Every citrus fruit in Sicily descends from four wild fruits of Asia.
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This chart is the epilogue to The Citrus Kingdom, an eight-part series on how citrus, carried west from Asia, shaped Sicily’s politics, culture and cuisine for a thousand years. This is how its fruits are related.
Papeda lineCitron linePomelo lineMandarin lineHybrid parentSport (a mutation)
Roman numerals mark each fruit’s chapter in The Citrus Kingdom. Tap a fruit to read it. A dotted line is a sport: one branch of one tree that mutated, the way the late mandarin of Ciaculli began. The bottom three rows are not new crosses either: they are selections and mutations of the sweet orange and the lemon.
Sweet orange: pomelo × mandarin, crossed back to mandarin. Tarocco, Moro and Sanguinello, the three blood oranges of Etna, are red mutations of it. Part IV, Taormina
Verdello: a Femminello lemon forced into a summer crop. Part VI, Ortigia
Femminello: Sicily’s main lemon. Monachello and Lunario are its neighbors; Limone dell’Etna is Femminello and Monachello grown on the volcano. Part VII, Modica
Tardivo di Ciaculli: the late mandarin, a sport of an Avana mandarin tree, ripening from January into March. Part VIII, Conca d’Oro
Mandarino: the Mediterranean mandarin, called Avana in Sicily. Part VIII, Conca d’OroClementine: mandarin × sweet orange.
Lemon: sour orange × citron, a hybrid of a hybrid.
Biondo Comune, Ovale, Valencia, Navelina and Ribera: the blond sweet oranges grown in Sicily. Part IV, Taormina
Bergamot: sour orange × lemon. Chinotto: a mutation of the sour orange.
Cedrino: a smaller, historically recognized form of the cedro, the citron.
Pompia: sour orange × citron, from Sardinia. Lumia: an old citron hybrid, most often citron × pomelo.
My Copic, liner pen and pencil drawing of the key citrus players in Sicily’s history—some are Sicilian icons, others the ancestral species that made them possible.
