Read the beginning of the Introduction from Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey by Robert V. Camuto:
"I went to sicily in the winter of 2008 to explore and write about an emerging wine scene. What I discovered in more than a year of travels to the island was more than a fascinating, teeming wine frontier; I found something close to my own heartbeat.
On a trip to Sicily years earlier, I’d sensed that I had landed on terra santa. It is a feeling that has only grown as I’ve come to know this island: from the anarchic street markets of old Palermo, to the morning stillness of the vineyards and lava flows of Mount Etna, to the vast grain-covered hinterlands that turn from vibrant Scottish green in spring to a nearly colorless brown under a scorching summer sun. Despite the legacies of corruption, emigration, violence, and efforts to obliterate its patrimony or scar its nature, something sacred persists here: a natural, familial way of life tied to the farmlands, forests, and seas of what Sicilians call their “continent.”
This book was inspired by a personal milestone. The approach of my fiftieth birthday produced one of those moments when you ask, “If this year were my last, how would I spend it?” And so I headed south from my home in Mediterranean France to a land that was more feral, lawless, random, contradictory, and therefore more profoundly Mediterranean. I suppose the fact that my grandfather was born in Bronte (and died in New York when my father was an infant) has something to do with the visceral attraction, although I know people with no Sicilian blood who have similar emotions.
Goethe wrote in the eighteenth century, “To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything.”
That statement now seems truer than ever. Modernity seems to have enriched swaths of mainland Italy materially, but robbed something of its soul. Sicily, however, seems to have so far resisted the forces that transform places into replicas of everywhere else. The traditions that form its identity are intact: a fervent pagan-like adherence to religious symbols, a profound commitment to the extended family above all, the obligation to break or ignore rules imposed by the state, and the correct belief that Sicily’s natural bounty and cuisines make the rest of the world seem pale and wanting."
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