Most farmers keep their trees away from danger. On the eastern side of Sicily, they plant them on it. Mount Etna is the tallest active volcano in Europe, and it smokes, rumbles and, every so often, throws ash and hot stones onto the villages below. The people who live there call it 'a Muntagna, simply "the Mountain", and on its lower slopes, between the lava and the Ionian Sea, they grow lemons.
The Limone dell'Etna is the youngest of Italy's seven IGP lemons. The European Union recognised it in 2020, long after Amalfi, Sorrento and the Gargano had their seals. But young on paper does not mean young in the field. These groves have been feeding sailors, ice makers and summer drinkers for more than two centuries. What made them famous is the Verdello, a summer lemon that growers here learnt to produce by making their trees flower a second time.
Living With the Mountain
The protected area covers 16 municipalities in the province of Catania, on the eastern, sea-facing side of the volcano. It runs from the Alcantara river in the north down to the edge of the city of Catania, including towns like Acireale, Giarre, Riposto, Mascali, Zafferana Etnea and the cluster of "Aci" towns along the coast. Locals call this stretch the Riviera dei Limoni, the Lemon Coast.
Three things make this coast ideal for lemons. The first is the soil: dark, porous and volcanic, made of broken-down basalt, low in limestone, slightly acidic and full of minerals. The second is the water. Snow on the summit (roughly 3,350 metres, although Etna keeps changing its own height with every eruption) melts into the rock and runs down through the mountain, feeding springs and wells with clean, mineral-rich water. The third is the weather, which surprises most visitors. This side of Sicily is sunny all year, yet it catches the clouds that roll in from the Ionian and stack up against the volcano, so it gets about as much rain as London. Winters are mild, and in the hottest weeks of summer, the sea winds — Levante, Scirocco and Grecale — bring a little relief.
But the Mountain can also be a threat. When Etna erupts, it can send down showers of lapilli — small fragments of lava — and volcanic ash. Falling on the groves in large amounts, they act like a hailstorm of burning gravel, scorching leaves and scarring fruit. Growers accept this as part of the deal: the soil that makes their lemons so good comes from the same eruptions that can ruin a season.
Sailors, Scurvy and a Lemon Boom
Large-scale cultivation began at the end of the eighteenth century, and it began at sea. The ports of Riposto and Catania were busy with ships, and sailors had learnt that a supply of lemons was the best defence against scurvy on long voyages. As soon as they stepped off the boats, they went looking for fruit. Demand grew, and the groves followed.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the lemon had become the economy of the coast. In 1869 Paolo Calì Fiorini, president of the agricultural committee of Acireale, publicly encouraged local landowners to plant more, and they did. When Federico De Roberto published his novel I Viceré in 1894, he described landowners digging through "the centuries-old lavas of Mongibello" — the old name for Etna — to find water and plant oranges and lemons. By the early 1980s, lemons covered around 9,500 hectares here. The area is smaller today, and the growers decided to protect what was left. In 2014 a group of them formed an association to defend the name, the IGP arrived in October 2020, and a Consorzio followed at the end of 2021, based in Acireale's town hall. Certified volumes are still small: around 21 tonnes in 2023.
The Femminello and the Monk
Only two cultivars can carry the Etna IGP name. The first is the Femminello, and in particular the local Femminello Zagara Bianca. It belongs to the same fertile, repeat-flowering family as the Femminello del Gargano lemon and the Rocca Imperiale lemon of Calabria. The Etna type takes its name from its white blossom (zagara bianca) and is recognised by its pale green new leaves. Growers love it for its generous yields.
The second is the Monachello, the "little monk". Its branches grow downwards, so the canopy falls around the trunk like the habit of a friar — hence the name. The Monachello appeared about a century ago, and it spread across the Catania area for a very practical reason: it resists malsecco.
Malsecco is the most feared disease in Italian citrus. It is a fungus, which probably arrived from the Greek islands, that gets into the woody vessels of the tree and stops the flow of sap. Leaves drop, branches dry out, and the only cure is surgical: cut away the infected wood and hope it has not gone further. The Monachello's resistance is close to 100%, and that made it the insurance policy of the whole district. It gives less juice than the Femminello, but in a bad year it may be the only tree still standing.
The Invention of the Verdello
Here is the part of the story the Etna coast is proudest of.
Left to their own rhythm, lemon trees produce most of their fruit between autumn and spring. For a long time, that meant a gap: by early summer, fresh lemons became scarce, just as the heat arrived and demand for cold drinks and ices went up.
Etna's growers found a way to close that gap. The technique is called forzatura, "forcing", or simply secca. Local tradition says it was discovered by accident about three centuries ago, and it has been handed down ever since.
In a Sicilian summer it rarely rains, so the groves depend on irrigation. In June and July, for a few weeks, the growers stop watering altogether. They call this dare la secca, "giving them the dry". The porous volcanic soil drains fast, so the trees feel the drought at once and stop growing. Then the water comes back, in large amounts, along with nitrogen-based fertiliser. The tree responds with a burst of new growth and an extra flowering in late summer, months after its usual spring bloom.
Lemon trees can carry fruit of different ages at the same time, and this is where that matters. Through autumn and winter, the small green lemons from the summer flowering grow slowly on the same branches as the ripening winter lemons. When the winter harvest is over, they are still there, and they are picked the following summer, from May to September.
