The coast was warm, quiet, sleepy. Nearby, an old man sold fake Phoenician antiquities out of his car. A cafe sold espresso and juice hand-pressed from Sicilian mandarin oranges. Vines trailed in the sun. Again, there was almost no one there but us.
Today, Sicily runs on almost everything except salt. That night we stayed at a converted farmhouse called the Duca di Castelmonte. Our host's last name, Curatolo, spoke of a family history at the top of the salt hierarchy, but he made his living from a farm, an inn, an olive oil business, and a soccer club. He also possessed a resource now more greatly prized than salt: the best cook anywhere for kilometers.
The point of salt, of course, is to put it on food. I'm not saying it was the salt, but our first dinner at the Curatolo farmhouse was like nothing you could imagine, one dish after another made with local ingredients, flavored with local olive oil. A clear cauliflower soup; a warm eggplant caponata; pounded steak seared in oil. Dinner ended with an unusual local liqueur made from fennel.
We would spend another 10 days in Sicily, visiting the famous parts and eating spectacularly well — unusual almond pesto, cheese grilled on an open fire, calamari hauled straight from the sea. We rarely saw any salt. At Italian tables, the presumption is that the chef does it right the first time. When we did ask for salt, we looked at it carefully. It rose in telltale clumpy mounds, the mark of sea salt still holding a bit of the moisture of the ancient salt pans. When we put it on our tongues, it tasted ... well, it tasted pretty much like salt.
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