Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  ‘I tell you one thing,’ says Stefano.‘Gli Elbani sono isolani. They’re insular, true islanders. They look inward, not outward.’

  This sounds very like some places I know in East Anglia and west Gloucestershire. Perhaps they’re isolani, too, looking inward, not outward. I wonder if Stefano and Francesca regret their decision to move to Elba, whether they feel trapped.

  As we eat and talk, we drink, first the Lazarus Vermentino d’Elba, and then the Aleatico and then the Sangiovese. They’re suave and elegant wines, and have the same vitality as their maker, a far cry from the natural wine of Franco and Alberto and even further still from the rough-hewn monsters of memory.

  We talk about winemaking and families and food and fishing. It turns out that, as well as looking like Charles Ritz, Stefano’s a fanatical angler himself, fishing the same waters in Slovenia, the Baca, Idriza, and Tolminka that I’ve fished in years past, for brown and rainbow trout, grayling, and the great marmorata, the marble trout of the Julian Alps. We compare notes on flies and rods, talk technicalities of line weights and cast lengths with the delight of strangers finding shared passions.

  Eventually I drag myself away, filled with fine food, wine and wonder at the way the life of the Farkas family has meandered from Budapest to Florence to Elba by way of the rivers of Slovenia and elsewhere, and how this life has so delightfully intersected with my own.

  Pianosa

  ‘There was nothing funny about living in a bum tent in Pianosa between fat mountains behind him and a placid blue sea in front,’ Joseph Heller had written in Catch-22, his great novel based on his war-time experiences as a bomber pilot.

  It seems odd that Heller decided to set Catch-22 on Pianosa because in reality, Pianosa has no mountains, fat or otherwise. Its name means flat, and so it is, a smudged green pancake suspended between sky and sea and far too small to make a suitable landing for giant American bombers. The creative novelist has the freedom to interpret or recreate landscape to suit their purposes. Sadly the travel writer has to be anchored more prosaically in reality.

  I’ve taken the happily old-fashioned ferry, with sparkling white woodwork and manganese blue trim, from Marina di Campo to Pianosa. The sea’s rumpled satin, the sky the colour of a blackbird’s egg.

  As we draw up to the quay the port looks substantial and normal, the civic buildings imposing, the private houses elegant and consequential. But there’s something odd about it. There’s no one on the quay to greet us, none of the buzz or bustle of a community. It’s silent but for the chuckle of the sea and bird calls. The small, enclosed harbour is deserted. Trails of diminutive silver fish twist like tinsel in its clear water. And close to, I can see that the buildings are crumbling, windows boarded up, roofs caving in, scabs of plaster flaking from walls, doors sagging on their hinges, gardens gone to seed. Some of the houses appear to be held together by webs of electrical wires woven by drunken spiders.

  The human absence is so palpable and unnerving that it’s a surprise to see a woman come out of one of the houses, and a shock when a car emerges from a side street and moves slowly down the road to the jetty.

  I feel as if I’m invading some private domain, like Augustin Meaulnes in Le Grand Meaulnes. Pianosa is an alien, urban Marie Celeste. It’s as if the town has suddenly been engulfed by some apocalyptic disaster, eliminating all civic life at a stroke. And that, in a sense, was what had happened.

  In the 1970s, Anni di piombo – the Years of Lead – when terrorism and criminal violence were at their peak in Italy, the government decided that Pianosa would become the site for a maxi-prison, the place where the most-feared Mafia bosses and terrorists were to be held. Suddenly the entire population who’d lived on the island at least since the Romans – Pianosa was mentioned in the Annals of Tacitus, the great historian of imperial Rome – and that had numbered 2,500 at one point, were told to leave. To judge by the buildings they left, these were not subsistence fishermen and farmers. The abandoned homes are mute testimony to a vigorous society. Over 1,000 years of communal life vanished almost overnight, and Pianosa’s only inhabitants became prisoners and their keepers. The skies buzzed with helicopters night and day. Searchlights lit the walls. Heavily armed guards patrolled the walls. Now the total population is listed as ten.

