«Orange trees, trees that I adore, your perfume is sweet to me! Is there anything in Flora's kingdom that could be more pleasing? Those firm-skinned fruits are an ancient treasure; and the garden of the Hesperides never saw other golden apples…».
This is how the seventeenth-century French writer Jean de La Fontaine tells us of his passion for the most famous citrus fruit, the orange . That fruit whose scent, combined with that of lemons, constantly reminded the German poet Heinrich Heine of Italy and which for Federico García Lorca has the brilliant color that love must have. In short, citrus fruits have inspired poets and painters as well . They illuminated the frescoes and mosaics of Rome and Pompeii, the womb of Renaissance Madonnas, the still lifes. They are the lemons and oranges of the cubist paintings of Braque and Picasso, of the impressionist ones of Cezanne and Manet. They are the "yellows of the lemons" of Montale's poetry, "stars of the trees and shining spheres" of the Arab-Sicilian poets up to Stanley Kubrick's "clockwork orange". As if that weren't enough, these fruits have made a fundamental contribution to human history.
To tell us about it is Giuseppe Barbera , professor of tree crops at the University of Palermo, in the essay " Citrus fruits " (il Saggiatore, 2023, euro 25, pp. 320, also e-book), a real history of the world with lemons as protagonists , oranges, citrons and grapefruit.
Coming from the farthest reaches of the Far East, citrus fruits have, in fact, been talked about since the dawn of time. It was in all likelihood a fruit of this family and not an apple that tempted Eve and Adam from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. And the golden apple that Paris gave to the goddess Aphrodite was a citrus fruit, unleashing the wrath of Hera and Athena and triggering the mythological dynamics that led to the Trojan War. And, still on the subject of Greek myths, the first name of citrus fruits was "hesperides", like the nymphs who, together with the dragon Ladon, guarded the golden apples of the garden of Zeus, the most precious and rare fruits in the world
Coming out of the myth, Giuseppe Barbera then tells us that precisely because of their rarity oranges were intended only for the emperor in China in the third century BC. In the Chinese Empire there was even a citrus ministry which had the task of ensuring the fruits to the "celestial sovereign".
Fruits so loved that for centuries merchants and explorers attempted the feat of importing plants - so sensitive to changes in climate, wind and humidity - to the West. Only in the Middle Ages and thanks to the Arabs did citrus fruits find their chosen space on the shores of our sea and made Sicily in particular a garden of delights that only the unfortunate building and agricultural policies of the last century have ruined, but not all by luck.
Without forgetting the health benefits of oranges and similar. Citrus fruits, in fact, have even been the remedy for an evil that has plagued the world for centuries, scurvy : James Lind in the 18th century managed to find the cure thanks to the simple lemon juice.
Giuseppe Barbera then reconstructs an unpublished history of the world , in which human events revolve around a citron or a lemon.
Telling this long adventure does not mean, however, only underlining the importance of citrus fruits in the culture and gardens of the most diverse peoples. It means stating once again that in the study and care of the landscape, its fruits and its beauty, we find the most precious teaching we can receive for imagining our future.