Duci ciuri di primavera! Discover our new map!

Together with the spring, came the new map Citymap Sicilia, which will be distributed in the coming days. You will find in the best restaurants, hotels, shops and all the most exclusive places of Catania, Siracusa and Taormina.

For the new edition, we thought of a cover … sweet! A cassata which celebrates the colors, the scents and flavors of summer: a “duci” (sweet) spring’s flower, in fact. Cassata is the queen of the Sicilian pastry and we offer you our top 5 curiosities!

• It is said that the cassata was born at the hands of an Arab shepherd who decided to mix the cottage cheese – a typical cheese was produced in Sicily for some time – with sugar, and to call this cake “Quas’at” or how the bowl in which he had mixed the cake.
• At the court of the Emir, in Piazza Kalsa in Palermo, the chefs decided to wrap the dough into a sheet of pastry and bake in the oven. Thus was born the first real version of the cassata, cassata baked. 
• At the convent of the Martorana in Palermo, during the Norman rule, the nuns invented marzipan (or pasta Martorana), made with almond flour. With the Spanish domination, came also the sponge cake and chocolate in Sicily. The pastry was replaced with sponge cake and ricotta were added chocolate chips. With marzipan paste were created the decorations which were added also those created with candied fruit, called “pumpkin“. He arrived so to the modern cassata.
• The cassata produced by Sicilian nuns was a product reserved for the Easter period. Even an official document of the first synod of Sicilian bishops, in Mazara del Vallo in 1575, speaks of the cassata as a dessert indispensable during the holidays.
• A well-known Sicilian proverb says “Tintu è cu nun mancia a cassata a matina ri Pasqua” ( “Sad man who doesn’t eat cassata on Easter morning”). Today there are many local variations: from the simplest with candied orange peel to those enriched with different candied fruits.