Italy is the largest producer of vegetables in Europe (19.8% of total harvest); Sicily is its largest agricultural region (10.8% of the agricultural area of the country), generating €4,335 million in harvest value annually. Eurostat, “Agricultural Census in Italy,” 2012, ➝.
Favara/fawarra (water spring); senia/saniya (water wheel); gebbia/gabiya (water tank); saja/saqiya (water channel). See Giuseppe Barbera, “Parchi, frutteti, giardini e orti nella Conca d’oro di Palermo araba e normanna,” Italus Hortus 14, no. 4 (2007): 14–27.
Pietro Laureano, The Water Atlas: Traditional Knowledge to Combat Desertification (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2005). 24.
Juan García Latorre, Andrés Sánchez Picón, and Jesús García Latorre, “The Man-Made Desert: Effects of Economic and Demographic Growth on the Ecosystems of Arid Southeastern Spain,” in Environmental History 6, no. 1 (2001): 75–94, 82.
James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 10–22.
Kolymbethra stands for “immersed” in Greek. The garden was also referred to as the Pool of the Gods.
Hypogean stands for “underground” from Greek hypó “under” and gaîa “earth.”
Note that the case of Palermo is particular as, contrary to other parts of Sicily, it is located on the Conca d’Oro (the Horn of Plenty), has considerably more underground water, and lies on a fertile plain instead of volcanic rock.
Giusy Lofrano, Maurizio Carotenuto, Roberta Maffettone, Pietro Todaro, Silvia Sammataro, and Ioannis K. Kalavrouziotis, “Water Collection and Distribution Systems in the Palermo Plain during the Middle Ages,” Water 5, no. 4 (2013): 1662-1676, ➝.
Sciroccato (affected by the sirocco wind) is a common Italian idiom to refer to someone whose behavior is confusing, dangerous, or nonsensical. Hence, it is a wind to be avoided as much as possible.
Simone Mantellini, “The Implications of Water Storage for Human Settlement in Mediterranean Waterless Islands: The Example of Pantelleria,” Association for Environmental Archaeology 20, no. 4 (2015): 406–424.
Francesco Brignone, I Giardini dell’Isola di Pantelleria (2012).
Giuseppe Barbera et al, “The ‘Jardinu’ of Pantelleria as a Paradigm of Resource-Efficient Horticulture in the Built-Up Environment,” Proceedings of the International Symposium on Greener Cities for More Efficient Ecosystem Services in a Climate Changing World (2018).
Simone Mantellini, “The Implications of Water Storage for Human Settlement in Mediterranean Waterless Islands: The Example of Pantelleria,” Association for Environmental Archaeology 20, no. 4 (2015): 406–424.
Interview with agronomist Graziella Pavia, Pantelleria February 18, 2018.
Giuseppe Barbera and Antonio Motisi, “Cultural Adaptation of Grapevine and Traditional Crops in a Unique Drystone Landscape: The Island of Pantelleria,” Paper presented at EASA2016: Anthropological Legacies and Human Futures Conference, July 21, 2016.
Ibid.
While the protected coastal plains around Palermo became one of the key sites for citrus groves through the introduction of intensive irrigation methods, the inner and western parts of the island were allocated for cereal production. As an interminable bread basket, first under Spanish colonial rule and later under the unified Italian nation, the Sicilian economy was eventually affected by the wheat boom in the U.S. in the 19th century. The subsequent local land struggles on the island around less globally competitive grain led to growing tensions among the population. Unsurprisingly, many decided to migrate; and apart from wheat and lemons, Sicily also started exporting its people. See Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider, Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily (New York: Academic Press, 1976), ix.
Arcangelo Dimico, Alessia Isopi and Ola Olsson, “Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons,” Journal of Economic History 77, no. 4 (2017): 1083–1115.
Ibid.
