Lipari and the Colonel’s Lemon

Marina Corta, the old fishing harbor at Lipari town, the largest settlement in the Aeolian Islands. The lemons in a Lipari backyard looked like no lemon in any Sicilian market—long, knobbled, and tipped with giant nipples. One of them traced back to a fruit a nineteenth-century colonel spent five years trying to breed. Part III of The Citrus Kingdom crosses by ferry to Lipari, the largest of the Aeolian Islands, past Croatian friends who have ruled out birds on the grounds that they smell, and a hotelier of magnificent fussiness. It follows the Interdonato lemon back to Giovanni Interdonato—a Garibaldi revolutionary who, after a life of conspiracy and exile, went home, set down his rifle, and picked up a grafting knife—and to the naval terror of scurvy that made Sicily a lemon kingdom in the first place. Read the full article →