  But Pianosa and its lost people have not been forgotten.One building has been reclaimed by the Amici di Pianosa, the Friends of Pianosa. In it there’s an illuminating exhibition of sepia and black-and-white photographs celebrating life on the island before the mass eviction. They show a vivid and active community, into which the prisoners and warders of an earlier prison appear to have been integrated. There are particularly poignant pictures of football teams down the years, in which it’s impossible to distinguish prisoners from non-prisoners, almost every player sporting a formidable moustache.

  In theory the maxi-prison closed in 1998, but it had recently been pressed into service again, even though the walls in some places are in no better state than the town buildings. Its presence determines life on the island, most of which is off-limits to the casual visitor, unless in the company of a guide.

  Needless to say, I haven’t booked a guide, so I wander off to the outskirts of the village, the limit of where I’m officially permitted to go, to explore what there is to explore on my own. Various tempting paths curve away into the scrubby bush of the island’s hinterland, a nature reserve, with abundant birds and animals rarely disturbed by human traffic. As these paths are clearly visible from the offices of the Corpo Forestale dello Stato, the only occupied official building on the island except for the prison, I think it wiser to stick to the letter of the law.

  Such prudence makes me realise that I’m not an explorer in the spirit of Burton, Speke or Percy Fawcett, or even a traveller in the mould of Norman Lewis, Paddy Leigh-Fermor, Eric Newby or Colin Thubron, forging on in the face of overwhelming odds, an enquirer after difficult truths. Mine’s a meeker spirit. I may follow by-ways in preference to highways, but I always stick to a way of some kind. If a sign says ‘Entry Forbidden’, I tend to take it at its word.

  Sticking to the permitted paths, I stumble on the island’s cemetery, tucked away at the end of a track that runs through undergrowth fragrant with thyme, sage, wild fennel and curry plants. A protective thicket of shrubs grows on one side, and a tiny golden cove lies on the other. It’s a sweet, shady place, crumbling from neglect, filled with resinous trees, aloe cacti, wild onions, daisies, wild iris and graves. It reminds me a bit of Swinburne’s poem, ‘A Forsaken Garden’:

  In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

  At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,

  Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

  The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

  Here’s another history of Pianosa, told in the inscriptions on the graves – ‘Monzi Silvestro agente di custodia nato 10 Marzo 1890 Morto 24 Novembre 1918 i compagni posero’ (Monzi Silvestro prison guard born 10 March 1890 Died 24 November 1918 erected by his companions); ‘Qui dorme l’eterno sonno Frosini Elia d’anni 19 Caporale nel 10 Reggio Fanteria Vittima di giovanile imprudenza il 6 Gennaio 1808. I Cittadini di Pianosa e gli agenti di custodia O.M.P.’ (Here sleeps eternally Frosini Elia19 years a corporal in the 10th Reggio Infantry Victim if a youthful indiscretion 6 January 1808. Citizens of Pianosa and prison warders O.M.P.). Quiet, plain homages to the people who lived and worked on the island. I can think of worse places to lie.

  However, I’m not quite ready for that yet. I retrace my steps to the village, passing the Via Giovanni Falcone e Paolo Borsellino, the names of the two investigating magistrates assassinated by the Mafia, to the prison which has a – well, I wouldn’t call it a trattoria, more of a canteen, a characterless, cavernous room with a bar, a vestigial shop and tables at which to eat food cooked by the prisoners and served by the prisoners. One prisoner, to be exact.

  There’s spaghetti con salsa di pomodoro followed by pesce spada alla griglia or ch
icken; and ice cream bought at the bar for pudding. Nothing fancy, but the cooking’s sensible and sound, and at twenty-four euros including half a litre of white wine, there’s not much to complain about. It’s certainly better than the lunch with the warders of Gorgona.

  There’s not a lot to do before the ferry back to Marina di Campo at 5 p.m., other than visit the remains of the villa of Augustus Caesar, and loaf and swim or swim and loaf. The only beach open to the casual tourist lies beneath the long frown of the prison wall that curves the full length of the bay beside the ghost town.

  At the end of the beach, Augustus’s villa lies under a white structure shading it from the elements. It seems a modest structure for the man who founded the Roman Empire through a mixture of brutality, ruthlessness, mendacity, military nous and political sophistication. He understood that soldiers were happier to be paid for not fighting than they were to fight. Perhaps it had been the house for Postumus, the adopted son whom Augustus had exiled to Pianosa. Postumus, described as ‘a vulgar young man, brutal and brutish, and of depraved character’, lived there until he became involuntarily posthumous on the orders of his adoptive father.

