Sicily has made impressive strides over the last few years. For example, consumers had often overlooked local products such as wine and olive oil up until around 20 years ago. Genuine products, no doubt, but with "do it yourself" origins that couldn't compete with the magnitude of the national and international markets.
Though when Sicilians decided to highlight the quality of the olives and wine grapes harvested under the island's nearly African sun, they became number one. Like Fratelli Aprile (the Aprile brothers), olive oil producers whose products have won notable prizes and accolades. They harvest olive trees in the hills of Scicli, which today is a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in the province of Ragusa, in the southeast part of the island.
La Pescheria Fish Market, Catania, photo: Getty Images
In short, Sicilians believe theirs is the land is the world's most beautiful and finest, and they're ready to bet everything on it – especially when it comes to food and wine. Chef Bianca Celano did just that. In 2013, she resigned from a boring job and opened a casual restaurant in Catania with an open kitchen, and the incomparable desserts of Corrado Assenza of Caffe Noto, who appeared on Netflix's The Chef's Table.
A winning formula – and then she changed gears, closing the restaurant to become the consulting chef of the Hotel Habitat, a boutique accommodation in Catania. Here, every ingredient that enters the kitchen is the result of research and collaboration with small and new local vendors. She taps into her background to implement haute cuisine techniques to reinvent historic dishes, such as frittedda, an ancient soup composed of artichokes, fava beans, and peas.
While waiting for the hotel to reopen, she organizes courses that involve shopping in the fish market, which she rounds out with fascinating anecdotes. It seems that pasta alla Norma is not dedicated to Bellini's opera, but instead to an irresistible, voluptuous woman.
Filicudi, one of the Aeolian Islands
Giusi Murabito, a molecular biologist, has another inspiring story. She sold her workshop and moved to Filicudi, the most archaic of the Aeolian Islands, a volcanic archipelago north of Sicily in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The reason? Love, of course. For its fellow fisherman and for nature. “I live on what the land and the sea offer me. Filicudi is generous, every season. It has its herbs and its fish.”
But Murabito's main activity is Walking Eiolie, for which she organizes food-focused excursions in eastern Sicily. She accompanies customers on visits to caper producers, fishing trips, and her lemon grove in Pozzillo, which has just earned PGI status. There, participants learn how to make granita with the snow from Mt. Etna. Then travelers taste typical dishes such as fennel pesto, and grappa from the rue plant. “Things you can't buy anywhere else. You have to come here if you want them.”
The town of Gangi overlooked by Mt. Etna's snow-capped peak, photo: Getty Images
Anna Modica, on the other hand, a law teacher, is also an "ambassador" of a sentimental Sicily, whose kingdom is her dining room at Palazzo Notarbartolo in Palermo, where she organizes lunches and cooking classes. "To understand a place you have to enter and eat in the homes," she explains, knowing that tourism is the future of the region. “We have raw materials, art, culture, beauty, and gastronomy. If we learn to use them well, Sicily will become an incomparable gem."
A plausible theory, "Once we [Sicilians] emigrated in search of wealth and success," she says. “Today the challenge is to find them here. Whoever believes in it makes the difference."
During the lockdown, her American students contacted her to absorb, if only alone
online, the concentrate of wonders that is the region. "You'll see, they'll come in person as soon as they can."
Cover photo: A fish vendor in Catania, credit: Getty Images
