The Italian Connection: The History of Sugar and Heroin




 

Image of Sicily

 
This is my paraphrase from something I discovered while reading "Midnight in Sicily," by Peter Robb.

When visiting southern Italy and Naples in particular, the author came to the conclusion that coffee is a "Neapolitan drug."  The sugar that Neapolitans put into their coffee with such care may in fact be tied to the "cult of coffee" throughout southern Italy.

Naples was one of Europe's first and biggest importers of sugar.  According to Fernand Breudel in his book, "The Mediterranean,"  in the single year of 1625, when sugar was barely known in the rest of Europe, Naples imported "the "unbelievable quantity" of 15 hundred tons of sugar.  In the same year, Naples also imported 15 hundred tons of honey.  This huge consumption was recorded 50 years after coffee first arrived form the East.  The Venetians first imported coffee in 1580 from Constantinople, where it had arrived 30 years earlier from Egypt.  While Breudel doesn't say that the jump in Neapolitan sugar consumption was actually connected to the arrival of coffee, Robb finds it quite possible.  According to Robb, Neapolitan coffee is barely enough to dissolve the sugar, thus leading one to think that coffee is mainly a way of flavoring sugar.

In the 17th century, ice cream was invented in Naples.  The Spanish rulers of Naples brought chocolate from the Americas and by the 1690's chocolate ice cream was born.  Throughout southern Italy, including Sicily, things made with sugar - cakes, pastries, marzipan, ice creams, are truly a gourmet's delight.

Robb wonders if the southern Italians' finicky obsessiveness with spoons, powders, and flames that coffee and sugar have taught may have something to do with the charm of heroin for young Neapolitans in their introduction stage to heroin.  It could be said that heroin changed the patterns of life in southern Italy and Sicily just as dramatically as sugar had done 5 centuries earlier.

Like sugar, heroin came west from Asia and onto the Americas on a similar scale.  In the same way that sugar took hold in the south of the Italy, so, too, did heroin.

Italians, like writer, Leonardo Sciascia refer to the "Palm Tree Line" when they talk about the geographic and climatic divide in Italy.  Scientists noted back in the early 1960's that this line had begun to move north.  The same line seemed to parallel the corruption and scandal in regional government.  The Palm Tree Line or the short black coffee line:  Leonardo compared the Palm Tree Line to caffe ristretto, a very short and very strong black coffee of the south.  The scandals and corruption seemed to move steadily north from the south in the same way as caffe ristretto.  The trade in heroin contributed greatly the corruption.

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