These are the Verdelli, the "little green ones", named for the colour of their skin. They reach the market in the months when fresh Italian lemons are scarce and shops fill up with imported fruit, grown in the southern hemisphere and shipped across the oceans. Next to those well-travelled yellow lemons, a green Verdello stands out immediately.
There is a bonus. Research at the citrus research centre in Acireale found that the Verdello is the richest of the Etna lemons in antioxidants, with more vitamin C, flavonoids and phenolic compounds than the fruit of the other flowerings. For growers, the Verdello is also the lemon that fetches the best price.
Three Lemons, One Tree
Both cultivars flower in several waves, so the Etna IGP recognises three types of lemon, each with its own season.
The Primofiore ("first flower") is the winter lemon and the most prized. The harvest opens on 15 September for the Femminello and on 15 October for the Monachello, and runs through the winter. It is elliptical, weighs at least 90 grams, and has a thick peel that moves from light green to lemon yellow. The juice is abundant, around a third of the fruit's weight in the Femminello and a quarter in the Monachello, with a strong acidity (at least 5.5 g/100ml) balanced by a good natural sweetness.
The Bianchetto, also called Maiolino, is the spring lemon, picked from April. Its skin is medium-thick and pale yellow and very fragrant, rich in essential oils, while the pulp is juicy and sharp. It also has more albedo, the white layer under the skin, which gives it a pleasant bitter edge.
The Verdello, the summer lemon, is picked from 15 May through to September. It is slightly smaller and rounder, from 80 grams up, with a thin peel that moves from green to pale yellow. It is less juicy and more bitter than the others, but its flavour is intense.
What the Lava Puts in the Peel
The Etna lemon's strength is its flavour, and the reason is chemical. Its essential oils are rich in citral, a blend of two compounds, geranial and neral, that gives lemons their characteristic taste, and the Etna fruit is known for its particularly high levels of it. The Rocca Imperiale lemon, as we saw in its chapter, is the king of limonene, the compound of lemon fragrance; Etna is the lemon of citral, the compound of lemon taste.
The volcanic soil plays its role too. The Acireale researchers also found that Etna lemons contain more sugars and more acidity than lemons from other parts of Sicily, along with higher levels of manganese and strontium, which they link directly to the lava soil. The result is a lemon that is strong on both fronts: sharp, but with enough natural sweetness to balance it.
The rules protect all of this. Yields are capped at 60 tonnes per hectare. Picking is done by hand, only after the morning dew has dried, using small scissors to cut the stem. Above all, no waxes or synthetic fungicides can be used after harvest. So the peel is not coated in anything: you can grate it, candy it or infuse it.
At the Table
In Catania, the lemon is mainly something you drink. In summer, the city's kiosks serve seltz limone e sale: fresh lemon juice, soda water and a pinch of salt, sometimes with a few drops of anise instead. It is the unofficial drink of the Catanese summer. Then there is granita, which on the Etna coast has always been a serious matter. In 1841, the Viscount of Marcellus, a French traveller, tasted the granitas of Giarre and wrote: "The juice of lemons picked straight from the tree, mixed with the snows of Etna, makes a drink that could not be reproduced with the shrivelled fruit of imports, even if it were of pure Italian origin. The ices, under this sky of fire, restore strength to the muscles and revive the spirit."
In the pastry shops, the lemon appears in gelo di limone, a set lemon pudding, and in biancomangiare, the almond-milk blancmange that Sicilians flavour with lemon peel. The Verdello's green peel goes into sorbets and into rosolio, the old Sicilian home-made liqueur. On the savoury side, it finishes grilled fish and the fried street food of Catania's markets. Beyond the kitchen, its oils end up in drinks, perfumes and cosmetics.
Following the Lemon Coast
A rural tourism route, the Via del Limone dell'Etna, follows the coast between the sea and the groves. It starts at Acitrezza, the fishing village where Giovanni Verga set his novel I Malavoglia, facing the Cyclops Islands — the black basalt stacks that, according to legend, the blinded Polyphemus threw at Ulysses. From there it moves to Acireale, with its baroque churches and granita bars, and on to the small harbours of Santa Maria La Scala, Stazzo and Pozzillo. Behind them, the groves climb on terraces of dark lava stone towards the summit. In spring, when the Femminello is in bloom, the whole coast smells of zagara.
Why This Lemon Matters to Us
Every chapter of this series has its own lesson. The Amalfi Coast lemon showed us heroic farming on impossible terraces, and the Gargano taught us persistence on the wrong sea. Eastern Sicily alone is home to three of Italy's seven IGP lemons: Etna shares this coast with the Siracusa lemon to the south and, to the north, the Interdonato lemon of Messina, created by a Garibaldian colonel. Each has its own story to tell.
The Etna lemon teaches us ingenuity. Its growers could not choose a safer place to farm, so they learnt to use what the volcano gave them: the soil, the water, the minerals. They could not stop the lemon season from ending, so they tricked their trees into a second spring. And when disease threatened the groves, they planted the Monachello, a resistant tree shaped like a monk.
This is a lemon made by people who looked at a dangerous mountain and saw an opportunity, and who have worked with it for more than two hundred years. That is the kind of story we built Lemon Appeal to tell, and the kind of fruit we are proud to bring a little closer to home.
