Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  I thank the man for the honey tasting. Isn’t it rather lonely, working on his own? I ask.

  He chooses it, he says, not being with the other prisoners. He prefers the bees, admires their industry.

  ‘They don’t need us,’ he says with forlorn passion. He seems wrapped in solitude.

  Finally, just below the point where pines and scrub begin, are the other animals, cows wandering in to some ramshackle barns and pens from the slopes where they’ve been grazing freely; sheep and goats in for milking; sows for farrowing; calves for suckling.

  ‘It’s as natural as we can make it,’ says the commissario. ‘No artificial fertilisers or pesticides. The animals aren’t stressed. They live in their natural groupings. They’re born, reared, and, occasionally, killed on the island.’

  He asks me what I make of what I’ve seen. I reply, truthfully, that I’m impressed. Even the animal shit has a different quality, smells cleaner and sweeter, than that on other farms I’ve visited.

  ‘It feels like a family-run smallholding of a hundred years ago,’ I say.

  True, it isn’t a model in the sense of modernity, order and productivity. It has that ramshackle quality of a working farm, with bits of abandoned machinery here and there, makeshift repairs, buckled fencing, battered corrugated iron roofing. But it’s properly functional. It’s for work, not for show.

  I lunch with the commissario and other warders in their canteen, and rather wish that I’d been able to eat what I had seen being cooked by the prisoners earlier.

  I’ve no idea whether it works in terms of rehabilitation. I can’t interrogate the prisoners on their views, and I wasn’t investigating re-offending rates. I’m sure that for some, work on the farm, taking responsibility for the wellbeing of animals, tending plants, watching bees make honey, really does provide a portal to a more law-abiding life, but my experiences at Pentonville taught me that many prisoners view a return inside sooner or later as an inevitable consequence of their chosen lifestyle.

  But in terms of animal husbandry, food production and human activity, Gorgona seems wholly admirable, even if it is ironic that the sheep, goats, cattle, pigs and chickens on the island live with a freedom that few farm animals enjoy on more conventional farms these days, precisely because their human managers do not.

  Back in Livorno

  I fall in love with Nicoletta the moment I see her in the Piaggio agency in Livorno. Not all scooters are ladies. On an earlier adventure I had ridden bloke-ish Bud, who’d been solid, sensible, dull and male. There’s nothing remotely bloke-ish about Nicoletta. She’s feminine in form and fibre, elegant of frame, bold of colour, steady of balance. Her voice has a seductive, half-a-bottle-of-scotch-and-twenty-Capstan-Full-Strength-a-day purr. She holds tight into the corners, and is steady on the straight run, given to the occasional shimmy as if saying ‘Just pay attention’. She has fierce acceleration if needed, although I prefer to potter at lesser speeds.

  We head south to Piombino to catch the ferry to Elba. Six months stretch out before me like a scroll without a mark on it. I have an intoxicating sense of freedom, exhilaration, and apprehension.

  So we saunter along at an amiable pace, sliding past vineyards, fields of wheat, groves of olives, dinky hilltop villages, alien industrial plant and machinery, grubby holiday developments. The sun’s bright. The tongue of tarmac unravels ahead. Into shadow, out of shadow, cool one moment, warm the next. Suddenly I smell the honeyed sweetness of broom – ‘E tu, lenta ginestra,/Che di selve odorate/Queste campagne adorni’ (And you, soft broom, gracing this vandalised countryside with fragrant bushes), as the poet, essayist and philosopher, Giacomo Leopardi describes it. Then the acid whiff of sheep. A little further down the road the taint of some industrial process. Now the tang of eucalyptus; now the rank reek of stagnant salt water.

  Car drivers flash by in air-conditioned confinement.Motorcycle riders glide past wrapped in gleaming black and the fat noise of their machines. But I do not envy them their cocooned isolation. What do they know of the real pleasures of travel? The sun’s high in the heavens. Wind tempers the heat of the day. I’m at one with Nicoletta, the elements, the world. The call of the wild, the romance of the open road, the joy of travel. Poop Poop.

  I finally park Nicoletta in the bowels of the ferry, and make my way up on deck, exhilarated and relieved. The first major hike of the trip has finished without mishap, and that is to be relished.

