It begins, of all places, in a ditch. Along the streams and field-edges of Sicily grows the tall wild cane the botanists call Arundo donax and everyone else calls simply canna, the giant reed that has fenced gardens and thatched roofs across the Mediterranean since before anyone was counting.
To make the island’s own little flute, the friscalettu, a craftsman goes out in the dead of winter, between about November and March, and cuts his cane by preference on the nights of a waning moon, when the old country wisdom holds that the sap has drawn down and the wood will not rot. Then he waits.
