Taormina and the Volcano Oranges

Mount Etna beyond Taormina, seen from the ancient Greek theatre where the chase for this story begins. In the 1990s, a man on vacation in Taormina took home a handful of lizards to his backyard in San Pedro, California. They survived. They spread. Today an evolutionary ecologist is comparing the Los Angeles population to the ones still living in the gardens below Taormina’s ancient theatre—and what the lizards reveal about adaptation turns out to explain something about the orange, too. Part IV of The Citrus Kingdom climbs from that theatre—past a stranger’s patio, a Sicilian orange-fennel salad, and a dented rental car—up the slopes of Mount Etna, tracing how Portuguese ships carried the sweet orange west and gave it a name in half the languages of the Mediterranean, and how Etna’s cold nights and volcanic soil eventually turned that wandering fruit into something unmistakably Sicilian: the blood orange. Read the full article →