The quest to find these game changers leads me to less traveled areas of Sicily, like Trapani, Syracuse, and the Aeolian Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea. What binds them all, I find, is a skillful trick of combining innovation with respect for tradition. (This is, after all, a place that has an ingrained, almost tribal reverence for tradition.) Most left Sicily—a place that seemed locked into cycles of corruption, crime, and neglect—as a matter of necessity but returned to reinvent a family business or to start one that they felt the island lacked.

My search for the new people changing the island was spurred by a conversation about recent Sicilian wine vintages with Ghino Poggialini, who runs one of my favorite wine stores in Tuscany, where I live. He introduced me to the wines from Serramarrocco, where—improbably, given the heat of Sicily—they make an elegant Bordeaux-style blend, albeit with a distinctly southern note. It turns out that the winery was started a few years ago by a young Sicilian baron who returned from London to take over the business. I want to find out what brought him home, and so begin my journey in the Trapani region, near his property, about an hour west of Palermo. In the spring, this fertile plain with vineyards and abandoned farmhouses is as green as Ireland and highlighted with fluorescent-red poppies. Now, in late summer, the earth is gold and beige with fields of winter melons ripening under the sun. The grapes are fat on browning vines—the source of a large portion (more than sixty percent) of the island's wine. The forty-one-year-old Baron Marco di Serramarrocco has a prime site not far from the hilltop town of Erice, a felicitous piece of terroir for wine with its high altitude, plentiful sunshine, and cool nights. The views, too, are vintage: of the Egadi Islands in the Mediterranean and, nearby, Segesta, a simple, perfectly preserved fifth-century Doric temple. The baron tells me that his family has owned the property since 1619. In fact, the Phoenicians are thought to have produced their own wines here—ancient vases with vines inside have been discovered on the land. As we make our way around the vineyard, Baron Serramarrocco tells me that until 2000, the family treated winemaking as a hobby, mostly for their own, and friends', consumption. In 2000, Serramarrocco's grandmother started bottling the wine for sale, but she died a year later, and it was at this point that the baron, who worked for Lloyd's insurance in London, came back.

His departure from Sicily as a child had been chilling and sudden. His father, an investigative journalist for the newspaper Corriere della Sera, got hold of a copy of the file on him compiled by the terrorist group the Red Brigades—which included information on when his son arrived at and left school. The future baron was promptly sent abroad. (The Sicilian Mafia were less inclined to target the nobility—even a nosy reporter—than they were the police and lawyers who were trying to shut them down, whereas the Red Brigades were Marxists for whom blue blood was bait.) Three decades later, he was back.