Made in Sicily. Giorgio Locatelli

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      ‘Sicily is Sicily – 1860, earlier, forever’

      – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

      As a northern Italian, I grew up with preconceived ideas about Sicily and southern Italy. The joke was always that no one in the south did any work; it was the northern Italians who ran the country and made things happen. I grew up in Corgeno, on the shores of Lake Comabbio in Lombardy, where our family had a hotel and restaurant, La Cinzianella, and like most people in the village we went on holiday to Emilia Romagna, or maybe Liguria. It was only in the seventies that people really started to go south.

      So you cannot overestimate how exciting it was that when I was about twelve years old, four friends, whom I looked up to because they were older – maybe eighteen – went off to Calabria, and from there to Sicily because one of them fell in love with a Sicilian girl (he actually ended up marrying her). Corgeno is a small place, where everybody knows everything about everyone else, and in those days when someone came back from their holidays they would be in the village square telling stories about the time they had had.

      When these guys returned, they were full of talk about the fantastic life, the sun, the beautiful sea … they made Sicily sound like a Robinson Crusoe island, full of beaches with no one on them. In my mind it became an idyllic, almost mythological place that sounded like the Caribbean, populated by people who were Italians, but yet not like Italians; almost a different race. They spoke a language that was completely different to ours, and the whole island seemed to work in such a different way to northern Italy.

      It was twenty years before I finally got to go to Sicily for the first time. Life got in the way: the army, cooking in Paris and London, having a family – my wife Plaxy, son Jack, and daughter Margherita (Dita) – setting up our first restaurant, Zafferano, and then later Locanda Locatelli. Then, in the late nineties, the winemaker Alessio Planeta (pictured on the previous page) invited me to look at an olive oil project he was beginning at La Capparrina in Menfi, in the south-west of the island. What was interesting was that after cooking for over two decades in London, I found myself looking at the island as much through the eyes of a Londoner as those of a northern Italian. Even after countless holidays in Menfi, where I have got to know many of the local people, there are times when I still feel as foreign as Plaxy, because when the local farmers or fishermen talk in dialect I can’t really understand what is being said!

      On that first visit it was early spring, just before Easter, when I arrived in Palermo, and as we drove down to Menfi I was completely blown away by the fact that the island looked so green and bright and gorgeous. I had expected something like northern Africa, and it is true that some areas are like that, but even in the middle of the motorway there were masses of big red bougainvillea, and the road cut through beautiful wheat fields and orange and lemon groves, olive groves, vineyards and fields of artichokes. The whole island was like a garden, and in a way the structure, with its funny old walls, reminded me a little of the English countryside.

      I could see straight away that the northern Italian idea that the guys who lived in Sicily sat around doing nothing was completely wrong. Everywhere you saw the hand of man, the agriculturist, over nature, in fields and groves that had been worked and tended for thousands of years.