Fico d' India Fico d’India (Indian Fig) or simply the prickly pear grows wild in Sicily. Strong, tough, and straggling mountainsides and roadsides this classic Sicilian plant, bears lots of fruit (it is also commercially produced), is ‘indigenous to the American Southwest and Mexico’ and was planted in Sicily by the Spanish ‘at a time when Europeans still believed that the Western Hemisphere was part of India.’ (Vincent Schiavelli).