the quality of Sicilian wine and food. The era of Sicily as a wine-producing and wine-exporting region had arrived.
ROMAN BREAD AND WINE
By the beginning of the second century B.C., Sicily was firmly under the control of Rome and would be relegated to serving as the granary of the Roman Empire for almost six hundred years. The fertility of Sicily, which had made it the land of plenty for Greek settlers and their vines beginning in the eighth century B.C., also made it the bread basket for the Romans and the succeeding foreign powers that came to control and exploit the island. In the mythology of ancient Rome, Ceres, the goddess of agriculture and grain, made her home in Sicily and as the creator of the art of husbandry was considered the first giver of laws to mankind. Unlike the cultivation of wine grapes and olives, which required intensive skill-based farming and harvesting, the growing of grain was more efficiently accomplished on large expanses of land. These vast farms, known as latifundia, were managed by wealthy absentee landowners (both Roman and Sicilian) and worked by local or imported unskilled slave or peasant labor. Following the end of the Roman era many of these latifundia were in the hands of the Catholic Church and increasingly a growing class of landed “nobility.” During Roman rule the absentee landowner, as would be the case with ecclesiastical and noble landowners in subsequent epochs, would lease out significant holdings of land to an intermediate “tenant-in-chief,” who in turn would wield enormous control over the peasant tenant farmers who worked the land. This pattern would ultimately become the foundation for the feudal economy that suffocated Sicily into the nineteenth century.
The extent of Sicily's wine production and wine exports during the period of Roman rule is not precisely known. However, there is historical evidence that several Sicilian wines were known and prized on the Roman table. Amphorae have been discovered in the ruins of Pompeii (itself a celebrated wine zone in ancient Rome) bearing the inscription “Mesopotamium,” the Latin name of a wine from the southeast coast of Sicily. In his treatise from the late first century B.C. and early first century A.D., the Greek geographer Strabo states that the district around Messina “abounds in wine” called Mamertinian, which “vies with the best produced in Italy.”13 Strabo also gives us a description of the volcanic terroir of Mount Etna that could come right out of a modern wine book: “However, after the burning ashes have occasioned a temporary damage, they fertilize the country for future seasons, and render the soil good for the vine and very strong for other produce, the neighboring districts not being equally adapted to the produce of wine.”14
The Latin agricultural treatises of the Roman writers Pliny (Natural History) and Columella (On Agriculture) of the first century A.D. and the Greek literary work known as The Learned Banqueters by Athenaeus of Egypt in the second century A.D. include several specific references to the esteemed wines and foods of Sicily. Columella also praises the written contributions of learned Sicilians to the science of husbandry.15 Pliny cites the Hybla region of Sicily as producing some of the finest-quality honey, being that it is “obtained from the calyx of the best flowers” and ferments in its first few days “like new wine.”16
The notable Sicilian wines that Pliny, Columella, and Athenaeus catalogue include the esteemed Mamertine wine from near Messina that was named Potitian after its original grower and was an early example of “ ‘château-labelling’ of a good growth.”17 In reference to the Eugenia vine variety, which was transported from Sicily to the Alban Hills southeast of Rome (the equivalent of a Roman grand cru), Pliny wrote that “with its name denoting high quality” it was “imported from the hills of Taormina to be grown only in the territory of Alba, as if transplanted elsewhere it at once degenerates: for in fact some vines have so strong an affection for certain localities that they leave all their reputation behind there and cannot be transplanted elsewhere in their full vigour.”18 Pliny's statement provides ample proof that the idea of terroir is indeed ancient.
Two other Roman vine varieties believed to be of Sicilian origin were Murgentina and Aminnia. Murgentina was exported from Sicily to the region of Mount Vesuvius and was the principal variety in a wine aptly called Pompeiana or Vesuvinum. Aminnia, on the other hand, was part of a group of vine varieties identified with both the Italian mainland and Sicily and was the only varietal wine classified among the most permissibly expensive by edict of the Roman emperor Diocletian at the end of the third century A.D.19 The migration of vine varieties and viticultural knowledge from Sicily to Rome evolved out of the original migration of Greek viticulture to Sicily beginning with the earliest Greek settlements in the eighth century B.C.
The founding legend of Rome is based on the story of a mythical hero, Aeneas, who spends formative time in Sicily on his epic voyage from Troy to central Italy. The Roman poet Virgil, writing in the first century B.C., recounts the adventures of Aeneas in the epic Latin poem the Aeneid. Like the Odyssey, the Aeneid takes place after the legendary conquest of Troy by the Mycenaean Greeks, believed to be sometime between 1300 and 1100 B.C. Aeneas, the last surviving prince of Troy following its defeat by the Greeks, is compelled to reach the shores of Italy in order to fulfill a divine prophecy that he will found Rome. On their voyage to the Italian mainland, he and his countrymen travel by ship around the Sicilian coast and land in northwestern Sicily. King Acestes, who is also of Trojan lineage and who founded the Elymian cities of Eryx, Segesta, and Entella, gives Aeneas a gift of Sicilian wine before Aeneas sets sail for Italy. After Aeneas and his men have shipwrecked on the shores of Carthage and the men have all but given up any hope of ever reaching their longed-for new home in Italy, Aeneas
. . . shares
the wine that had been stowed by kind Acestes
in casks along the shores of Sicily:
the wine that, like a hero, the Sicilian
had given to the Trojans when they left.20
Aeneas “soothes [the] melancholy hearts” of his men with the wine gifted by the heroic Sicilian king.21 Unlike in the Odyssey, where it is the Greek hero who offers ambrosial wine to the brutish Sicilian Cyclops, in the Aeneid it is the gracious Sicilian king who gives the precious gift of wine and solace to the Trojan hero. Virgil, who was writing seven centuries after Homer, would have been well aware of the influence of Greek culture and viticulture in Sicily. The founding legend of Rome, however, envisioned a Sicily whose culture was built by its mythological ancestors, the last surviving Trojan kings and princes, not by the Greeks. In reality, Sicily—apart from tourist attractions like Mount Etna and the ancient ruins of Syracuse and Agrigento—did not have a high profile in the official annals of the Roman era. Its utility was based principally on the quality and reliability of its production of summer wheat, a commodity. In purely mythological terms, however, Sicily and Sicilian wine played a seminal role in the epic narrative of Roman history as told in Virgil's Aeneid.
MUSLIMS AND NORMANS BEAR FRUIT
After the fall of the Roman Empire, first Vandals and then Goths, two different Germanic tribes, overran Sicily. Beginning in the sixth century A.D. the emperors from Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), the capital city of the Eastern Christian Empire, took control of Sicily. Then, in the first quarter of the ninth century, a sizable army of Arabs, Berbers from North Africa, and Spanish Muslims began to invade Sicily. As for previous conquerors, Sicily's strategic position in the Mediterranean and its lush fertility were powerful draws for the Muslim invaders. It would take approximately seventy-five years for the Muslims (referred to by medieval chroniclers as Saracens) to complete their conquest of the island and to supplant Sicily's Greek culture with a Muslim one (except in the northeastern part of the island known as Val Demone, which remained predominantly Greek).
The period of Muslim control lasted almost two hundred years (878–1061) and ushered in a golden age for Sicilian agriculture. Based on the system of Islamic fiscal administration in the Muslim strongholds of Libya and Tunisia, the Muslims in Sicily imposed a fixed-rate annual land tax (called the qānūn or kharāj) that landowners had to pay regardless of their crop yield.22 This incentivized the productive use of cultivatable land. (By contrast, with certain limited exceptions, the baronial class in Sicily following the decline of the Normans would jealously resist any taxation based on their agricultural landholdings until the