Oranges, Everywhere
There is something about oranges that feels both ancient and alive. During my travels, they have shown up in the frescoes of Pompeii at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, the open-air markets of Sur Mer, in a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice in Mexico City and an orange eaten roadside in Havana, in the orange-infused water I returned to again and again during one of the harder health seasons of my life in Charleston. Oranges have followed me — through travel and through wellness — and I have come to think of them as more than fruit and also as a thread connecting the earth to the body, the past to the present, and the places we visit to the people we become.
Having studied so much art history through text books and travel, I assumed the massive Renaissance paintings, stone sculptures, and breathtaking antiquities would be the highlights of my long awaited, first trip to Italy. And certainly they were. But it was the small, unexpected gift of oranges, particularly along its Mediterranean Sea, that turned out to be the sweetest surprise — tucked into my backpack after morning yoga sessions, shared mid-walk through ancient streets, eaten as an afternoon snack in the shade. My skin was glowing.
Oranges were everywhere — and I mean everywhere — in Italy. I watched one small Italian man in red Adidas tennis shoes shake a tree outside the hotel with a broomstick, coaxing fruit loose onto the sidewalk below. A mother wound down the ancient streets of Naples with a large load in her front bike basket and her baby on the back, unhurried, as if time itself bent around her. At breakfast, small freshly picked oranges overflowed from large hand-crafted wooden bowls, sunlight streaming in and bathing everything until the fruit looked almost electric. Along the roadside, orchards blanketed the small rural farms Italians call masseria — fortified farmhouses particularly common in southern Italy's region.
Oranges are ubiquitous in Italian art, but their presence in the paintings of Pompeii, particularly, is a subject of scholarly debate. True sweet oranges were not widely introduced to the Mediterranean until centuries after the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, and archaeobotanical evidence supports what art historians have long suspected: carbonized seeds of citrons and lemons have been physically recovered from several sites, while oranges are absent from the botanical record entirely. Yet citrus fruits — lemons and citrons in particular — appear clearly in several of the city's most celebrated frescoes and mosaics, already recognized as symbols of luxury in Roman art. The round, orange-colored fruits depicted in these paintings are now believed to be apricots, peaches, or certain citron varieties rather than true oranges. Interestingly, while the fruit itself was unknown to the ancient Romans, the color was not — and some of the famous "Pompeian Red" walls shifted toward an orange hue over time, transformed by the extreme heat of the eruption itself.
For example, the House of the Fruit Orchard (Casa del Frutteto) contains some of the most stunning botanical frescoes in Pompeii. In the Blue Room, a vivid azure background serves as sky for a meticulously painted orchard — lemons, strawberry trees, pears, and pomegranates rendered with remarkable botanical precision. Egyptian influences weave throughout: symbols of the cult of Osiris, Apis bull imagery, and Dionysian theatrical masks drifting through the garden scenes like whispered myths. The Black Room takes a different approach, using a dark background to evoke an evening garden, anchored by a central fig tree and a serpent — a Roman symbol of prosperity and protection.
In Renaissance art, oranges symbolized wealth, status, and fertility. As rare and costly imports in Northern Europe, they carried particular prestige during the 15th and 16th centuries. Artists frequently incorporated them into still lifes and religious paintings — most notably in Botticelli's Primavera, where they evoke the Medici family's power, and in the Arnolfini Portrait, where they signal prosperity and worldly refinement.
Italy has a way of giving you more than you came for. I arrived chasing masterpieces — Caravaggios in dim chapels, marble worn smooth by centuries of hands — and left carrying something simpler. The memory of juice running down my wrist on a cobblestone street, skin warm from the afternoon sun, nowhere to be and no desire to be anywhere else. In Naples, a kind woman had handed me the orange from a crate outside her shop, barely glancing up. No transaction, no ceremony. In Italy, the oranges weren't in the itinerary. But the best things never really are.
In Villefranche-sur-Mer, (South of) France, just outside the Église Saint-Michel — a stunning Baroque church known for its ornate interior, historic organ, and iconic bright yellow facade — open-air markets hum with life as locals gather their daily provisions. Oranges as large as coconuts dominate the tables, and I needed one white plastic bag for each one I picked. They were impossibly sweet, and freshly squeezed, they made a perfect addition to sparkling water as my partner Dan, his brother Thomas, his sister Frances, and her husband Frank settled in by the sea for a late afternoon lunch. It was a savoring and sobering moment — taking in the singular sweetness of the South of France's local harvest, and soaking up every sentence, every laugh, every warm exchange among family.
A celebrated visitor to this region, Claude Monet painted citrus trees — including oranges and lemons — during his trips to the Mediterranean coast, spanning the South of France and the Italian border, in 1884 and 1888. Captivated by the quality of light, he produced works such as Branch of Oranges (1884), often seeking to capture the vibrancy of citrus against the brilliant blue sea. Like The Lemon Grove in Bordighera (1884), these paintings were created en plein air. Also, Paul Cézanne is the painter most deeply associated with the South of France — particularly Provence — and is renowned for his still lifes featuring fruit, most notably Apples and Oranges (1899).