  Elba

  ‘In ancient lays they sang the praise of purple Provencal and Samiotic wine/But I reserve my song to dwell upon the virtues of the Elban vine.’

  I wrote those lines some forty or so years ago, after a visit to Elba with two friends, Paul and Charlotte. It’d been an epic summer, full of wine, food, exploration and laughter. We’d been staying near Lucca, and decided, on the spur of the moment, that we needed an adventure. We’d had enough of the formal beauties of the more celebrated Tuscan towns. Elba, an island looming tantalisingly off the coast, was the obvious candidate. And, aside from having been a temporary residence for Napoleon Bonaparte, we knew nothing of the place.

  I’m not sure we knew much more by the time we returned to the mainland after two days. Elba struck us as being short on romance and visual splendour. The only detail that stuck in my mind was of a last lunch in a restaurant in Portoferraio before taking the ferry back to the mainland. We drank two bottles of red wine, not unusual then or now, but no one had warned us that Elban wines were routinely 14 or 15 per cent ABV. These days that level of alcoholic content has become pretty standard, but, at the time, when the only wines of a similar strength were port or sherry, the Elban bottles were liquid booby traps. Lunch became merrier and merrier. Suddenly it was time to get the car onto the ferry. This turned out to be easier said than done. I have a vivid memory of being at the wheel, Paul shouting at me and a sailor leaping nimbly to one side as we careered up the ramp and into the hold of the ship. Hence my rueful reflections on the potent charms of Elban wine. Attitudes to drinking and driving have changed since those carefree days. I hadn’t returned to Elba since.

  I turn up the narrow, winding road that leads along the Valle di Lazzaro. The hills curve round to form a natural amphitheatre. The crest of the hill is thickly wooded. The hillside below is neat with platoons of vines, sappy green with fresh foliage, and clumps of silvery-green olive trees. At the end of the road, nestled among the olive trees and vines, is the Azienda Agrituristica Farkas, the home of Stefano and Francesca Farkas.

  Stefano bears an uncanny resemblance to the great French fisherman Charles Ritz, a boyhood hero of mine. He has the same lean features, sharp nose, elegant moustache, and clipped hair. He fizzes with energy and purpose. Francesca’s more retiring, less forceful than her husband, but kindly and thoughtful.

  Years before, Stefano tells me, the Valle di Lazzaro had been a farm producing wine, but it fell into disuse and disrepair. He and Francesca bought it and set about returning the land to its former productivity. As we stand in the evening light looking out over the serried ranks of vines turning gold in the sun, Stefano explains how they cleared away the undergrowth that had covered the terraces, and reconstructed them where they had collapsed, assessed the soil, measured the sunlight, put in the metal stakes that mark each line of vines, planted vermentino, chardonnay and aleatico vines and nurtured them. That was nine years ago; nine years of unremitting labour that had transformed the overgrown, raggle-taggle bowl in the hills into a series of orderly, productive terraces. It’s been a prodigious undertaking. Stefano says that he has a helper, but he still works full-time, pruning, spraying and picking the grapes himself.

  ‘I tell you one thing,’ he says a little wistfully. ‘This is work for a younger man.’

  Elba has a rather confused history, in common with many Mediterranean islands. First the Etruscans arrived, and then the Romans, attracted like subsequent occupiers by substantial deposits of iron and related minerals essential for cutting-edge military technology of whatever age. T
he island’s principal town/port, Portoferraio, means The Port of the Iron Works.

  Later, Elba changed hands between Pisans and Florentines, as those city states vied for supremacy both on mainland Italy and in the Mediterranean. There was a short period under the somewhat unreliable wing of the Visconti of Milan. Barbary pirates made frequent and unwelcome visits. The Florentines eventually ended up in control, and Cosimo de Medici built a series of interlinking forts in Portoferraio – Stelle, Falcone and Inglesi – to protect his territory. These forts still stand as an impressive testament to sixteenth-century defensive strategy, with their systematic and linked communications, by which troops from one part could be moved swiftly and easily to another.

