6.00am: Rude awakenings

I had been dreading the trip. The last time I went to Sicily was last year when I discovered – two weeks before our wedding – that brides to be got to import their alcohol from the neighbouring island without paying any duty on it. We are still drinking the bottles of prosecco I had brought over.

On the way out, the sea was, as they say, qisu zejt. Mum and I found a couple of adjacent seats and read for two and a half hours. We got the alcohol shopping done in an hour, then spent the rest of the day eating, eating and eating some more, only stopping to eat every now and again.

On the way back, if there was anything that would compare to oil in the sea, it would be the political situation in the crude kind. Two seconds out of port, and it was clear that the day’s food would end up in a bag. Many of them actually, and all made of paper. Even thinking of those excruciating six hours – that’s how long it took to navigate the strait – makes my stomach heave.

So this time, I called the Virtu people under the pretext of wanting to know if I needed my ID to travel, Shenghen and a lot of other technical stuff. ‘Oh no’ the lovely lady who answered the phone told me ‘Just get any form of identification, even a driver’s licence. We only need it to know that we’re giving the tickets to the right person.’

As always happens, I ended up blurting the real reason for calling: how bad would it be? ‘It’s going to be fantastic’ she told me. ‘But you would say that’ I bleated. ‘Seriously, it will be. We now have websites that actually predict sea movement 5 days in advance. And since last year, we bought the fabulous Maria Dolores. It’s much bigger than the one you travelled on. It will be great. I assure you’
Unlike planes, travelling on the catamaran’s Club Class area only costs around €15 extra. They were worth every cent. Whereas downstairs, you get the hoi polloi on rows of seats, laden with huge bags of tat, upstairs it’s all decent puffy chairs and tables, couches and leather recliners.

The travellers are of a quieter kind. I found a pod and settled down with my piles of books and magazines. The purser was called Moira. ‘It will be great’ she assured me again, handing me a huge, thick red blanket and a cup of tea.

She was right. Ten minutes out, and I was settled, with the phones of my iphone stuck firmly in my ear, my table laden with books, and easy access to an outside area which a few people used for smoking. Sadly, there was a a deranged little boy whose parents had given up on his discipline the day he was born. Yet even that that could stop me from actually enjoying the journey. I hankered down and slept the sleep of babies with Nina Simone warbling in my ears.

 

8.30am: Pozzallo and Beyond

 

I’m travelling with a businessman I will call G. The Maltese, and the Gozitans, have been buying patches of land in the neighbouring island, and I want to find out why. ‘We’re here’ he says quietly, bringing me out of my coma.

Outside, S is waiting for us in a four wheel drive, and so is G's business partner, A, who fell in love with the area eight years ago and who has bought a huge chunk of it.
Unlike the dreaded Catania port, Pozzallo is smart, clean and quiet. I can see fish restaurants as far off as a mile, all packed next to each other. From all over the south, people come to the fish shops here to stock up for lunch.

We drive up to Frigintini where S owns the hub of the village: an extended building which includes a b&b, a lotto section, a little mini-market, and most important of all, the café. I stand at the bar and order a cornetto alla crema and a cappuccino, remembering that the latter after 10am is an unforgiveable faux pas.

The cornetto is massive and the cream inside gooey and almost yellow translucent. I have half of it coming out of my ear when the bionda behind the bar, who is getting married in a week, tells me ‘you should have had a Sicilian breakfast’. This is a granita and brioche. She shows me how the brioche is dunked into the icy flakes. I wonder if I should let the cornetto go down the gullet and take up her suggestion when G calls me out.

He shows me his bag, which I had thought was curiously full of clothing, or maybe gifts. But in it, he has a huge bowl which will be filled with ricotta by the end of the day. I make him promise to take me food shopping at some point during our packed schedule. He does. So we set off

 

9.15am: The Properties

 

We set off from Frigintini and over perfectly laid country roads, across the South of Sicily. I still haven’t got to grips with the names of the tiny villages (population: 200 – 2,000)yet, but for G and A, this is a second home. They know every single nook and cranny in the area and they start to explain to me what the whole property situation is about.

I am sceptical. I query and bitch, as I am wont to do. I wonder who would be interested in buying up patches of land just because other Maltese are doing so. Then they stop me at the first one: a rundown, local-granite clad farmhouse with views as far as the eyes can see and five hectares of arable land full of old carob and olive trees attached.

