The miracle of limoncello

Consider the paradox of lemons. In Italy, one associates them with scented groves. A few years ago, Helena Attlee wrote the book The Land Where Lemons Grow, in which citrus fruits become a golden thread running through the history of Italian agriculture. Yet though the lemon is arguably the most beautiful of fruits, its tart taste is bracing. A spremuta di limone finds a swift route to any shaving nicks.

But the lemon can be sweetened, in the form of limoncello, an after-dinner drink of no great subtlety, good for pouring over puddings but hardly a match for the fortified wines of the Iberian peninsula. That said, there is an exception. Most limoncello is produced on the Amalfi coast, that enchanting region south of Naples. But there is an outlier, which comes from Godalming.

A friend of mine, Andrea Cali, has political opinions so extraordinary that only an Italian could hold them. He is a disciple of an Italian economist and sometime cabinet minister, Antonio Martino, who claimed that he would be in favour of a united Europe as long as it did not have a government. Antonio was a committed anarcho-libertarian, as is Andrea, though he also holds a torch for the Bourbon monarchs of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

They were indeed maligned rulers,libelled by both Verdi – in Tosca – and Gladstone, who described their realm as ‘the negation of God erected into a system of government’. That would have been true of the pre-Risorgimento Papal States, but the Two Sicilies muddled along in a perfectly acceptable fashion, no worse governed than they have been since.

Anyway, Andrea, who holds a chair at the University of Naples, founded 800 years ago by Frederick II, stupor mundi, makes limoncello, which he calls lemon cello.