How I ate my way around Mount Etna

“They’re the best cannoli in all of Sicily,” says Alfio Puglisi, one of our hosts, as we huddle outside a pasticceria in the town of Taormina hoovering up a plate of pastries. They’re heavenly: light and crisp, filled with sweetened ricotta and candied orange peel — the acme of one of the island’s most famous treats, a recipe that has been perfected over more than a thousand years, since Sicily was under Arab rule.

Sicily is a fascinating place to eat, home to one of the oldest and most diverse cuisines in Europe. Situated between Europe and north Africa, the island is home to regional ingredients and recipes that reflect the many cultures that have occupied it over centuries, including the Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Normans. With fertile volcanic soil, and a lush, varied landscape, Sicily is sometimes referred to as “God’s kitchen” — and the area around Mount Etna, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, is particularly blessed.

We’re exploring this hallowed land as part of “Etna Wild Food”, a three-day immersion in the region’s gustatory delights put together by Palazzo Previtera, a historic bed and breakfast in the town of Linguaglossa, and the tour operator Emotional Sicily. As a longtime lover of Etna wines, I am particularly pleased that we’ll be sampling plenty, in addition to food tastings and meals with Sicilian chefs and culinary experts. As part of the tour, London-based chef Ben Tish, author of the cookbook Sicilia: A Love Letter to the Food of Sicily, is here to divulge some cookery secrets too. 

My husband and I arrive at Catania airport on a Friday afternoon, where we’re met by Alfio, the young, affable owner of Palazzo Previtera. Along with Ben and his wife Nykeeta, we hop into Alfio’s Jeep and drive about an hour to Linguaglossa, where some 5,000 people live at the foot of Etna’s northern slopes.

Since its construction in 1649, the palazzo has been home to Alfio’s ancestors, an aristocratic family that have been silk merchants, doctors and clergymen, and whose portraits keep watch from brightly painted walls. As we tour the property, Alfio explains its painstaking, decade-long restoration, from carefully repairing frescoes to sensitively installing the mod cons required by paying guests, the first of whom arrived last year.

Palazzo Previtera is essentially a museum with rooms — a technicolour labyrinth of ornate fabrics, artefacts and curios, with decorative ceilings, geometric tiles and antiques that illustrate the evolution of interior design in Sicily. There are four guest bedrooms (and two cottages in the gardens), plus an exhibition space on the lower floor.

Its grounds are also full of treasures, with vast tangles of wisteria, rare English roses and a sweet family of tabby cats. Amid grape vines and olive trees, stalks of wild fennel poke from the earth, which Ben vows to cook over the weekend. After an aperitivo in the garden, it’s finally time to eat. 

The weekend was high-intensity interval training in caloric intake, but it was also a glimpse at Sicily’s future

At Trattoria LinguaGrossa, a small local restaurant with an enormous selection of Etna wine, we munch on pane fritto and artichokes wrapped in lardo, before a generous plate of pasta arrives. The handmade casarecce, swimming in a silky, slow-cooked ragù, with falling-apart pieces of Nero Siciliano pork, has notes of juniper berry — a local twist on a classic dish with an ingredient that can be traced back to the island’s Norman conquerors. Following sausages with wild, bitter herbs, we end with the house speciality, sciauni — fried ravioli stuffed with sweetened ricotta — and are grateful for the short walk home.

The next morning, en route to Guardiola, a prized parcel of vineyards (contrada) to the north of Etna, it’s clear why FT wine writer Jancis Robinson has called this “some of the strangest wine country in the world”. The roads traverse metres-high peaks of black, cratered rock — lava flows from large eruptions that happened as recently as 1990 — with awkwardly shaped, steep and terraced vineyards nestled in between.

“A landscape like this is 10 times more expensive to work than flat vineyards”, says Alberto Cusumano, one half of the sibling team behind Alta Mora winery, as he shows us how the vines are inaccessible to machinery and must be tended to by hand. “You only do it if you really want to.” 

With Etna’s 3,357m of elevation and proximity to the Ionian Sea, winemakers also have a range of harsh, unpredictable weather to contend with. That other minor detail — the constant threat of volcanic eruption — is shrugged off; Etna’s activity is appreciated by its resilient, native grape varieties (Nerello Mascalese for red wine, Carricante for white), that soak up the ash that settles in the soil. Alta Mora’s silky reds — delicate and precise with light tannins — are archetypal of the region; its whites, which Alberto says are more difficult to perfect, offer notes of citrus and pear, showing no signs of struggle to get right.

In the village of Randazzo, the vivacious Giovanna Musumeci, an award-winning pastry chef, is telling us about the origins of one of the island’s culinary obsessions. Granita dates back to the Middle Ages, when Sicilians would take snow collected from Etna (stored in underground caves called neviere), and flavour it with fruit, nuts and other ingredients mixed with sugar.