My eyes can hardly adjust to the scene, yet they are taking it all in. ‘A hectare is 9 tumoli’ they tell me very simply ‘Calculate that’. The lot: 40 tumoli of land, with what can potentially be a stunning holiday farmhouse with a huge pool outside and enough olives to make you want to take up agro-tourism for life, throw down the gauntlet and just move, costs €150,000.

There is no mistake in either the number or the currency. Sure, it would take at least €40,000 to convert the farmhouse in the traditional manner, using Sicilian contractors, or maybe 60 if one were to push out the envelope and really go the whole way with an ecological house (even the street lamps are solar-powered in most places, so they know how to do it), but that’s still 86,000 liri in total. We paid much more than that to buy and convert a townhouse in Malta, and I’m sure half of them were for the garden which here would be almost laughable.

And on it goes, house after house, tract after tract of arable land. They show me their wonderful projects of top-notch villas situated in an area so beautiful that I almost want to cry. For once, the development is totally in keeping with the area and your neighbour would be literally a mile away: close enough for comfort, but not too close.

Every time we stop, we eat from the fruit trees which grow without any help from man, and all the help they can get from nature: apricots dripping in juice, santarosa plums which make my hands sticky, and at one point, tut, which I remember growing wild even in Malta, before we destroyed every single tree to build our maisonettes. They tell me I’m going to stain my clothes. And I do of course, clambering up the tree like a child and grabbing the small black fruits and pushing them straight into my mouth. I’m in love. They have me, and so does the land.

 

1.00pm: The Food

By 1pm, my stomach puffy from all the fresh fruit I’ve eaten, I’m still hungry in that way that you can only be ‘hungry’ when on holiday: stuffed but still pining for more, for the experience of eating good stuff just in case you die tomorrow.

G has firm instructions, including particular destinations, from his wife to take me out to lunch.

We drive to Ragusa Ibla, the old town with the famous Duomo and find a restaurant which is still using the wonderful ovens which I had noticed the Sicilians actually build into their architecture, stuck in a corner of every kitchen, using wood as fuel. We settle down there, avoiding the 1 and 2 star Michelin restaurants in the old, pretty town, simply because here, we don’t need spit and polish, but just spit to digest the good food.

I can see that G and A want to just have a quick lunch and get on with showing me their projects, but I insist in a very female way, and order everything: roasted cheese, which here they sear on red-hot metal, antipasti dripping in oil, some bavette with bottarga and a mixed grill of meat and fish.

We sit outside, the only customers, and the food starts to arrive. We eat hungrily, lustfully, like this is our last meal. Maybe every meal on holiday should be consumed like this, but then, no-one is ever this lucky all the time.

Everything is good, but the bottarga sauce is to die for. The garlic, floating in the delicious olive oil, has been roasted, and so tastes sweet, the texture slightly crisp but not quite. They use cherry tomatoes, which, again, have been blackened on the metal, and the fish roe is nothing like that crap we get in jars, all powdery and dry.

Here, it is salty as ever, grated in huge flakes, and jostling happily with the chilli.

Nobody asks us how we want the fillet, the provenance of which is obviously local (most of the bits of land we’ve seen had grazing cows meandering around them) so it turns up a porn shade of dark red, with a seared outside. Nobody asks me if I want cheese on my pasta.

The swordfish is thinly sliced and comes with black lines from the oven. The huge red prawns are crisp and carbonised to sweetness. There are calamari, again, charred simply. The other two tuck into the meat and fish, but I cannot stop loving the pasta. Having written an entire book on low-carb, this is exactly what I mean when I tell people to only break their ‘diet’ when it’s worth it. Hours later, I can still taste the wonderful sauce in my mouth.

 

2.00pm: The Ice-Cream

As we get to the end of our meal, washed down with some lemony white wine, the water only consumed because of the intense heat, G tells me. ‘If you like, you can order dessert here, but Mrs. G told – or rather threatened me – to take you for some ice-cream. It’s your choice’.

It’s no choice, really. I adore ice-cream and in summer could eat every single permutation of food as long as it came in super-cold balls of cream. So we set off up the road and shelter from the afternoon sun in a tiny shop called Gelati Di Vini. I hope you get the pun, because I’m not about to explain.

