Bettie's Books

bookshelves: spring-2014, nonfiction, published-2013, radio-4, travel, italy, history, newtome-author, food-glorious-food

BOTW



Description: A celebration of the Italian love affair with citrus fruit.

Mixing travel writing, history and horticulture, author Helena Attlee sets out to meet Italy's dedicated gardeners and farmers - whose passion for their life's work is as intoxicating as the sweet scent of zagara (citrus blossom).

Episode 1: The elaborate naming systems of Renaissance botanists for the myriad varieties of citrus; and a journey to the Gulf of Naples to experience the mild yet intensely flavoured juice of the Amalfi lemon.

Episode 2: Scicily, the mafia, and blood oranges. Citrus first arrived on the island in the ninth century, brought by the Arabs whose sophisticated irrigation systems made it viable there as a crop. The island is still renowned for the quality of its fruit, particularly the arancia rossa, the blood orange, hailed as the 'prince among oranges', which is grown in the shadow of Mount Etna.

Episode 3: The extraordinary story of the Lake Garda lemon. In spite of the coolness of its northern latitude, Lake Garda was once the centre of a thriving citrus industry, producing extremely bitter lemons that were exported all over northern Europe. It was a feat only made possible by dogged determination and a lot of hard work.

Episode 4: Uncovering the origins of the fantastically violent and messy Battle of the Oranges - an annual event that marks the end of carnival in the Northern Italian town of Ivrea.





Episode 5: A journey to Calabria, in the deep south of Italy, to discover one of the rarest and most precious of citrus fruits: the bergamot.

Bergamot is the product of a natural cross-pollination between a lemon tree and a sour orange that occurred in Calabria in the mid-seventeenth century. It's very particular about its environment and fruits successfully only on a thin strip of land that runs for seventy-five kilometres from the Tyrrhenian coast to the shores of the Ionian Sea.





Reader ... Francesca Dymond
Writer ... Helena Attlee
Abridger ... Laurence Wareing
Producer ... Kirsteen Cameron.

This fed my odd-obsession streak. Isn't it amazing the reads that look so average in subject matter can turn out to be so, well, zingy and zesty, and infuse a breath of fresh air into life. Citric acid was just what I needed to cut through the greasy sludge of those last days of winter. Come to think of it, 'Driving over Lemons' did the same job for me over a decade ago, however that lent more to the amusement side of the spectrum, whilst this is solid fact, beautifully read by Francesca Dymond.