Today, popular flavours include mulberry and almond, but Giovanna also experiments with savoury tastes: pizza fritte with aubergine, ricotta and tomato granita — a thrilling play of hot and cold; focaccia with pancetta and mayonnaise ice cream that is unexpectedly delicious. Brioche, butter ice cream and anchovies . . . is perhaps a step too far. “It’s challenging,” chef Ben says diplomatically. Giovanna laughs and says it’s her most divisive dish. We refresh our palates with mandarin granita, and head to the Alcantara valley.

Through peach groves and towering wildflowers, along potholed roads in desperate need of repair, we find Tenuta Rustica, a beautiful olive oil-producing estate that has belonged to the Fisauli family since the 16th century. Lorenzo Fisauli and his wife Margherita, who met at university in Milan, recently returned to Sicily to take it on. Wandering the land, behind tangles of foliage, Lorenzo shows us a nearly 3,000-year-old mill, carved into a rock, that was used for making oil and wine — fascinating evidence of Italian viticulture’s start in Sicily, from around 800BC when it was introduced by the Greeks.

We’re treated to Margherita’s homemade bread and pecorino from the neighbouring sheep farmer, drizzled with the estate’s extra virgin olive oil. Alongside, the duo’s latest project: a low intervention rosé. “[The estate] started with oil, but we really love wine,” says Margherita, who studied to be a sommelier. “So we said, ‘Why don’t we try?’”

It’s a drink to suit the restaurant of chef Alberto Angiolucci, our dinner venue that would look more at home in Clapton than Catania: minimalist and modern with an old school hip hop playlist. The 28-year-old, after working in some of Italy’s top restaurants, opened his own last August — a macelleria di mare (literally “seafood butcher”) — applying the nose-to-tail approach to fish. “Our mantra is use everything,” Alberto says. “The liver, the stomach . . . there’s no waste.” His sustainable ethos and use of old-world methods, such as salting, ageing and preserving, to create contemporary cuisine (an excellent mullet ceviche with fried artichoke or the more playful “sea salami”), have earned him a young foodie fan base.

Back in Linguaglossa, it’s Sunday morning at Dai Pennisi, the local butcher — a carnivore dreamscape of sausages, prime beef and cured meat, though we’re seeking lamb. “The flavours that we have at the palazzo will all go nicely with it; the broad beans, wild fennel and asparagus,” Ben says. We stop at an alimentari for citron the size of rugby balls and a bounty of spring vegetables: romana courgettes, scarola (a leafy green) and courgette flowers. “I like really simple, seasonal food, with big gutsy flavours — and Italians, Sicilians especially, really live and die by that,” Ben says. 

Now chef-director of the Cubitt House group of London pubs and restaurants, Ben started his career in Italian cuisine and eventually broadened his focus to the Mediterranean region. “When I wrote my first book, Moorish — and Moors had a huge influence in Sicily — I fell in love with the place and the food,” he says. 

Following a tasting at the Franchetti family’s Passopisciaro winery (where bottles command prices of up to €140), everyone is helping peel, chop and slice vegetables in the palazzo’s kitchen. (In the presence of a chef — even one as friendly and relaxed as Ben — I feel rather inept, and mine look like they’ve been handled by a chimp.) The room smells divine, with garlic frying, lamb chops searing, and courgette flowers fizzing in oil, before they’re topped with lemon, honey and fried mint from the garden.

Surrounded by antiquities in the palazzo’s dining room, we tuck into our lunch of lamb and the abundance of spring vegetables, braised in garlic and olive oil and sprinkled with jus and fresh herbs, and a green salad with grated pecorino and orange segments. Everything is drizzled with Sicilian vino cotto (a reduction of non-fermented grape must) and Tenuta Rustica’s wonderful olive oil.

Later, after our stop in Taormina for Sicily’s best cannoli at Bar Pasticceria Etna, it’s time for Sunday’s most important tradition: service at the local pizzeria, where the town’s priest, still wearing his collar, enjoys a pizza and beer at the table next to us. Our Sicilian hosts are lamenting the island’s downsides: it’s slow to change, there’s a lack of government support for business, and the brain drain that has plagued Italy’s south. But there is reason to be optimistic. 

Sure, the weekend was high-intensity interval training in caloric intake, but it was also a glimpse at Sicily’s future through the young people who have left and come back. Manila Di Maira, the founder of the tour operator Emotional Sicily, had done just that. “I was pessimistic about Sicily,” she says. “But when I started meeting these like-minded people around the island, it changed my perspective.”

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