Sicily

Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean and does not have one cuisine. Etna, over 3,000 metres and active, makes its own climate. The Madonie and Nebrodi are beech-forested grazing mountains. The interior is the old wheat latifundium. Between Trapani and Marsala lie the salt pans, and offshore are further islands with their own farming: the low bush-trained vines of Pantelleria are a UNESCO-listed practice. You can drive from citrus groves to snow in an hour.

The layers are legible in the ingredients. From the Greeks: olives, vines, honey, ricotta. From the Arabs, between the ninth and eleventh centuries: citrus, sugarcane, rice, aubergine, saffron, couscous, almond pastry. And dried pasta. In 1154 the geographer al-Idrisi described a factory at Trabia, near Palermo, producing dried pasta strands exported across the Mediterranean: the first written record anywhere. From the Spanish came cold-worked cocoa, still made that way at Modica, where the sugar stays in crystals and never dissolves.

The provinces behave like separate regions. Palermo is the street-food city: spleen sandwiches, chickpea fritters, thick sfincione pizza, arancine (feminine here, arancini in Catania). It is also the home of sweet-and-sour caponata. Catania cooks pasta alla Norma with fried aubergine and salted ricotta, drinks Etna wines grown on lava terraces up to 1,000 metres, and eats granita with a brioche for breakfast. Trapani faces Tunisia: fish couscous, an almond-and-tomato pesto, sea salt. Ragusa and Modica have their own aged cheese, their chocolate and Cerasuolo di Vittoria, Sicily's only DOCG. Syracuse has lemons and the tomatoes of Pachino.

The sweets are a separate discipline, and where the Arab inheritance weighs most. Cassata combines sheep's ricotta, sponge, green marzipan and candied fruit; a cannolo needs its shell fried to order and its ricotta drained for a day; frutta martorana is painted marzipan shaped as fruit, invented in convents. Then granita, which replaces coffee in summer, watermelon jelly, and marzipan pastries. Among the nuts, the green pistachio of Bronte grows on lava and is picked only in alternate years, and the almonds of Avola are the ones the confectionery trade wants.