Most of the Italian lemons in this series come with a long and blurry past. Nobody knows who planted the first Sfusato on the Amalfi terraces, or which gardener on the Gargano first decided to leave a lemon on the tree for two years. These lemons were shaped by generations of growers and very little was written down.
The Interdonato is different. It has a name, an inventor and something close to a date of birth. It was created on the Ionian coast of Sicily, just south of Messina, in the second half of the 1870s, by a retired officer of Garibaldi's campaigns who spent his later years experimenting in his own citrus groves. The fruit still carries his surname, and his portrait sits in the middle of its IGP logo. No other Italian lemon can say the same.
It also has an unexpected link with Britain. For decades, a large share of the harvest travelled to England, where it became the lemon of choice for a cup of tea. So this chapter is, in part, a story about a lemon finding its way back.
From Revolutionary to Grower
Giovanni Interdonato was a man of the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century movement that unified Italy. Born in 1813 in Roccalumera, on the Ionian coast south of Messina, he helped lead Messina's uprising against the Bourbons in 1848 and, in 1860, joined Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand, marching into Messina with his column ahead of Garibaldi himself. Once the new kingdom was in place, he governed much of the Messina area in the name of the House of Savoy.
He spent his later years a few kilometres from where he was born, in Nizza di Sicilia, where he was mayor from 1877 until his death in 1889. He was also a keen agronomist, and in his citrus grove in the Reitano district he began the experiments that would make his name.
Two Hundred Grafts
Between 1875 and 1880, Interdonato carried out around two hundred grafts, looking for a lemon that behaved differently from the ones around him. It was slow, patient work.
His method is worth a closer look, because it explains the fruit. He took two half-buds, one from a cedro (citron, the large, thick-skinned ancestor of the lemon) and one from the ariddaru, an old local Messina lemon. He joined them lengthways into a single piece and grafted it onto bitter orange rootstock, the traditional base for Sicilian citrus. Most of these experiments came to nothing. One of them produced a tree unlike anything else on the coast.
The new tree was a natural hybrid of cedro and lemon, and its fruit stood out immediately. It ripened earlier, grew large and elongated, and had an unusually smooth, fine skin. It also stood up well to malsecco, the fungal disease that was devastating Sicilian citrus at the time. Locals called it limone speciale (the special lemon) or simply fino (the fine one). In the end, it took the colonel's name.
The Lemon That Comes First
The Interdonato's defining trait is timing. It is the earliest lemon of Italy's winter season. The first fruits are ready at the beginning of September, weeks ahead of the other winter lemons, such as the Siracusa lemon and the Etna lemon, whose Primofiore harvests begin in October. For a while, the Interdonato has the market almost to itself. The IGP rules allow harvesting from 1 September to 15 April, although most of the work is finished by February.
It is also easy to recognise. The fruit is medium to large, from 80 to 350 grams, elliptical, with a pronounced tip at one end, the umbone, which Sicilians sometimes call the lemon's nose. The skin is thin, smooth and glossy. Early in the season it is a matt green that turns yellow as the fruit ripens, but even at full maturity the two ends stay green. It is a small detail, and the quickest way to spot an Interdonato on a market stall. Inside, the flesh is yellow and juicy, and seeds are rare or absent.
Then there is the flavour. Thanks to its modest citric acid content, the Interdonato is mild and delicate, sweeter than most lemons you will have tried. The production rules even set a minimum sugar level for the juice, at least 6.2 degrees Brix, because sweetness is what this lemon is known for. The peel follows the same logic. It is fine-grained and gentle, with little of the bitterness you expect from a lemon skin.
A Lemon for England
By the nineteenth century, the Ionian coast of Messina was known as the "land of the evergreen gardens", and daily life there revolved around citrus. The Interdonato spread quickly. New groves filled the coastal strip and climbed the valleys of the Nisi and the other torrents, planted on dry-stone terraces that are still visible from the coast road between Messina and Catania.
Much of that fruit went abroad, and until after the Second World War its main market was England. The reason was tea. A sharp, acidic lemon competes with a cup of tea; the Interdonato, mild and fragrant, brings out the aroma of the infusion without taking it over. The British adopted it as their tea lemon, and in Sicily it is still described as the best lemon to serve with tea.
