I’m starting with Sardinia here, not because it comes before Sicily alphabetically, but because I want it to be the destination of your next Italian holiday. Naturally, I think all the islands should be a priority, but realistically, you have to choose one as a starting point, and this should be it. It’s wild. The island lies about 150 miles off Italy’s west coast, just opposite the mainland regions of Campania and Calabria. Corsica is a short ferry ride to the north, while Tunisia is due south. Sicily, which is just a bit larger than Sardinia, is about 200 miles southeast and is home to around 3.5 times the number of inhabitants.

Sardinia was one of the earliest places in Europe to be settled and has historical ruins dating back more than ten thousand years. Things really started to get going among local tribes in the Stone Age, circa 3200 BCE, and by 2000 BCE, settlers had arrived from mainland Europe. The Nuragic culture, the island’s most important native community, survived until the third century BCE. The vestiges of this ancient society are still present all over Sardinia, mainly in the form of nuraghe, fortified stone complexes that rise from fields and perch on hills all across the island.

By the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, things started heating up in the Mediterranean. The Greeks and Carthaginians were on the move and in competition with each other. When you consider Sardinia’s dominant position between North Africa and the European continent, it’s logical that the Carthaginians would establish colonies there. The evidence for their vast trade network is still preserved at sites like Tharros on the Sinis peninsula. The still thriving bottarga (cured gray mullet roe) tradition of the area testifies to the enduring influence of Carthage.

The Romans took over in 238 BCE (though they were unable to completely eradicate the stubborn Nuragic culture, especially in the Barbagia sub-region, which still boasts a reputation for defiance) and reigned over the island for seven centuries. The island was attacked and conquered in the Middle Ages by waves of invaders, including the Vandals, Byzantines, and Arabs. But it asserted self- rule by four kingdoms until the fourteenth century, when Spain’s Aragon rulers began to exert influence amid attacks from the maritime republics of Genoa and Pisa.

Throughout its millennia of civilization, Sardinia has maintained a strong rural character, and does so to this day. There are twice as many sheep (three million!) as people on the island, and about one-third of all of Italy’s sheep reside there. Their main product is pecorino (sheep’s-milk cheese), which takes countless forms. The best known are Pecorino Romano (in spite of its name, almost all of it is made in Sardinia, not near Rome) and Pecorino Sardo, salted cheeses with a sharp, piquant flavor. There are other wonderful cheeses, too, like Casizolu and Fiore Sardo. Since antiquity, durum wheat has been an important product and is responsible for the forms and flavors of Sardinia’s intricate pasta shapes like and ornamental breads.

Sicily isn’t quite as historic as Sardinia, having only been settled around 8000 BCE. From that point on, civilization advanced slowly until Carthage began launching expeditions from North Africa, establishing colonies in western Sicily around 850 BCE. A century later, Greek settlers landed in the eastern part of the island and developed their own important settlements at Syracuse and Gela. Greek expansion on the island brought Sicily into Hellenic culture’s own identity. The Greeks built temples, too, including the spectacular sanctuaries at Agrigento and Selinunte.

Tension between the Carthaginians and Romans flared up in the third century BCE, and the outcome of the resulting Punic Wars was Roman supremacy. The Romans relied on Sicily for its grain, grapes, and oil during their seven- hundred-year reign there. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, a series of wars for the island followed. Vandals and Goths vied for power and ultimately the Eastern Roman Empire (aka the Byzantine Empire) took control of the island until the ninth century. Byzantine rule was challenged by Arab armies led by the emir of Tunisia beginning in 827, and after nearly a century of warfare, most of the island came under Arab rule. The period coincided with a golden age of technology, economics, agriculture, and philosophy in the Arab world. Land reforms and improved irrigation massively improved Sicily’s productivity and transformed arid deserts into lush gardens and citrus groves; the advancements are visible even today. Thousand- year-old qanats (irrigation canals) continue to supply Palermo’s suburbs with water.

The period of Arab rule was an impactful one in the culinary sense. Not only did new farming practices improve crop yields, but they also changed what could be grown on the island. Eggplant and sugarcane arrived for the first time, while citrus, almonds, and pistachios flourished in a way they never had before. Palermo (then known by its Arabic name, Balarm) became one of the most sophisticated cities on Earth, and following the expulsion of the Arab settlers by Norman invaders in the eleventh century, the island’s culture and cuisine continued to flourish as the Normans built on their predecessors’ successes.

The beginning of the Spanish period in the fourteenth century was a prosperous one, and ultimately peaked in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when nobility embellished Sicilian churches and cities with funds from colonial plundering and introduced new ingredients from Spain’s Mesoamerican conquests. During this period, tomatoes, potatoes, prickly pears, squashes, beans, and chocolate arrived and enriched the local gastronomic culture. The wealth and stability didn’t last, though. The stunning novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa perfectly traces the late-nineteenth-century decline of the island and its wealthy patron class in the time just before and after Sicily fell to Italian unification.

The Pontine Islands, off the coast of Lazio, were resettled in modern times by Spanish Bourbon aristocracy and Neapolitan peasants, which is why their dialect and cuisines are so closely related to Naples. They share a somewhat common history with Ischia and Procida, farther south. The diets are rich in brothy soups likepesce all’acqua pazza and zuppa di cicerchie . Ventotene’s lentil soup is nearly identical to that of Linosa—an example of two distant rural island cultures on opposite sides of Italy coincidentally mirroring one another.

The three main islands in the Bay of Naples— Capri, Ischia, and Procida—have a robust relationship with the mainland, so their cuisines share a lot in common with the Amalfi Coast and Naples and are particularly rich in seafood. This is in contrast to other islands, where risk of invasion meant harvesting seafood was dangerous and mostly avoided. But the arcipelago napoletano has been an established tourist destinations for centuries (as opposed to the other small islands, which only saw a tourism boom beginning between the 1960s and 1980s).

Lying about 12 miles off the coast of Puglia’s Gargano Peninsula, the Tremiti archipelago is composed of five islands: San Domino, San Nicola, Capraia, Cretaccio, and Pianosa. Only the first two are inhabited. Due to their tiny year-round population and reliance on tourism, there’s not a huge litany of local dishes, and you’re more likely to find generic seafood specialties like spaghetti with clams or fried calamari. There are a few bread soups on the island that speak to just how frugal the islanders were, never letting even stale bread go to waste.