November 2025 – the heart thrills

Florence, 21 November 2025

A week or so ago, my wife and I were doing a gentle hike on Lake Como. We’ve both been a bit under the weather, so a hike with none of the brutal climbs required of many of the hikes around Lake Como were just what we needed. We had also done a few other, rougher hikes along the lake in the previous days and had discovered to our dismay that heavy rains back in late September had made a number of them impassable. So as I say, a nice gentle hike along a well-kept path was just what we needed. For any of my readers who might want to know which hike we did, it was the “Via Verde”, which runs between the villages of Moltrasio and Laglio (and is not to be confused with the rival “Green Way”, which runs further north along the same shoreline of the lake). Here is a photo of the typical view one enjoys along this path at this time of the year.

Towards the end, we were walking into the village of Carate Urio when we came across a table set up along the path and on which were placed two crates holding a dozen or so of these strange-looking vegetables – or were they fruits?

My wife trained her iPhone camera on one of these vegetables (or fruits?) and promptly identified it. In Italian, it is called “zucca spinosa”, or spiny pumpkin. They were certainly spiny, but the relationship to pumpkins wasn’t immediately obvious. And being a pumpkin, it’s sort of both a fruit and vegetable: botanically a fruit but culinarily a vegetable given the way it is eaten (as we shall see in a minute). For the purposes of this post, I will henceforth refer to it as a vegetable.

Different parts of the world have different names for this vegetable. It’s called chayote in the US. Here we have a lady from Louisiana showing off two of them (although, reflecting that State’s French heritage, they are often called mirlitons there, as they are in nearby Haiti).

The Americans have actually just borrowed the Spanish name for the vegetable; we’ll come back to the Spanish name in a minute.

It’s called chocho or chuchu or some variant thereof in places as varied as Mauritius, India, Sri Lanka, Brazil, and Jamaica. This is thought to be the Pidgin English version of chayote. Here we have a farmer in Assam with his crop of chocho.

The vegetable is called choko in Cantonese (am I wrong in thinking that this ultimately derives from chocho?), which later became the name used in Australia and New Zealand thanks to the Cantonese who emigrated there in the 19th Century. Here we have an Australian proudly showing off the chokos growing in his garden (note that his variety is without spines).

Meanwhile, in the islands of the eastern Caribbean, the vegetable is called christophine or christophene. Here we have early risers in a market in the island of Martinique searching for their choice christophenes.

There are more names used for this spiny pumpkin, but the ones I’ve cited give us an indication of where it originally came from. It is one of those foodstuffs which make up the great Columbian exchange: that massive movement of foodstuffs, people and diseases which occurred after Christopher Columbus stumbled across the Americas. I’ve mentioned this exchange several times already in these posts, when writing about the prickly pear, the Jerusalem artichoke, vanilla, and turkeys. And now I can add to the list the spiny pumpkin, or christophene (which reflects the connection to Christopher Columbus), or chayote, which is a Spanish transliteration of the Nahuatl name chayohtli. In fact, modern studies indicate that the chayote was first cultivated in Mesoamerica, between southern Mexico (in the states of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Veracruz) and Honduras, with the most genetic diversity being present in both Mexico and Guatemala. Here, we have a field of chayote in Mexico.

Just to finish my elongated riff on names, another name for the vegetable which is used in Guatemala and El Salvador is güisquil or huisquil, which is derived from another Nahuatl name for it, huitzli. Here we have a Guatemalan singing the praises of the güisquil.

But to come back to my wife and me, standing in front of that table on the Via Verde. The vegetables’ anonymous grower was offering them for free to passers-by. I was hesitant, but my wife was bolder. She reminded me that we were having some old friends over for dinner the next day, why not try the spiny pumpkins out on them? But we don’t know how to prepare them, I objected. My wife waved off that objection, immediately doing a search on the internet. Hey presto, she found what sounded like a pretty easy recipe, explained in a video by a lady from Calabria in southern Italy, who mentioned in passing that the spiny pumpkin was particularly popular in her region – readers should note this link of the spiny pumpkin to Calabria, as we shall come back to it in a minute. My doubts brushed aside, we picked up five of these little spiny pumpkins and loaded them up in our rucksacks.

