sedano

Essential ingredient in any good sugo; just before serving take it out and give it to the cat. If she's an Italian cat, she'll eat it (and maybe the carrot, too). A stalk of celery is a costa di sedano.

The leaves of sedano selvatico, or wild celery, are used as an herb. Sedano verde is the dark green, tough, stringy kind, used only to flavour sauces and soups and then discarded. The kind that's good to eat is called sedano bianco.

Other sedanos include:

sedano di montagna or di monte: this is levistico, or lovage, which tastes a bit like celery. The leaves are used in soups and salads, the roots are used to flavour digestivos, and the seeds go into marmelades and sweets.

sedano nero: produced only in Trevi, in Umbria, with dark stalks and a tender heart. Slow Food Presidium, and subject of a black celery food festival in October

sedano rapa: celeriac. Hard to find in Italy

sedano rosso: celery with rhubarb red tints to its lower stalks, and the glory of Orbassano in Piedmont. Slow Food Presidium.

The Sicilian word is accia but celery in Sicily has rather deeper roots than most celery. One of the colonies founded on the island in the 7th-century BC by the ancient Greeks was Selinunte, named after selinos, the ancient (and modern) Greek word for wild celery or parsley that grew here; the confusion arose as they taste pretty much the same (celeriac leaves are said to be a good substitute).

Parsley/celery leaves were one of the symbols of Selinunte, and today its war and earthquake shattered ruins comprise one of the biggest archaeological sites in Italy, but only one temple has been reconstructed.