Shapoor Safari left Kabul in 1996 after the mujahideen knocked on his door and tried to order him into their ranks. He fled first to Pakistan, then to Iran where he washed cars and learned to solder metal, then to Turkey, where he worked in a bread factory, putting mini brioches on the conveyor belt to go into the ovens. Two friends told him there was a boat going to Italy. He paid $3,000 for his place.

“It was 2002. It was the first boat to go to Italy,” he told me without pride. “There were 150 of us. Afghans, Pakistanis, Iranians, even a few Iraqis. Men, women, families, children also. On the second day, food and water ran out. The crew gave some biscuits to the children. On the third day, the captain began to sell bottles of water for $100.”

On the fourth day, there was a storm and the engine stopped and the boat heaved violently in the waves for three hours, until they got it started again. On the fifth day, they were rescued by the Italian navy and taken to a camp in Calabria. In those days, the numbers of migrants and refugees was far fewer, processing was faster. In two or three months, Safari had documents allowing him to work.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Students learn to cook at the Astalli Centre for migrants in Palermo. Photograph: Alex Majoli / Magnum Photos/The Observer

For seven years, he travelled all over Italy: Milan, Turin, Rome, Venice. He took jobs in supermarkets, as a dishwasher, making pizza; one summer, he picked olives, another tomatoes. But he never managed to get a permanent contract. He was alone. He looked at the map, saw Sicily being “kicked” by the Italian boot, and got on a train to Palermo. There, he seemed to find his feet. He worked for a year in the kitchen of the Teatro Massimo, from morning until midnight, earning €25 a day. Then he left and went to work in other restaurant kitchens, watching, learning, cooking.

Food is as much, or more, about identity, memory and family as it is about sustenance. Sicily’s history is one of successive empires, “dominations” as Sicilians term them – Greek, Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine, Gothic, Arab, Norman, Spanish, and most recently, Sicilians laugh, Italian – that have come ashore and into its cooking pots. Safari told me: “Palermo is different, I feel here people are looking forward to meeting new people. Sicily,” he added laughing, “is not Europe!”

Its culture comes as much from its position as a Mediterranean island as it does from its inclusion in a relatively recent Italian union. Palermo’s mayor, Leoluca Orlando, likes to say that it is a Middle Eastern city that happens to be in the EU. The sweet and sour taste of Eastern agrodolce is key to its cuisine. Its most famous dishes are pasta con le sarde, a sardine sauce often made with capers and raisins, and almond granita, the descendent of an Ottoman sherbet. Levantine pine nuts, pistachios and sesame seeds are generously scattered over gelato or spaghetti. In Palermo, couscous with fish is a staple family dish.

Since the Arab Spring in 2011, the fall of Gaddafi and the subsequent breakdown of law and order in Libya, roughly 400,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean and landed in southern Italy and Sicily. The majority are young African men, but before them came Bangladeshis and Tamils; in the 1990s, Tunisians came over to work in the fields. As much as the recent African influx comes with political, ethnic, economic and even criminal complications, there is a part of Sicilian tradition that identifies with the new arrivals. Sicily has always been an island of immigrants and, in the 20th century, of emigrants. How, I wondered, given this background, are the more recent migrants encountering a new continent around Sicilian tables and integrating in its kitchens?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dishes of octopus at Ballarò Market, one of the most ancient open-air markets in Palermo. Photograph: Alex Majoli / Magnum Photos/The Observer

Safari is now head chef at Moltivolti in Palermo, half-restaurant and half a shared space for NGOs working with migrants, a utopian bubble in the midst of a big city and a bigger issue. His kitchen team comprises a Sardinian, two Senegalese and an Iraqi. The menu is international: from Sicily, pasta with swordfish and aubergine or broccoli, anchovies and raisins, or artichokes and bottarga; Italian lasagne; hummus from Jordan; tabbouleh from Lebanon; falafel from Palestine; Argentinian sweet potato; Iraqi kebab with pumpkin; and Tunisian brik with tuna.

“Do you like cooking?” I asked. At this question, finally, Safari smiled. “When I am in the kitchen, when I am cooking or teaching people – it is messy and people are stirring and arguing, I feel the same as I did with my family all around.”

Moltivolti lies at the heart of the Ballarò neighbourhood of Palermo. Alleyways strung with washing wind into piazzas overlooked by crumbling madonnas. For many years, Ballarò was a dilapidated, clannish ghetto, increasingly depopulated as families moved to airier suburbs. Several years ago, new arrivals began renting here and now the area is an extraordinary mix of mafia, migrants and hip young social entrepreneurs. In the market that runs like a spine through the neighbourhood, Bangladeshi groceries sell cassava, okra, scotch bonnet chillies and mangoes beside stalls piled with springtime artichokes and still-warm ricotta, while Sicilians yell the virtues of flashing silver sardines, lemon granita and freshly fried chickpea fritters, known as panelle. “We are in the middle here,” Claudio Arestivo, one of the co-founders of Moltivolti, told me, “I feel we are living an experiment.”

Not far from Moltivolti is the Astalli Centre for migrants, housed in several buildings built around a gothic cloister. “The Jesuits help us a lot,” Emanuele Cardella, the director, told me. (In Ballarò, and all over Sicily, the Catholic church is active in providing frontline services for migrants). Cardella gave me a tour of the classrooms and workshops where they give lessons in computer science, Italian, English, tailoring, carpentry, ceramics, and the dining room where they feed 100 people every day for breakfast. In the kitchen, Cardella explained, they have also run a cooking course for several months, for 10 or 12 migrants at a time. He showed me photographs of several groups, smiling for the camera in front of the centre’s stoves: women and men, headscarves and beards. “Afghan women, people from Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco, Tunisia.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Preparing lasagne, Moltivolti-style. Photograph: Alex Majoli / Magnum Photos/The Observer

The course deliberately features half Italian and half foreign cuisine. “I discovered tikka masala!” Cardella told me, kissing his fingertips enthusiastically. “It’s great! It is amazing the infinity of combinations of new tastes to discover. If we mix different cultures, we increase exponentially our discovery of new taste. It’s amazing to see, for example, a Nigerian cook discover Indian spices.”

I met Ricardo Pizzuto and Samuel Torres, who oversee the cooking class, as they were teaching a group of children to sing the Italian national anthem accompanied by bongo drums. Pizzuto said he had never explained a new technique or a new ingredient without someone from the class finding a correlation to their own culinary background. I told them that I had seen three aubergine dishes on the menu at Moltivolti – baba ganoush, caponata and a dish of aubergine with mint, parmesan and eggs described as Lebanese. I half-joked that they were more or less the same thing, but Torres shook his head. “No,” he said, with conviction. “They are different. If we mix them, we lose their identity.”

I began to see that the Sicilian model of integration as less a melting pot of assimilation than as layers of different cultures, each distinct and delicious, what a third-generation pastry-maker described to me, pointing at a millefeuille, as “stratificazione”.

“We are just like a mosaic,” mayor Orlando told me, proudly, adding another metaphor. Despite an “Italians first” rhetoric gaining traction and votes in the March national elections, Italy’s shift to the right on immigration issues has been less pronounced in the south and Sicily. The new interior minister recently visited the island and declared he’d had enough of Sicily being “the refugee camp of Europe”, and told migrants: “Get ready to pack your bags.” Mayor Orlando responded in a written statement: “We are severely worried about declarations which sound like propaganda slogans, that can compromise the well-established culture of welcoming and human rights respect of all, without splitting citizens with labels such as ‘locals’ and ‘migrants’.” Orlando has long championed migration as a human right and has launched a movement to abolish the residency permit. Just as prohibition gave rise to gangsters and cartel violence accompanies the drug trade, Orlando argues that limiting people’s freedom of movement creates the opportunity for criminal enterprise. “Our project is to be different but to be equal,” he told me in April. “To be different because we are human beings. To be equal because we are human beings.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Growing produce in Ballarò neighbourhood. Photograph: Alex Majoli / Magnum Photos/The Observer

The juxtaposition is evident walking along the Via Maqueda, the Roman road that runs along the meridian of the city, where Bangladeshis fry samosas and pakoras between gelato shops and pizzerias. Side alleys ring with the clatter and chatter of informal front-room restaurants set up by Senegalese women have set up kitchens in their apartments. The woman behind one of these, Ami Fall, served up great mounds of maafe (spicy peanut stew) and yassa fish with onions when I ate there one lunchtime with three teenagers from Gambia, Guinea and Senegal who had been in Sicily only a few months and were finding it hard to get used to a diet of pasta. Fall has been in Palermo for more than 15 years and now cooks pasta al forno, lasagne, Moroccan couscous. “My children eat everything!” she said, laughing as a woman with curly blond hair poked her head around the door and said “Salve!”

“Hey!” replied Fall. “How’s your mother doing?”

“Not well.”

“I’m so sorry!” Fall turned back to me. “It’s like family here, she is a neighbour, just like a sister, she helps the kids with their homework.”

“I’m going to get a crepe,” called the neighbour. “Do you want one?”

“Some Sicilians are really like Africans!” Fall said, laughing.

As much as people are different, they can’t help mixing, especially when they eat. One afternoon at Moltivolti I met Safa Neji, who had come to see her Iraqi chef friend. Her family had moved to Sicily from Tunisia more than 20 years ago, she has an Italian passport and goes back often to visit relatives. “My grandfather complains when my mother makes him couscous,” she laughed. “He says she has lost her Tunisian-ness and makes it in the Sicilian way.” I asked her if she felt Tunisian or Sicilian, realising, even as I said it, that it was a crass question. “I am me,” she said simply. “There is no difference between Palermo and north Africa. Tunisia,” she pointed, as if towards the next neighbourhood, “is right here.”

‘Arabs brought the first lemons a thousand years ago. Spanish brought tomatoes from the New World’

Neji showed me photographs of the feast she and her mother had prepared to celebrate her graduation. There were two tables, each covered with a red tablecloth, side by side. One was laid out with Tunisian food: a mound of couscous with chickpeas, carrots laid against the ramparts, meat on a separate platter, fried brik triangles, Tunisian frittata “which is similar to the Sicilian but has parsley”. The second table was laid with Italian food: small pizzas and tarts with tomatoes and courgettes, everything on the Italian side was speared with a toothpick. I said it was interesting that even the method of eating, traditionally with your hands, on the Tunisian table and on the Italian, with an implement, was separate but equally represented. Neji nodded and, laughing, said she and her mother always liked to eat with their hands when they were in Tunisia, but grandfather would admonish them, as if it were something a bit retrograde.

While young Sicilians are interested in the spicy new flavours, their parents tend to retain a more conservative palate. But traditions evolve: I met several migrants who worked as housekeepers and cooked for middle-class Sicilian families, learning family favourites and introducing their own recipes. Ambi Aram from Mauritius – another multiracial island, where Indians, Africans and Chinese have influenced local dishes – told me she cooks curries for the family she works for – “They like it hot and spicy!” – and often adds ginger to the Italian soffrito of onions and garlic. “I modify. I invent. Happiness is when we get to know another tradition, another taste.”

This melding and blurring is also taking place in restaurant kitchens, where plenty of migrants have found jobs. At one of the mayor’s favourite trattorias, Il Pipino Rosso, housed in the medieval brick alcoves of a 14th-century palazzo, the owners were so impressed with a Syrian chef who put falafel and tabbouleh on the menu that they are in the process of opening a Syrian restaurant with him in a village outside the city. Their Bangladeshi pizzaiolo, Sheikh Al Mamun, told me he sometimes makes dishes using Indian spices, adding turmeric and ginger to the minestrone, for example. The new chef, Tizziana Allegri, was excited: “It’s beautiful, Sicilians are very open to new tastes. Here people find different flavours.” And one evening, I had dinner in a typically Sicilian trattoria, one I found by chance, and saw on the menu, amid the classics, pasta alla norma, pasta with pistachios, pesto Trapanese made with almonds, and “gnocchi with swordfish, salmon shrimp and curry”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A student on one of the Astalli Centre’s cookery courses. Photograph: Alex Majoli / Magnum Photos/The Observer

When I told Sicilians that curry-pasta was creeping into their culinary repertoire, they were sceptical. But cross-cultural pollination is unavoidable. “I think all the world is mixing food because more people are coming, there is immigration, and people are travelling more, too,” Patrizia di Benedetto, the chef of the Michelin-starred Bye Bye Blues told me. For the celebrations of a local saint’s day last year, at Moltivolti they made arancini, fried rice balls, with a maafe sauce. At the Astalli Centre the chef, Ricardo, makes a ragu with Indian spices.

“Sicily is a triangle,” Bonetta dell’Oglio, the chef, slow-food activist and author explained, pointing to the tattoo of the outline of the island on her forearm. “It is divided into three valleys by three mountain ranges.” One, she explained, looked towards Italy, one towards Africa, one towards Tunisia and the Maghreb. “All of these places and dominations enriched our culture.” Dell’Oglio had invented “sushiliana”, using couscous instead of rice and fish marinated in orange, lemon, white wine, salt and sugar and wrapped in a sheet of nori, to show that new concepts could be created with Sicilian flavours. For the wasabi, she made a paste of red chilli peppers. After all, she told me, many ingredients considered Sicilian were once foreign. “The Arabs brought the first citrus, lemons and oranges and mandarins, a thousand years ago. The Spanish brought peppers and tomatoes from the New World. Tomatoes only really arrived 200 years ago. Before that, they were more ornamental plants, people didn’t trust them. Think how quickly tomatoes have become part of almost every aspect of Sicilian cuisine.”

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At Moltivolti one evening, they held a cooking class for a group of 40 students from Rotterdam studying cultural economics and entrepreneurship. They made traditional Sicilian cannoli, what was described as “Zambian polenta” – a cornmeal dish called nshima – and then Safari showed everyone how to make dumplings. He told his story through the ingredients. The spice mix of coriander, cumin, cardamom, garlic and pepper are his Afghanistan home; the flour reminds him of the Turkish bakery; the yogurt is from Iran; and the liquid to bind recalls his time on the boat when he learned the value of every single drop.

One of the Dutch professors watched as a long tongue of dough rolled through the pasta machine and was taken up by many hands as everyone cheered. “And what is better than cooking together, hearing different stories?” he said.