The next day, preparations started early. As recommended by the Calabrian lady, I peeled the pumpkins with a potato peeler – the spines were a little annoying but no more than that. Then I opened them up to take out the stone, after which I cut the halves into thin slices. Then I could start on the other two ingredients, tomatoes and onions. I divided up six large tomatoes, and sliced up one small onion (the recipe called for more but I’m not a fan of onions). At which point, I handed over to my wife, who threw all the ingredients into a big bowl, added the herbs, salt, and oil, and mixed everything up thoroughly. At the right moment, she ladled the mix out into a pan and put it into the oven for 40 minutes at 180 degrees Centigrade. I throw in a photo of what the result looked like – this is actually from the Calabrian lady’s video; we forgot to take a photo since we were so busy with preparations of the dinner.

Because what we had prepared was a side dish. The main course, the pièce de resistance, was cotechino with lentils and mashed potatoes. Like that, if the side dish turned out to be a disaster, we still had the main dish to fall back on. Luckily, it all turned out well. When I carried in the side dish, I explained the whole back-story. None of our guests – three Italians and one American – had ever heard of zucche spinose (in the case of the Italians) or chayote (in the case of the American). We all tried the dish with a little trepidation, but luckily it tasted really good. To me, the spiny pumpkins tasted like a cross between zucchini and cucumber. They went well with the tomatoes.

We didn’t finish the dish, so my wife froze the remains. When we get back from Florence where we are at the moment (to see an exhibition on Fra’ Angelico), we’ll try it out on our son too.

I fear we’ll never make the dish again, unless our anonymous grower on Lake Como is kind enough to make next year’s crop available to passers-by, because you cannot grow spiny pumpkins in the north of Italy (except, as we have seen, in Lake Como’s microclimate). As a result, northern Italians have no culinary experience with it – which is why our three Italian guests, all from Milan, had never heard of it. Of course, we could travel down to Calabria. Because, I discovered, Calabria is a “hot spot” for the growth and consumption in Italy of the spiny pumpkin. This is a consequence of one of the many individual rivulets that made up the giant global flow of plants out of the Americas after the continent’s accidental discovery by Columbus. When, in 1502, the Spaniards took over the Kingdom of Naples, of which Calabria was part, they carried the spiny pumpkin from their new dominions in Mesoamerica to their new dominions in southern Italy. And the plant took particular root in Calabria.

But we can’t go to Calabria just to eat spiny pumpkin! I’ll have to come up with an exciting trip full of new things that we’ve never done before if I’m ever going to persuade my wife. I have one or two things in mind. There’s the Riace Bronzes in Reggio Calabria, which we’ve never seen. There’s some old Christian mosaics in a monastery up in the Calabrian mountains, mentioned by John Julius Norwich in one of his books, which we’ve never seen. I’ve got the whole winter to come up with some more things to see and do …

Milan, 6 November 2025

My wife and I were down in Sicily recently. Our daughter and her partner came over with the grandson and they decided to spend a week down in the very far south of the island, near one of Sicily’s three promontories, Capo Passero (if I mention this detail, it’s because it plays a role later). The house they rented gave directly onto the beach and our grandson spent many happy hours digging holes, making sandcastles, and braving the – relatively small – waves that broke onto the beach.

In between these sessions on the beach, we managed to get in brief visits to Noto and Syracuse, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Here’s a photo of the cathedral in Noto.

And here is one of the square in front of the cathedral in Syracuse.

It was while I was wandering the streets of Syracuse that I noticed this flag – every public building had one.

I discovered that it is the official flag of the region of Sicily (which is why I normally saw it flying along with the Italian national flag and the EU flag).

I’m a bit of a flag man – many years ago, quite soon after I started this blog, I wrote a post about what I considered to be the most elegant national flags. So of course I focused in on this flag. What really intrigued me about it was that symbol in the middle: a face from which emanate three legs bent at the knee.

I quickly established that this symbol is called a triskeles, Greek for three-legged. It was a popular symbol on coins. The earliest numismatic representation of it (from around 465 BCE) is on coins from the Greek statelet of Pamphylia, in what is now southern Turkey.

The triskeles was used in varying formats on Greek coins for several centuries thereafter, but it was most closely associated with the coins of Agathocles, Tyrant of Syracuse from 317 BCE, and self-proclaimed king of Sicily from 304 BCE, until his death in 289 BCE. On this coin, it is the main decoration on the reverse side of the coin, because Agathocles adopted it as a personal symbol of his reign.

Agathocles brought an important modification to the design, placing a Gorgon’s head as the central hub from which the legs emanate. He also added wings to the feet.

On this Syracusan coin, instead, it is used as the mint mark.

It seems that Agathocles chose the triskeles as his symbol because it mirrored the (roughly) triangular shape of Sicily.

