People from North Africa and the Near East first used the word paradisi to describe their intimate garden spaces filled with the sound of running water and the perfume of beautiful flowering plants and trees, a shady sanctuary cut off from the harsh landscape outside by high walls.

On the outskirts of Palermo the first orange and lemon trees brought to Italy by the Arabs were planted in gardens. The beauty of these gardens was celebrated in a genre of poetry called the rawdiya, or ‘garden poem’, in which oranges and lemons were often mentioned.

Abu al-Hasan Ali, an Islamic poet still living in Sicily under Norman rule at the end of the eleventh century, described oranges as pure gold that had rained on to the earth and been fashioned there into glowing spheres.

Abd ar-Rahman, another Sicilian-Arabic poet, wrote:

The oranges of the island are like blazing fire

Among the emerald boughs

And the lemons are like the pale faces of lovers

Who have spent the night crying.

The wonderful Islamic gardens disappeared long ago, although Sicilian citrus groves commemorate their presence by being known still as giardini or even paradisi on the island’s east coast, names that retain the echo of their Arabic associations with beauty, intimacy and succour, of the oasis in an arid desert landscape.

Attlee, Helena (2015-01-05). The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and Its Citrus Fruit (Kindle Locations 797-808). Countryman Press. Kindle Edition.