Thanks to a small group of farmers and Giovanni d’Agati, the Ciaculli Late-Season Mandarin, a Slow Food Presidium, has become both a symbol and a tool in the fight against unchecked urban development, which threatens the remnants of Palermo’s Conca d’Oro.

STORY BY TOMMASO RAGONESE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARCO CRUPI

Giovanni d’Agati, President of the Il Tardivo di Ciaculli Consortium

A tax advisor once told me that behind every successful venture, there are generally two key figures, much like certain street performers. On one side, there are the magicians who captivate the crowd with their tricks, and on the other, there’s the helper holding out the hat to collect the audience’s donations. In the case of the Ciaculli Late-Season Mandarin, it’s the farmers who ensure the enchanting aroma and flavor of this historic fruit return each year, while Giovanni d’Agati makes sure the hat is never empty.

Giovanni d’Agati overseeing the unloading of mandarins at the Il Tardivo di Ciaculli Consortium.

“Hurry up, maestro! The other truck has to come in!”. Headset in ear, between calls, Giovanni waves his arms, directing the unloading of mandarins at the warehouse of the Il Tardivo di Ciaculli Consortium, of which he is President. He jumps on the forklift, personally transporting the pallets to the start of the packing line. I lose sight of him for a moment and find him again at the manual sorting line, working alongside two laborers to discard the imperfect fruit.

Ciaculli is a small village of Palermo nestled at the foot of the limestone cliffs of Monte Grifone. ‘Ciachi’ or ‘ciaca’ was the name given to pieces of rock that fell from the mountain, used not only to pave roads but also to build terraces for the traditional citrus groves. It was here, around the 1940s, that the late mandarin, also known as “marzuddu” or “marzolino,” was born through a spontaneous bud mutation of the Avana mandarin tree.

Its late ripening is what brought the Ciaculli Late-Season Mandarin into the limelight: it was the only one available on the market until well into March. The harvest provided work for hundreds of hands, and owning a piece of land was nearly a guarantee of income. Some even organized the collection of fallen mandarins, which, unsuitable for the fresh fruit market, were sold to processing industries for juices and essences.

Among these so-called “scattatari” was a very young Giovanni d’Agati. “I was about five years old, and my grandfather, who owned an orchard, promised me some pocket money if I collected the mandarins off the ground. I’ve always cherished this childhood memory. Who could have imagined that mandarins would become my life?”

As fate would have it, it was during a mandarin harvest in the nearby Croceverde Giardina that Giovanni fell in love with the woman who would become his wife. At that time, to speed up the harvest, the mandarins were picked along with the twig they hung from. Since the fruit had to be delivered to traders without leaves, it was often the women in each family who used scissors to remove the twigs and leaves from the mandarins.

“My mother was from Croceverde, so we often visited family there,” Giovanni recalls. “I first saw my future wife when I was thirteen, in a country warehouse, working at an impressive speed ‘spiricuddari i mannarina’—removing the twigs from the mandarins. You should have seen her; she could fill seven wooden crates an hour!” The warehouse was on the land owned by Giovanni’s future father-in-law, beyond stone walls topped with sharp bottle shards, which still line Via Conte Federico.

Gino

Gino

The caretaker of this land has always been Gino. “It must be about thirty ‘tùmmini’” he says in a weary voice, referring to an old unit of measurement equivalent to just over 1,500 square meters. “The past few days I spread some fertilizer, and it was quite windy. My head hurts a bit”. With large farmer’s hands, eyes framed by a motionless fan of wrinkles, and an expression caught between contemplation and indifference, Gino enjoys a cigarette as he leans on his Ape Piaggio, the iconic vehicle of any respectable Ciaculli farmer.

“When my father-in-law could no longer tend to this orchard due to health reasons”, Giovanni remembers “my wife and I faced a choice: we had to decide whether or not to abandon the grove. We couldn’t bear to let it go to waste. That was the moment when, for the first time, selling the Ciaculli mandarins from my father-in-law’s land became part of my work”.

“At that time, I worked in the restaurant business, and among our clients were some Neapolitan traders who used to buy Sicilian specialties, including the late mandarin and winter melon. I managed to sell the first crop to one of them”. Meanwhile, in 1996, thanks to a Life project co-financed by the European Union, the Municipality of Palermo, and the Italian Farmers Confederation, the Periurban Agricultural Park in Ciaculli was established.

With the creation of the Park, various environmental and landscape regeneration initiatives began, including the development of visitor routes through the terraced area and the restoration of abandoned mandarin groves. The Municipality cut irrigation water costs by 75%, and in 1999, the Il Tardivo di Ciaculli Consortium was founded.

Not long after, due to political shifts during the changeover between municipal administrations of opposing parties, the project stalled. The interest of the producers who had joined the Consortium to receive grants for the periurban park began to fade.

Placing the mandarins into the cardboard boxes. A worker demonstrates the traditional wrapping method using a lemon instead of a sponge to separate the sheets of paper.

“Among those few of us who still believed in the Ciaculli Late-Season Mandarin project, we looked at each other and asked, ‘What do we do now?’. It didn’t take long for us to realize we could only rely on our ability to market the product to survive”, says Giovanni, who, by then, had become the President of the Consortium.

