The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and its Citrus Fruit

by Helena Attlee

http://amazon.com/dp/1581572905

A heady mixture of travel writing, history, horticulture and art, this book plots a unique journey through Italy’s cultural, culinary and political past. Building on a life of travel and work in Italy, the author undertakes a journey encompassing the sticky streets of Ivrea during the Battle of Oranges, the comfortable gardens of Tuscany’s villas and a magic triangle of land in Sicily, where the best blood oranges in the world grow in the shadow of a volcano. She maps the citron’s long migration from the foothills of the Himalayas to the shores of southern Italy, traces the bitter juice of Seville oranges through ancient Roman and Renaissance cookery books, exposes early manifestations of the Mafia during the 19th-century citrus boom, and laments the loss of landscapes shaped by citrus cultivation.