The drive from Palermo to Regaleali looked short on Google Maps, but it took us longer than I had expected. First we waited in traffic along the coastal road heading east, watching the stones of the old city give way to the twentieth-century apartment buildings, painted in ochres and yellows. We then turned off into the arid hills of the Sicilian interior. When we gained speed, I untied my hair and let it blow across my face in the breeze.
I remember the first time I left urban Sicily for the rural centre of the island, in September 2015. Approaching Mount Etna, I saw chalky smoke emerging from over a hill, and felt a distinct sense of unease. I was in volcano territory, after all, and increasingly, the islands of the Mediterranean are flashpoints for uncontrolled fires. When I approached the source of the smoke, however — already a counter-intuitive direction in which to move — I came to realise that there was something intentional behind these fires. There was a farmer tending to them, apparently unfazed by the fumes and the flames.
Now, whenever I see veils of white smoke rising from the fields in Sicily, as I did on our drive to Regaleali, I have to remind myself that somebody who knows what they are doing probably has it under control. The instinct to take cover from fire is difficult to override, however, and of course, the flames are not always under control. So in spite of myself, I still find it hard to take my eyes away from the hypnotic patterns the clouds make in the still air.
The road became a dirt track, then a road again, for a while. We gained ground and ascended to Regaleali, a fertile oasis of vineyards and olive groves that stood out against the golden, rocky landscape we had just crossed. We parked and opened the door into the courtyard, and were welcomed in by Fabrizia and her dogs. In the kitchen, we peeled tomatoes for lunch, and while the pasta was cooking I cut myself a slice of schiacciata all'uva: a white focaccia bejewelled with a scattering of little grapes, sweet and sharp, which give the bread a delicious juiciness. This snack is synonymous with the grape harvest, and arriving in the last weekend of September, we were just in time. Below the apparent calm, the estate was alive with wine-making activity. In spite of the still afternoon heat, I went for a brief walk to take in my new surroundings.
When I visit somewhere new in Sicily, I often ask myself what features I might be able to see elsewhere in Italy, or indeed, elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and what things instead feel uniquely Sicilian. The Case Vecchie, the buildings that make up the Anna Tasca Lanza cooking school, are to my mind quintessential symbols of Sicilian food culture. I recognised the long kitchen table from photos by cooks who have shared their impressions of the school in recipe books or on social media.
Sometimes Sicilians like to emphasise how different their island is from the European mainland. They might point out its affinities with the southern coast of the Mediterranean, arguing that Palermo looks and feels more like Algiers than Milan; that the Sicilian dialect is full of Arabic-origin words; that in the west of the island, families are just as likely to sit down to a meal of couscous as they are to go out for a pizza. I had always assumed that this narrative was above all a feature of coastal Sicily; the result of physical closeness to the sea itself.
Regaleali is about as far away from the coast as you can be on the island. Soon after arriving, however, I still felt something — call it an echo, perhaps, or a reverberation — that connected even this most specifically Sicilian of places to the rest of the Mediterranean. The spacious courtyard has the calm shade of a Marrakech riad. A room in the nearby Case Grandi, the site of the Tasca d’Almerita winery, contains an enormous map of the farm in the nineteenth century, which shows that sommacco, or sumac, was grown here for leather tanning. The doors, shutters and window frames of the buildings on the estate are painted a distinctive hue that immediately feels Tunisian.
I later learned that this nod to Tunisia is deliberate: Fabrizia’s grandfather was inspired by a trip there in the early twentieth century, and brought back the idea of painting the family’s properties in that same colour. Away from the coastal light of Sousse or La Goulette, the Tasca blue seems a shade darker, a step closer to ‘royal blue,’ than its Tunisian equivalent, and perhaps it is. But it still has the intended transportive effect: it reminds the visitor that, contrary to popular depiction, there is nothing frozen in time or space in Sicily, which has always been a place of surprising connections.