  In 1596 Phillip II of Spain captured Elba, and like Sicily and much of Southern Italy, absorbed it into the Spanish Empire. In 1802 the island was sold to France, under whom it prospered for a while. But its more recent history has been one of decline. The mining that made Elba prosperous for so long dwindled and then died out, the last mine finally closing in 1981. Since then, agriculture, winemaking and tourism have occupied the energies of the Elbani, although they seem to take the business of growing things and making wine rather more seriously than they do tourism.

  The sky is grey and lowering as I set off for Marciana Marina. The road loops inland and then loops back to the coast again. The main part of the island is low and lumpy. The highest part, Monte Capanne at 1,018 metres, is only a little higher than Scafell Pike in Cumbria. Much of the knobbly interior and coastline is covered in Aleppo and Corsican pines, and thick fragrant bush of macchia, that distinctive, dark green, prickly, fragrant mix of lentisk, myrtle, strawberry tree, juniper and heather. Here and there this dark green shag pile is broken by terraces of olive trees or vines lined up in methodical squares. The coast is as crimped and sculpted as a pie topping into a succession of bays. Here and there views open up along the craggy shore as I pass through dozy seaside villages.

  If the sun were shining, Marciana Marina would be one of those idealised small Mediterranean villages. Low, cream and umber houses crowd along the curve of the seashore, sheltered by the shaggy hills behind. A long breakwater provides sanctuary for a mix of fishing boats and recreational yachts and cruisers. The centre of the town is very quiet in the cool grey of the day. The odd person goes about their daily business. Men line the benches of the well-kept municipal gardens on the front, like swallows on a telegraph wire. As I park, a small boy darts out of a baker’s shop clutching the loaf of the day.

  Carlo Eugeni is sitting outside the Café Roma, a large, unremarkable place on the promenade. Carlo is the local Slow Food supremo. He’s a stocky man, dressed in denim for comfort, not for show. A shrewd, well-fed face watches the world with amused detachment from beneath a baseball cap. When he lifts the peak, there’s a fine stipple of white hairs underneath.

  He speaks excellent English, the result, he says, of the years he’d worked for Delta Airlines and Pan Am, organising gastronomic tours for their customers.

  ‘Mostly widows and divorcees,’ he says. ‘I don’t think they were really interested in food and wine.’

  He retired and returned to the town of his birth, turning his energies and contacts to supporting local foods and wines.

  I ask him what distinguishes the food on Elba.

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘There’s food of the land and food of the sea, but both have the qualities of simplicity and frugality. It’s not very sophisticated. It concentrates on flavour. Big flavours. La tonnina is a typical Elban dish.’

  ‘La tonnina?’

  ‘A salad made with salted tuna. Belly is best. Salt was used to preserve the tuna because oil was too expensive. And it meant that fish could be eaten inland as well as on the coast. You soak it overnight in milk. Then cut the tuna into pieces and mix it with chopped onion, tomatoes, black and green olives and capers. Add some olive oil and let it rest for a few hours before eating. Big flavours.’

  I tell him of my experiences with Elban wine on my first visit to the island forty years ago.

  Carlo smiles. ‘Things have changed since then,’ he says. ‘Not all of them for the better. But some, yes.’

  He summons Franco, a man with a comically lugubrious face, greying wavy hair, Marcello Mastroianni moustache and glasses, who’s talking earnestly to two others at a table on the other side of the bar. ‘Can you bring me a bottle of your wine. For my guest. A very important English journalist.’

  Franco does his best to look impressed. ‘As it’s for him and not you…’ He goes off to fetch the wine.

  Carlo explains that Franco and his partner, Alberto, have a vineyard in the hills above the town where they grow trebbiano grapes and make wine in small quantities.

  ‘It’s about as natural as wine can be because Franco and Alberto are too lazy to do anything to it. Absolutely nothing. They don’t spray because it’s too much trouble and too expensive. They do a bit of pruning. Not much. They keep the weeds down. They pick the grapes, press them, ferment the juice and bottle it. That’s it.’

  Franco returns with the bottle. The label is a simple, elegant ox-blood rectangle with the letters TO in white on it. No flowery prose describing the terroir, family history or grape varieties. Not even a note on the alcohol level.

  TO are simply the first letters of the surnames of the winemaking partners, Tonnino and Onetta.