  Augustus ruled for forty-one years before retiring from politics, a rare thing to do in Rome of that time, and died of natural causes aged seventy-five, which was even rarer. Reputedly his last words were ‘Have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit.’

  After inspecting the ruins and reviving my memories of Imperial Rome, I go for a swim, my first on this trip. Although the temperature’s crispish, the sea feels like silk against my skin and the sun warms my head.

  Elba (again)

  If anyone knows anything about Elba, it’s that Napoleon Bonaparte spent a few months in exile on it. He came reluctantly in April 1814 and left hurriedly in February 1815. Although he had a country residence island, he spent most of his time in the Villa dei Mulini, at the top end of the Portoferraio, that has been recently restored as part of the celebrations marking 200 years since his brief sojourn.

  It has the air of the home of a well-to-do merchant, solid and handsome, with the central section slightly higher and grander than the two-storey wings on either side. It’s freshly painted a curious, bilious rapeseed yellow, with bare grey stone surrounds framing the windows. It must have seemed constrictingly modest to someone used to the vaulting spaces, glitter and glamour of Versailles or Schönbrunn.

  A covey of schoolchildren squats in the sun in the piazza outside. A teacher stands facing them. Her voice rises in a singsong monotone without, it seems, any oral punctuation. On and on she goes, her voice rising like that of a skylark, only less melodic. She knows her stuff, and by golly, she’s going to give it to them whether they like it or not. Judging by the whispering and fidgeting, some of the children clearly don’t.

  My sympathies are with the kids. Their situation sharply brings back the ghastly tedium of visits to the mosaic-bedecked churches around Ancona and Cervia to which my parents dragged me all those years ago. Eventually the teacher’s peroration comes to an end and the children are released. They pelt into the Villa dei Mulini as if released from bondage, clutching notepads and pens. I follow them in.

  Inside the villa the rooms are sensible and comfortable and unmistakably bourgeois while the furniture is the grandiose, florid stuff of Empire. Little of it is actually Napoleon’s own, but it is of the period, not modern counterfeit. The only exception is one of the Emperor’s campaign camp beds, which is astonishingly elegant, minimalist and sensible, even with its baldacchino.

  Is it the bed on which Napoleon lay while conducting the Battle of Waterloo, I wonder? At the time he had such a bad attack of piles that he wasn’t able to sit on the back of his horse, thus depriving him both of mobility and the height he needed to survey the battlefield properly. It could be argued that haemorrhoids have played a pivotal role in European history. I don’t suppose this interesting aperçu found its way into the teacher’s discourse to her bored pupils. It might’ve livened up their afternoon.

  For someone who never seemed inclined to stay anywhere very long, Napoleon had an impressive library. He was a ferocious and omnivorous reader all his life, committing chunks of Voltaire, Corneille, Molière and Racine to memory, as well as following philosophical, political and scientific debates. The bookshelves are spread over two rooms and made up of volumes he had chosen from his bigger library at Fontainebleau.

  The way the light falls on the spines of the books and the rope preventing entry makes it nigh on impossible to see what volumes made up the Emperor’s reading matter. I manage to decode the titles of volumes of Voltaire, Année Française, and Le Moniteur Française, but that’s all. It’s a pity, as the contents of other people’s bookshelves are always illuminating about the collector.

  Napoleon had a keen sense of family, and looked after them with typical Mediterranean patriarchal authority. Even so, he apparently found the presence of his sister, Pauline, in the villa rather trying. Pauline had sold her house in Paris to be able to join him on the island. With one of those delicious historical ironies, the buyer had been the British government, and the Duke of Wellington had acted as the intermediary. Indeed, he befriended Pauline, and had a picture of her in his residence. The building is still the British Embassy, and full of Pauline’s own furniture and ornaments, including a pair of exquisite silver sauce boats said to be modelled on her breasts.

  She might not have been dull, but she was unquestionably demanding, rackety and given to sex with just about everyone. She died in 1825 aged forty-four. I remember reading somewhere that she suffered from bad blood circulation in later years and was wont to tuck her toes up under the breasts of her ladies-in-waiting in order to keep them warm. Such learning is the product of indiscriminate reading and a memory in which the curious asides of history’s trifles are retained more faithfully than its landmarks.