“I had no experience. I remembered that Neapolitan trader who helped me sell the produce from my father-in-law’s land. I called him and asked if he would be willing to take on a larger quantity of mandarins with quality guarantees that were probably hard to find elsewhere. At that time, there was little focus on customer satisfaction in the citrus industry, but from my experience in hospitality, I understood its importance”.

“He agreed. That’s how our journey as a consortium began. We had a thousand empty crates in a warehouse in the middle of nowhere, with a sloped floor that always risked making the cart carrying the crates roll away on its own. It was freezing at night, and the lighting was just one bulb. But there was interest in the product. I called Parma, Genoa, Naples. Slowly, we gained access to 60 national markets”.

Giovanni’s dream, however, was to open the doors of large-scale distribution to the Consortium. “I started calling Esselunga. I called dozens of times without even getting through to the purchasing office. Until one day, perhaps tired of my persistence, the manager decided to pick up the phone”.

“We stayed on the phone for nearly twenty minutes: I managed to convince him to buy one pallet”. Today, the Il Tardivo di Ciaculli Consortium supplies Esselunga, Coop, several Conad platforms, Eataly, Eurospin, Coop Suisse, and Metro. The turnover has reached six million euros, also thanks to the fact that the warehouse handles other products like lemons, melons, and loquats.

Labeling for large-scale distribution.

“Our mission was simple: produce quality while respecting nature’s timing. Alongside that, we had a deep passion for what we were doing”. This philosophy brought the Consortium and the Slow Food Foundation together, leading to the mandarin’s recognition as a Presidium product. “We must find every possible way to promote what nature gives us here in Sicily; otherwise, we risk having no more mandarin trees left in Ciaculli. There are fewer and fewer young people in these fields”.

Gino, however, is one who has always been here (and has no intention of leaving). Twenty-eight years of hard work. When I ask if it’s really been that long that his life has followed the rhythms of the mandarin orchards, he nods slowly, clicking his tongue—a humble yet solemn way to sum up a life lived. Behind him, the last mandarins of the year dangle from the trees.

“The harvest here is just about done, then we’ll need to prune and start watering again” Gino says. The mandarin tree requires irrigation. Gino shows us what he calls ‘a prisa,’ one of the channels, similar to the Arab-designed ‘saje,’ which used to carry water from cisterns (from the Arabic ‘djeb,’ meaning cistern) diverted through a system of hand-dug trenches.

We watch Gino as he, armed with plastic buckets, collects mandarins in the traditional way. The fruit, which is very sensitive to handling, is separated from the branch, and the peduncle is removed with scissors to prevent it from damaging other mandarins in the container. Breaking open a freshly picked mandarin, you immediately notice the thin skin and, above all, the intense aroma of the oils contained in it.

At full ripeness, the Ciaculli Late-Season Mandarin is not only incredibly fragrant but also very sweet. However, the defining feature of this mandarin is its seeds—a characteristic that makes it fertile, a fruit capable of giving life, an ancestral fruit. The mandarin is, in fact, one of the three original citrus fruits, along with citron and pomelo. It has nothing in common with the many clementine clones available on the market.

Biting into the juicy pulp of a mandarin from the back of Gino’s Ape, we head back toward the entrance of the orchard. Looking around from here, it’s impossible not to think of all the eyes of travelers from the past who were captivated by the sight of the Conca d’Oro: “where the lemon trees bloom, and the golden oranges shine among dark leaves” (Goethe, Wilhelm Meister).

Since the Greek historian Callia of Syracuse wrote in the 4th century BC that the territory of Panormos was called “all-garden” for being entirely full of cultivated trees, things have changed dramatically. From the 1950s onward, the splendid gardens described by Goethe, Guy de Maupassant, Fernand Braudel, and other illustrious travelers of the past have been swallowed up by urban development in what is now known as the “Sack of Palermo.”

From the 14,000 hectares of gardens compared to the 1,000 hectares of urban center in the past, the ratio is now essentially reversed. The last remaining trees cling to the terraces built when the value of mandarins would have encouraged us to tear down houses to make room for citrus groves. About a hundred hectares of mandarin groves remain as the last green lung of Palermo, essential for dissipating at least some of the hellish heat generated by the asphalt and keeping the mountain from sliding down into the valley.

The mandarins, selected and packed, are ready to leave the Consortium’s warehouse.

In an era when the commercial value of fruit does not take into account biodiversity conservation, consumer health, and, more than ever in Ciaculli, the landscape, the challenge of the Ciaculli Late-Season Mandarin can only be considered temporarily won. It will take land management policies that reward the heroic efforts of Giovanni and the Consortium’s producers—policies that, since the collapse of the Periurban Agricultural Park project, no one has taken responsibility to implement.

Neither Giovanni’s spirit nor Gino’s hands will be eternal. “The last wooden suit awaits us all—there are no exceptions for the rich or the scoundrels” Gino says, with the cigarette now extinguished on his lips, as we part ways. As if to say that, at the hour of our last breath, it won’t matter how influential we have become or how much wealth we have amassed. Looking back, what will we say we have left behind? As for me, I would be happy to see a garden of sweet, fragrant mandarins swaying in the first spring breeze, under the rays of an early March sun.