  Franco pours the wine. It’s the colour of dandelions and has an unusual, peppery, astringent nose. Franco says we need to wait a little before drinking it, to give it time to open. Natural and unpretentious it might be, but that’s no excuse for not treating it with respect.

  Franco’s wine-making partner, Alberto Tonnino, comes over to join us. He has one of those perpetually youthful faces and a mop of light brown hair. ‘The vines are very old,’ he says.’A hundred years or so. That helps give the wine its concentration.’

  They only make about 300 bottles a year, he says.

  ‘One hundred for him,’ says Franco. ‘One hundred for me, and one hundred to give away to friends like Carlo.’

  Suddenly it’s time for lunch.

  ‘You must go to La Taverna,’ says Franco. ‘They’ve got fresh anchovies. In today.’

  Carlo’s reluctant. He isn’t convinced that the anchovies can be as fresh as Franco tells him. Only very fresh anchovies are worth eating, he says.

  Crossing the street outside, we bump into the chef of La Taverna. He confirms that the anchovies have just come in that morning. We’d be welcome. We’re the only customers for lunch. I’m anxious to try the soppressata di polpo before the anchovies. As far as I’m aware, soppressata normally applies to a cured, pressed salami in Calabria and Basilicata. It turns out to be an ingenious variation on that favourite Mediterranean theme of potato and octopus.

  I’m not quite sure why this particular team of ingredients should have such universal appeal. It comes with all kinds of variations – cold or warm; with capers; without capers; with parsley; without parsley; dressed; undressed – but a straight left to the tastebuds it isn’t. Perhaps the attraction lies in the gentle nuttiness of potato, one of the few ingredients that don’t mask the delicate, delectable sweetness of freshly caught octopus. In this case, rocket and tomatoes, parsley and olive oil all add their ha’p’orth to thin, firm slices of octopus, and very nice it is, too.

  The anchovies come with similarly fried zucchini. Franco’s right. The anchovies are very fresh, clean, lambent with a certain airiness within a crisp shell of batter as light as a butterfly’s wing.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Carlo observes as we say goodbye. ‘You come to meet me. I introduce you to two men who make very singular wine. And they tell us where to have lunch. Connections, it’s a kind of magic.’ He waves to me as I set off.

  Francesca and Stefano invite me to dinner. Their house is comfortable, rooms lined with books and pictures, richly carpeted, wood gleaming in amber light. The table in the dining room next to the ample kitchen is loaded
with bowls and plates are lined up – a gloriously fruity, gloopy pappa al pomodoro; zucchini in carpione, sweet and sharp; and la tonnina, the powerhouse salad of salted tuna Carlo Eugeni had told me about. Beside them stand sleek bottle after sleek bottle of Farkas wines with their Lazarus labels.

  As I pile my plate, I ask Stefano and Francesca how they had come to live on Elba.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ says Stefano. ‘My grandfather was the painter, Istvan Farkas, one of the most famous in Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century, a friend of Picasso, Modigliani and other artists of the time. He was also a publisher, which was the family business. Towards the end of the war, Hungary became very anti-Semitic and in 1944 the Germans occupied the country. My grandfather, who was Jewish, was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He died there. My father, Paolo, went into hiding, and was then forced to leave Budapest in 1948 when the communists took over. He came to live in Italy and became one of the world’s best-known textile designers. He bought Villa Cafaggio on the Tuscan mainland, and started making wine there, vino sfuso, which we sold to Pietro Antinori. Vino sfuso is bulk, unbottled wine.

  ‘In 1972 there was a crisis and wine buyers stopped buying. So we had to do something. I took over the vineyard from my father, and began to make quality wines to build up its reputation.

  ‘In 2006 someone offered to buy Villa Cafaggio, and we took the decision to sell my share and we came here, to the Valle di Lazzaro.’

  ‘With our two daughters,’ says Francesca. ‘But then they fell in love and got married and went back to the mainland because that’s where their husbands work.’ She sounds wistful. She misses the easy contact with her children and grandchildren.

  ‘How’ve you found it?’ I ask.

  ‘When we came here,’ says Francesca, ‘we invited our neighbours to lunch and dinner. They came and were very pleasant, but they didn’t ask us back.’ She speaks with a certain puzzled acerbity.