The decline came decades later. From 1985, prices collapsed under competition from cheaper lemons grown in Turkey, South Africa and Chile. The citrus crisis of those years halved the area under cultivation, and many terraces were abandoned.
Nineteen Towns Between Messina and Naxos
A slow recovery began around 2000, and it came through organisation. The IGP was registered in November 2009 under the name Limone Interdonato Messina. The protected area covers 19 municipalities on the Ionian side of the province, from the city of Messina south to Giardini Naxos, just below Taormina. It includes coastal towns such as Scaletta Zanclea, Alì Terme, Nizza di Sicilia, Roccalumera, Santa Teresa di Riva and Letojanni, and the villages of the valleys behind them, such as Fiumedinisi, Mandanici and Pagliara.
The landscape explains why the lemon settled here. The climate is mild, without heavy rainfall, and the many fiumare (the seasonal torrents that run down from the Peloritani mountains) make irrigation possible. Thanks to the mild winters, the fruit can stay on the tree for months without spoiling, which is why the harvest can run from September to April. There is also the wind. The vento di canale, the steady breeze that blows through the Strait of Messina, keeps the groves airy and acts as a natural defence against many pests, so the trees need fewer treatments.
In 2014, eleven growers founded a cooperative dedicated to the Interdonato. A Consortium for its protection followed in 2016, later recognised by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture. The numbers remain small: in 2023, certified production was a little over 500 tonnes, from a few dozen operators. The Interdonato is also listed in Slow Food's Ark of Taste, the catalogue of foods at risk of disappearing.
Grown by Hand, Graft by Graft
This is a demanding tree. The IGP rules describe the cultivar as sensitive, which is why irrigation and pruning matter so much: the trees are watered from April to October and pruned between mid-February and mid-September. Groves are farmed with integrated or organic methods, and a good part of the area is certified organic.
There are two ways to start an Interdonato grove. The first is to plant young trees. The second is to convert an existing citrus grove: in spring or autumn, the old trees are cut back and grafted with Interdonato buds, so the same trunks and roots start producing Interdonato lemons. It is the same technique the colonel used, more than a century ago.
The trees flower at most twice a year, and the harvest is done by hand, with scissors, so that the small green cap where the fruit joins the stem stays attached. A single tree yields between 80 and 130 kilos of lemons.
At the Table
Because it is so mild, the Interdonato is a lemon you can eat. Around Messina it is sliced thin, peel and all, and dressed as a salad with olive oil, vinegar and salt. It is also the classic lemon for limone zuccarato: cut into slices, sprinkled with sugar on both flesh and peel, reassembled into the shape of a lemon and left in the fridge overnight. And because the juice needs very little sweetening, it makes a perfect lemonade.
Its zest and juice also go into liqueurs, jams, gelato and even the famous chocolate of Modica, where its gentle aroma adds freshness without overpowering anything else. In the kitchen it works for the same reason it works in tea: it complements a dish without covering the other flavours.
Two practical tips from the growers. To get the most juice, cut the fruit lengthways, following the natural direction of the segments, rather than across the middle. And to keep it fresh, store it somewhere cool and dry, ideally in a paper bag.
As for tea, the rule is simple: one thin slice, dropped into the cup. No squeezing required.
Why This Lemon Matters to Us
Every chapter in this series carries its own lesson. The Amalfi lemon taught us about heroic farming on impossible terraces. Sorrento lemons showed us patience built out of straw and chestnut poles. Procida lemons proved that value doesn't need a European stamp to be real, and the Gargano taught us about persistence on the wrong sea.
The Interdonato adds something remarkable: a lemon can be the work of one person. A former colonel with time, curiosity and a grafting knife made two hundred attempts, and one of them became the lemon of an entire coast. Since then, the growers of the area have kept it alive through two world wars and the price crash of the 1980s.
For us, there is also the matter of where it used to go. For decades, a Sicilian lemon was part of the British cup of tea, until cheaper fruit took its place. Bringing the Interdonato back to the UK, and telling the story of the colonel, the grafts and the green-tipped fruit of the Ionian coast of Sicily, is exactly the kind of thing we built Lemon Appeal to do.