The Greek name for the island was Trinacria, which means three headlands. The three headlands in question were those at the “corners” of the island: Capo Peloro, to the north of Messina, Capo Passero, all the way down south of Syracuse (and close to where we spent our little Sicilian holiday), and Capo Lilibeo, close to Marsala. The choice by Agathocles of the triskeles as his personal symbol was no doubt meant to underline his ambition – realised in the last years of his life – to be ruler of the whole of Sicily.

None of Agathocles’s heirs who were still alive when he died managed to succeed him as king of Sicily. In fact, he was formally reviled after his death, with all statues of him throughout Sicily being destroyed. Nevertheless, his triskeles continued to be used as a symbol for the island. After the Romans had turned the island into a province of its Empire, they added three ears of wheat to the Sicilian triskeles, apparently to underline the province’s role as a granary for Rome (and took the wings off the feet).

With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the use of the triskeles seems to have disappeared in Sicily. But it came roaring back in 1282, when, in what has become known as the War of Sicilian Vespers, the Sicilians rebelled against their French Angevin overlords and invited the King of Aragon to take their place. The Sicilians created a flag to carry into battle.

It was made up of the red and yellow colours of Aragon (but also the colours of the communes of Palermo and Corleone, where the revolt started) with a triskeles at its centre (where the Roman ears of wheat had disappeared and the wings brought back, but this time attached to the head).

After twenty years, peace was concluded and the House of Aragon ruled Sicily for the next 400 years or so.

In 1848, some 600 years after that first burst of rebelliousness, and when the whole of Europe was being shaken by revolutionary outbursts, the Sicilians had another bout of rebellion and ousted their Bourbon overlords. The movement of course needed a flag, so the triskeles was rolled out again, but this time it was affixed to the red, white and green tricolour, itself created in 1789 by Italian revolutionaries copying their counterparts in France.

Alas, the revolt, and the flag, lasted only a year, until the Bourbons took back control of the island. But then, a mere ten years or so later, in 1860, when Garibaldi and his thousand volunteers disembarked in Sicily on his way to conquering the island and the boot of Italy, the Sicilian rebels dusted off this flag to fight behind. That rebellion was successful this time. Or maybe it wasn’t, because Sicily shucked off its Bourbon overlords but only to become part of the new Italian State, where national unity was strongly promoted and regional diversity quashed. So of course the triskeles disappeared from the tricolour flag.

Then, at the tail end of the Second World War and after 80 years as part of the new Italian State, separatism reared its head in Sicily. In the chaos created by the Allies’ invasion of Sicily and the collapse of the national government, the Movement for the Independence of Sicily was formed. Of course, it created its own flag which naturally enough sported a triskeles, a bright red one in this case. I’ve no idea why the separatists chose this colour for its triskeles, or the colour of the flag’s background – perhaps simply the red and yellow now traditionally seen as Sicily’s colours?

It was a strange movement, which pulled in people from the left and the right of the political spectrum but also had links with the mafia and the island’s traditional bandits. Indeed, the darker, criminal elements of the movement spawned an armed force, the Volunteer Army for the Independence of Sicily. It, too, created its own, triskeles-bearing, flag.

This “army” attacked Carabinieri barracks and made general mayhem but was eventually crushed. In the meantime, the national government bought off the separatists by promising Sicily a special autonomous status (as it did to other regions on the rim of the country: Sardinia, Val d’Aosta, and Trentino-Alto Adige).

In the decades after the War, Italy’s regions, which had been politically moribund since the country’s unification, slowly clawed back their political importance. Finally, in 1970, the country’s first regional elections took place, while in 2001 a constitutional amendment gave the regions greater say in policy-making.

With the regions’ increasing political importance came the desire to create their own flags, banners, armorial bearings, and so on. Sicily was no different. Its regional parliament approved a first flag in 1995.

Its design explicitly harked back to the flag created by the rebels in 1282 (although the colours of the background were switched around), but instead of the triskeles the region’s coat of arms was placed in the flag’s centre. This did include the triskeles but quartered it with the arms of the Normans, the Swabians, and the Aragonese, who had all been overlords of Sicily at some point.

Finally, in 2000 good sense prevailed and the regional parliament approved today’s flag with only the triskeles in the centre.

So there we are. An ancient symbol created back in the mists of time has managed to survive down through the centuries as a symbol of Sicily’s desire to shake off its overlords and now has been given a new lease of life as a symbol of – hopefully – a vibrant region in a more federalist national state.

Month: November 2025

SPINY PUMPKIN

TRISKELES