It’s a treasure trove of wines and chocolate. The men instantly swoop on the ice-cream counter for their choices, but I’m enthralled by the wines which line the shelves. The cheeses called Ragusano D.O.P. (they obviously know their EU regulation, which is a lot more than I can say for us lot) and Ubriaco di Nero D’Avola (yes, cheese marinaded in wine), are ready cut, sealed in vacuum and waiting to be sold in a small specialised fridge.

Which is where I spy a 296 gram slab of bottarga, waiting for me to buy it. The ingredients list says ‘uova di tonno (thymus thynnus), sale’. It costs €45. I have no idea how much I should be paying for it, but I buy it.

I also buy some 2005 Sinestesia (‘quando I sensi si confondono e poi si fondono donando, quasi per magia, affascinanti percezioni parallele, in una sintesi compiuta di armonia e forza evocative’ which just about describes our lunch), a bottle of Maria Costanza from the 150-year old family business of the Agricola G. Milazzo and a bottle of red Frappato from 2005 which the lovely shop owner tells me I can serve chilled with my pasta alla bottarga, or at room temperature with meat. Just for the hell of it, I buy some 2003 Rosso di Montalcino from much higher up in Italy.

I sneak into the ice cream area while they’re packing the wine and I order a cornetto double the size of the men’s. I choose dark chocolate with chilli, fennel, carob and nero d’avola. I could have had all manner of forest fruits, plums, olive oil and pistachio. Giolitti in Rome does not even start with this gorgeousness of genuine flavour and texture. The men have finished their ice-cream and so we all switch to tasting every other flavour we haven’t had. The girl behind the counter is bemused but happily hands us little plastic teaspoons laden with cream.

I buy some more: chocolate from the region, all of it dark, and mixed with vanilla, nero d’avola, carob, cinnamon, and peperoncino, blended into a fine mix which resembles a harder Aero. I buy their finest olive oil. I spy some slabs of ‘pasta di mandorla’ and, having watched the Bionda this morning produce a sensational latte di mandorla, realise that the stuff should not come in tetra-paks as we buy it here; you simply crumble the paste into a litre of water and whizz in a blender, then chill. I buy three.

The men have to drag me out, which is how my every shopping experience closes. They also have to carry my laden bags, which is not new either. I have spent €200 euro in about 30 minutes and they were worth every cent

 

6.00pm: The Mignon

In the afternoon, we dash around in the four wheel drive, seeing some more houses. Every now and again, we go back to Frigintini to pick up and drop off things, and I watch as the Bionda’s husband-to-be mixes some chilled espresso with the latte the mandorla to make a long macchiato for the thirsty truckers.

The traffic is docile and the drivers, although Sicilian to the core, respectful. There are more tractors than there are cars, and seeing as it is June, the land is barren and laden with balls of animal bedding, waiting to be transported. The hills undulate everywhere. No wonder the Maltese and Gozitans love it: it’s like Gozo, twenty years ago, but bigger and better. Like going home as you wished home would be.

We whizz through some industrial zones which I’m told are full of clothing shops. I can imagine the Maltese swooping over them but obviously have no interest in stopping. We see some more houses, eat some more fruit from their trees, and I promise myself silently to drag The Writer up here to see and experience for himself. Meanwhile though, I have to buy him some pasti. Otherwise, I tell the men, TW will never forgive me.

It’s already past 7pm, and G and I swoop over a little bakery, San Lorenzo, leaving A outside to guard the car from wardens. We buy large trays of little pastries made with almonds, mandarin and carob. The man takes us into his huge kitchen at the back and fills our fresh cannoli – large and in mignon versions – with ricotta mixture, there and then.

We pick up the ricotta from Frigintini and whizz down to the port, watching the massive coaches bringing back the hordes of Russians, Ukranian, French, Swiss and German tourists which are here on day trips from Malta and Gozo. The humungous red ball of sun is setting behind us and the yachts bob in Marina di Ragusa.

Mariella, our purser for the trip back, is waiting for us and has reserved a lovely spot in the Club Class area for me, obviously warned about the ‘food writer from Malta who had a bad experience last year’. G is exhausted, having been up since 1.30 am, so he retires to his reclining seat. I read for a few minutes and find myself dropping off to sleep under the red blanket. When I wake up, sticky from a day of running around, we are in Malta and I have a feeling that I’ve just discovered heaven. Go figure that it was just an hour and a half away.