flavours that you expect to be discordant, but somehow they come together and bowl you over.

      In Palermo I love the street food: the guys outside the restaurants grilling fish for people to take home, the vendors selling sea urchin with lemons, panelle – fantastic little fritters of chickpea flour (Panelle di ceci) – and all kinds of tripe, such as quaruma (veal or beef entrails) or mascellato (pieces of jaw); stigghiola, intestines of sheep or goat, soaked in wine, then wound around sprigs of parsley and barbecued; or pane con la milza – sandwiches filled with beef spleen, which is boiled, and kept warm in a big pot like a wok. The pieces of spleen are put inside soft white focaccia-like buns, known as guasteddi, with a sprinkling of salt and a squeeze of lemon, and the flavour is delicious. Sometimes fresh ricotta and grated caciocavallo cheese are added, and the sandwich is called maritatu – it is said that this is what Garibaldi ate when he landed in Palermo in 1860.

      Palermo doesn’t feel like a European city. It leaves you breathless from the noise and the beauty of the Arabic sense of colour and abundance in the markets, the bakeries and crazy cake shops, the gelaterie, bars and cafés full of every shade and flavour of ice cream and granite.

      It is so different to the south-west coast, only an hour and a half’s drive away, where you see more of the ancient, classical influence. If you go out with the fishermen and look back to the Valley of the Temples, further around the coast, between Sciacca and Mazara del Vallo, you can see where once there was a Greek city on the flat plain above the swamps, where people were scared of malaria.

      In the villages the shops are sometimes so small, they are little more than holes in the wall; there is no heavy industry, and everyone is dedicated to fishing, or the production of grapes and olives. Old men sit around on their chairs in the village square, as if the street is just an extension of their houses, just sitting and talking and watching. The first time we went on holiday, Jack was saying: ‘Why are they sitting on the street? Don’t they have houses?’ Sometimes, if the men have an affiliation to a political party, they will put their chairs outside their office, or maybe outside the confraternity of olive pickers. And when they are talking, I am sure it’s about food, because everyone talks – or argues – about food: who makes the authentic version of a pasta, whose mother had the best recipe.

      Dramatically different again is the eastern side of the island, where Noto was rebuilt after Mount Etna erupted, and Modica was rebuilt after the earthquake of 1693. Everything is very elaborate, very baroque. Then, as you travel upwards through the plain of Catania, towards Mount Etna, you meet people who speak in a different dialect to the people who face the sea, and they seem to talk in proverbs. If anything, they appear to be even more resilient, even more Sicilian, because they live in the shadow of the mountain the ancient people called the monster with a hundred heads. It is not just one volcano, but a series of them, and every so often it shoots up its ‘bombs’ of molten lava, and when people find them, they write their names on them.

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      When you go up the mountain you see the fields of lava and the hills it formed when it erupted and fell and hardened like honeycomb, and it is incredible to think that the mountain both kills and nurtures … whole communities have been destroyed by it, but there is nothing that won’t grow in the soil enriched by the volcanic ash.

      In Palermo you can see the layers of history in the buildings – churches, synagogues, Arabian mosques – and like most of the world’s cities, you see the extremes of rich and poor, though slowly they are reclaiming the poorer areas. And in the late night eating you see the Spanish and Arab influence. The shops open late, people work until the early evening, go home, relax a bit, then come out for dinner, or eat at home, and then meet friends at a bar or café. I like to sit outside on a hot night at one of the places overlooking the sea, where you can eat pasta con le sarde, or involtini di pesce spada, and ice cream. Always ice cream.

      In so many places you see the old ladies preparing food in the way they have done for centuries, with the same ingredients, but there are also some young chefs who are taking the same ingredients and combinations, but interpreting and proposing them slightly differently; not only in Palermo, but in the cities on the other side of the island: Noto, Modica, Messina … In one Michelin-starred restaurant, La Gazza Ladra in Modica, the chef, Accursio Craparo, makes artistic creations such as watermelon salad with sea urchin sorbet; ‘linguine’ with a cream of anchovies, candied orange and wild fennel flowers; and a clever little mini ‘burger’ of beautiful tuna: some of the ventresca (the fat belly) is mixed with some of the back and formed into little ‘buns’ that are part steamed, then fried, and filled with a slice of raw tuna, and a ‘mayonnaise’ of anchovies, lemon, sea urchin and fish liver, with herbs scattered on top.

      Palermo is a loud city; from the swallows that wake you up in the morning to the sellers in the market, everyone seems to be shouting. No wonder tourists get scared – and these guys are only trying to sell snails! People say Palermo is dangerous, but I don’t see it as threatening; I find it warm and welcoming. And I like the hustle and bustle and noise. But of course there have been times when, unseen by the outsider’s eye, it has been a dangerous place, because the city is in the heart of Mafia territory.

      ‘Nobody sees; everybody knows’

      If you look hard enough in Palermo, you can still see some of the white stickers that appeared one night all over the city, with a message that translates as: ‘there is no dignity in a people that pays the pizzo’ – the protection money demanded by the Mafia. The stickers were an invitation to join the newly formed addio-pizzo movement, an alliance of restaurants, bars, shops and businesses that display the addio-pizzo sign in their windows, which tells you they are refusing to pay.

      You cannot talk about food without talking about the Mafia, because the roots of the Mafia are in the land, and when you control the territory, you can control the production of the food, its transportation, and its price. But food also brings people together, and slowly, slowly, a change is happening in Sicilian society and it is being determined by a young generation of restaurateurs and bar owners and food producers who are finding strength in numbers and the courage to stand up to the might of the Mafia.

      In the late 1980s, when I was already cooking in England, the Mafia seemed to be always in the newspapers and on the TV news: the wars between the rival families, the drug trafficking, the money laundering, the murders of anti-Mafia politicians, judges and the investigating magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the kidnappings, the trials. I was fascinated by it all, but I never seemed to see any explanation as to ‘why?’ For a northern Italian it was difficult to understand the power of the Mafia, the way it had infiltrated every organisation, so much so that during the trials, it was said that the only safe place to talk in the Palace of Justice was in the lift. So for an Anglo-Saxon person, I imagined, it would be almost impossible to understand.

      Then I read Cosa Nostra, A History of the Sicilian Mafia, by John Dickie, Professor of Italian Studies at University College London, a brilliant, compelling, but also very scholarly work, which had a very big impact on me. Dickie told the story in a way that had nothing to do with folkloristic Godfather images of ‘Men of Honour’, the kind of glorification that brings busloads of tourists every year to Bar Vitelli in Savoca, near Taormina, where they filmed the wedding festivities of Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie of the Mario Puzo novel.

      Since then I must have devoured a whole library of books on the Mafia, and every time a new one is written, I have to read it. So I have done a lot of searching over the years, to try and understand. You have to think about the history

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