When the British East India Company returned from the Far East in the 1660s, they presented a strange plant called tea to King Charles II. His beautiful Portuguese bride quickly became fond of it for treating her colds. Some 20 years earlier, a merchant by the name of Peter Mundy noted it as “only herb boiled with a kind of herb boiled in it.”
When they began adding milk, tea, and honey to the drink, another component was also deemed to prevent the plague of many sailors – scurvy. It was a commodity of which the Italian island of Sicily had plenty.
The lemon craze in the 1870s sent the island into an economic boom that astonished for the domestic population. Under the Bourbon feudal economic system, many native Sicilians moved away from their invaders’ control and corruption, and receded into the hills to form their own communities. The Mediterranean’s largest island had a merry-go-round of foreign invaders since Ancient Greece, which has undoubtedly inscribed a “suspicion of others” into Sicilian DNA. Choosing to do business within their own groups, ‘La Cosa Nostra,’ or ‘Our Thing,’ became the Sicilian way to “run things.”
Read more: