Marasala wine, salt and windmills

Marsala is famous for more than wine and seafood, boasting some of Europe's oldest salt pans producing table salt from seawater. The area is still home to some of the windmills that were once used to pump water around the basins. Drawing salt from the water is a slow process depending upon the hot sun during the long, dry Sicilian summer.

Salt extraction in Sicily dates at least from the time of the Greeks and Romans, although the windmills were a mediaeval innovation. It still flourishes in the Marsala area, not for a lack of "dry" salt deposits in Sicily (where there are several mines), but because many cooks prefer sea salt to that harvested from other sources.

By the nineteenth century, Sicilian sea salt was exported to European countries as far away as Norway and Russia. Several of the British firms involved in other Sicilian exports, namely Marsala wine and sulpher, helped develop the international trade in sea salt.