Letter of the Commandant of Castellammare {sic} del Golfo to the Prince of Satriano, 23 September 1849. Cited in Ilaria Giglioli and Erik Swyngedouw, “Let’s Drink to the Great Thirst! Water and the Politics of Fractured Techno-natures in Sicily,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32 (2008): 392–414.
Filippo Sabetti, Village Politics and the Mafia in Sicily (Montreal and Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 59–60.
Ibid.
Clyde Haberman, “In Sicily, Even Water Has Its Price,” New York Times, July 22, 1989, ➝.
Umberto Santino, “Il ruolo della Mafia nel Saccheggio del Territorio,” in Casa Europa (Palermo: CSDGI, 2016). Ilaria Giglioli and Erik Swyngedouw, “Let’s Drink to the Great Thirst! Water and the Politics of Fractured Techno-natures in Sicily,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32 (2008): 392–414.
Daron Acemoglu, Giuseppe De Feo, and Giacomo De Luca, “Weak States: Causes and Consequences of the Sicilian Mafia,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 24115, December 2017.
Giglioli and Swyngedouw, “Let’s Drink to the Great Thirst!”
Erik Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890–1930,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89, no. 3 (1999): 443–465.
Marco Armiero, Filippo Gravagno, Giusy Pappalardo, and Alessia Denise Ferrara. “The Nature of Mafia: An Environmental History of the Simeto River Basin, Sicily,” Environment and History (2017).
According to the Agromafie Reports (reports about organized crimes connected to food supply chain published by the Italian Institute of Political, Economic and Social Studies) from 2011 to 2016. Armiero et al., “The Nature of Mafia.”
Crispian Balmer, “Italy’s Mafia Harvests Big Gains from Agriculture,” Reuters, February 17, 2016, ➝.
Letizia Palumbo and Alessandra Sciurba, “Vulnerability to Forced Labour and Trafficking: The case of Romanian women in the agricultural sector in Sicily,” Anti-Trafficking Review 5 (2015).
Adam Vaughan, “Climate Change Rate to Turn Southern Spain to Desert by 2100, Report Warns,” The Guardian, October 26, 2016, ➝. See also Eyal Weizman, Erasure: The Conflict Shoreline (Göttingen: Steidl, 2014), 25.
Jacob Bunge, “A Warming Climate Brings New Crops to Frigid Zones,” Wall Street Journal, November 25, 2018, ➝.
Since the 1999 adoption of the Tampere Council Conclusions, the EU’s first milestone toward a common strategy aimed at the recovery of the proceeds of crime, Sicily has 2,088 confiscated and reactivated assets. But on the basis of the emotional wave of terror sparked by the period of Mafia massacres in Sicily, a cultural and social rebellion against eco-mafia activities pushed institutional efforts to emerge from a grassroots level in the late 1990s and early 2000s: citizens, associations, and various political and religious networks became aware that it was not possible to delegate efforts against the proliferation of Mafia only to the judiciary or law enforcement. See Michele Maria Anzalone, “The Up-Cycle Beyond the Crime: The Productive Re-Activation of Confiscated Criminal Assets,” PhD dissertation, submitted 2017, Universitá degli Studi di Palermo School of Architecture. See also EUR-Lex, Directive 2014/42/EU, “Freezing and Confiscation of Proceeds of Crime,” Art. 3.
Barbera, “Parchi, frutteti, giardini e orti.”
Zoran S. Ilić, Lidija Milenković, Ljubomir Šunić, and Maja Manojlović, “Color Shade Nets Improve Vegetables Quality at Harvest and Maintain Quality During Storage,” Contemporary Agriculture 67, no 1. (2018): 9–19.
See ➝.
See Tony Allen, Virtual Water: Tackling the Threat to Our Planet's Most Precious Resource (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); and Arjen Y. Hoekstra, “Human Appropriation of Natural Capital: A Comparison of Ecological Footprint and Water Footprint Analysis,” Ecological Economics 68, no. 7 (2009): 1963–1974.