Traveling the Cuban countryside in August, I would often stop to eat an orange — a welcome break from the heat and the un-air-conditioned 1950s Chevrolet my driver Julian had inherited from his grandfather, its engine kept alive, miraculously, by a repurposed tomato can. We were moving through a region about 140 kilometers east of Havana, one of the Caribbean's most significant citrus-growing corridors, where vast orchards reshape the landscape for miles. On the open roads, flatbed trucks rolled ahead of us, loaded with workers and the day's harvest — oranges packed and stacked, heading to market. At sunset, the light caught the groves and everything shimmered — color and stillness all at once, almost painterly.
Cuba has a rich citrus history. Once a major export sector, the industry centered on Valencia oranges, Marsh grapefruit, and Persian limes, with key growing areas in Matanzas, Ciego de Ávila, and the Isle of Youth. Following a sharp decline after the fall of the Soviet bloc — compounded by hurricanes, drought, and citrus greening disease — production shifted away from fresh exports toward processed juice. Today, what was once a thriving agricultural economy has become something quieter: citrus is a luxury in many Cuban homes, its harvest mostly directed largely toward tourist areas and international markets. There is something bittersweet about that, in every sense of the word. But if a host offers you an orange upon arrival, accept it as the gift it is — a gesture of welcome that costs more than it appears and more than one month’s ration.
Cuban painters understood the significance of citrus in the Cuban culture long before the economists did. Amelia Peláez, a leading figure of the Cuban avant-garde, returned again and again to citrus in her cubist-inspired still lifes. In works like Naturaleza muerta en rojo (1938), radiant color and architectural arabesques frame tropical fruits, restating the 19th-century poetic conceit of Cuba as a land of sensual abundance. Antonio Gattorno, another 20th-century master, struck a similar chord in Frutas del Trópico (c. 1930), where citrus anchors a broader vision of the fertile Cuban countryside. What strikes me now, looking back at those canvases, is how the painters captured something the agricultural reports never quite could: the feeling of a landscape generous beyond measure, glowing with the same light that caught Julian's windshield on those long August afternoons.
The orange I ate by the side of the road outside of Havana was ordinary — imperfect, already warm from the heat, nothing remarkable in taste or circumstance. A local had handed it to me without much fanfare, the way you pass something to a stranger when you have enough to share. I ate it standing up, juice on my hands, the road stretching out in both directions. It wasn't the best orange I'd ever had. But it was the one I remember. Much like that trip to Cuba — it was bright, a little fleeting, and just sweet enough to stay with you long after it was gone.
Citrus has deep roots in my adopted city of Charleston — deeper than most people realize. In the 1730s, early settlers planted oranges, lemons, and limes as high-status commodities, and by 1747 the region was exporting hundreds of thousands of oranges before a series of severe freezes forced a slow retreat from large-scale cultivation. At the height of that era, "The Orange Garden" — a fashionable alfresco concert venue and promenade near present-day Orange Street — stood as a symbol of wealth, pleasure, and Lowcountry elegance. That spirit hasn't entirely faded. Oranges are still woven into the rhythm of the winter season here, their fragrance as much a part of the holidays as anything wrapped in ribbon.
Almost a decade ago, struggling with my health, I began a detox that felt less like a wellness trend and more like a reckoning. I eliminated meat, dairy, sugar, and alcohol, and spent weekends on nothing but water, oranges, and sea salt. It sounds stark. It was. I would finish an intense hot yoga practice completely drenched — wrung out in every sense — hanging on by a thread, and come back to that citrus water like it was saving me. In some ways, it was.
Doctors will tell you the science: orange juice can cleanse the gut, alkalize the body, support the liver's natural detoxification pathways. Sea salt replenishes electrolytes stripped by heat and sweat. The body, given the right conditions, knows how to reset itself. I didn't think about any of that at the time. I just know it moved me somewhere better — quieter, cleaner, more like myself.
Ten years later, the protocol has stayed with me. No dairy, no alcohol, no sugar — not as punishment, but as a kind of promise I made to my body and kept. My nutritionist's master smoothie formula is still my daily anchor: one part water, one part greens, one part fruits and vegetables, one part citrus juice. Simple ratios, endlessly adaptable, always grounding. And most days, a lot of oranges. Sliced at my kitchen counter, eaten slowly, without ceremony. Some rituals earn their permanence through setbacks — the big breakthrough, the before-and-after. Others just quietly work. This one started in a season of survival, now it's just how I live. Small, worth keeping anyway.
Oranges, I have come to understand, are not simply a fruit. It is a record — of place, of season, of the body's quiet negotiations with time. Oranges show up in the frescoes of ancient walls and the bins of ordinary markets in Sur Mer, in a Naples bicycle basket and the roadside pause of a long Cuban afternoon. Citrus has marked the hardest seasons of my life and some of the most luminous. The thread running through all of it — through Italy and Cuba and France and Charleston, through illness and recovery, through leaving and coming back — has always been the same: something bright, something perishable, something that asks you to slow down long enough to actually taste it. I have learned to pay attention to such things. They are, I think, how the world reminds you it is still worth being in it.