  On 26 February 1815, alarmed by rumours that he was about to be transferred to a far less salubrious island in the Atlantic or even assassinated, Bonaparte left Elba, returned to France and began the last hurrah that led to Waterloo. Although his reign on the island was short-lived, he still managed to make a perfect nuisance of himself, issuing decrees, bossing everyone about to improve mining and modernise agriculture. The departure of this restless, Protean figure was probably greeted with a sigh of relief by the Elbani.

  All in all, I think, the Villa dei Mulini’s a fine, civilised and agreeable residence, and only an ass would want to leave it in favour of the uncertain cockfight of European politics.

  From it, I wander down through the town. The streets are vertiginous. Pretty sun-washed pink, cream and yellow houses with green shutters cascade down the slope to the port.

  In some ways, Elba presents the kind of Mediterranean scene nostalgia has fixed in my imagination, with some of the character, I fancy, that the South of France once possessed; an unspoiled, untrampled Eden of golden, sun-drenched coves and dramatic rocky outcrops lined with umbrella pines shading cottages with terracotta fish-scale tiled roofs, when Brigitte Bardot and Roger Vadim made it fashionable and it was colonised (cinematically, anyway) by the laughing girls, as brown as nuts and as scantily clad as shop window mannequins, frolicking in the sea with lads with the profiles of boxers and the minds of philosophers, before they picnicked on grilled fish, scarlet tomatoes, oozy cheeses and crusty baguettes, casually feeding each other grapes – or better still, figs – and drinking glasses of cloudy pastis or pink kirs, and smoking Gitanes or Boyards Caporal and talking all the time as they do so.

  But I don’t feel that the tough, self-sufficient, taciturn Elbani have the sophisticated worldliness or the cheery venality of the Provencals. Cecilia Pacini, a local journalist, had told me that the Elbani referred to mainland Italy as ‘Il Continente’ in much the same circumspect way that the British refer to Continental Europe. Certainly, the Elbani don’t have much truck with the demands of contemporary tourism.

  Down on the quayside, deeply tanned, elderly
men with silvery, wavy hair, black shades, trainers and jeans and shirts with the collars turned up to disguise jowls and scrawny necks, pose in front of a frieze of masts and cantilevered superstructures on boats. But Portoferraio is no Cannes or Beaulieu-sur-Mer, thank heavens. There’s none of the grandiosity of sea-going palazzi. If there’s just a bit of vulgar display, at least it’s modest vulgar display.

  Rather, Portoferraio has an air of distressed gentility, the elegant shabbiness, of a gentleman down on his luck. Collar and cuffs are frayed, suit and tie shiny with use, shoes in need of fresh soles and a lick of polish. But with a turn of fortune, an unexpected inheritance, Black Dog coming in at 100–1 in the 2.30 at Uttoxeter, the town will be as elegant and prosperous as it was in former times. Somehow, though, I feel that Black Dog isn’t going to come in at 100–1 for Portoferraio any time soon.

  Giglio

  ‘Take the road to Giglio Castello. You can’t miss the turning. It’s just past the cemetery,’ Francesco Carfagna tells me on the phone. ‘It’ll be a short journey for me when my time comes,’ he adds, and laughs.

  John Irving first introduced me to Francesco a couple of years earlier at Slow Food’s great biennial food jamboree in Turin, the Salone del Gusto. It had been love at first sight on my part as I was drawn to Francesco’s ebullience, generosity and idiosyncratic intelligence. He’d said that if I should ever visit Giglio, I must look him up. I’d taken him at his word.

  I find the turning easily enough, bounce along the track past the cemetery, and come to a halt beside a circular stump of a building. Francesco is waiting for me outside.

  ‘Matthew, you are welcome.’

  Francesco’s about my height, but thicker through the chest, and rounder in the tummy. He has a shock of fine white hair, and sideburns, the like of which I haven’t seen since the 1970s, on either side of his cherubic face. His eyebrows are like two dark, spiky hedges above expressive brown eyes. His face, arms and hands are so deeply tanned that they might be mahogany all the way through. He’s wearing a pink shirt with a frayed collar and a pale blue jersey that would be shapeless were it not stretched over a considerable girth. He has socks on and heavy work boots over them.