Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  Tavolara

  The sign above the dining terrace reads ‘Ristorante da Tonino – Re di Tavolara’ (Little Tony’s Restaurant – The King of Tavolara). It may lack something of the majesty of the House of Windsor, but once upon a time the House of Bertoleoni had sufficient credibility to be registered by Queen Victoria in her comprehensive catalogue raisonné of European royalty.

  The island of Tavolara is a great limestone fin that rears up from the sea just off Porto San Paolo. The rocky upper parts burst free from a mat of trees and vegetation covering the lower slopes. However, that section of the island is off-limits, the realm, not of Tonino it seems, but of the Italian military according to various blood-curdling signs warning the casual visitor to go a step further at their peril. I suspect that this is a cunning ruse to keep the major part of Tavolara in a pristine state for eagles, mountain goats and blue lizards.

  So the few dozen seekers after solitude and golden sand who, like me, have made the twenty-minute trip from Porto San Paolo, are restricted to a long, flat foot of low dunes, scrub and reddish outcroppings of rocks that extend from the base of the limestone fin. On this sandy extension sits King Little Tony’s restaurant, and another bar next to it, half a dozen houses huddled about, two swimming beaches and a cemetery. Cemeteries are becoming a sub-theme of this journey, but they have their own point and poetry.

  The one on Tavolara could take its place in any Sergio Leone spaghetti western. It stands apart amid low, scrub-covered dunes, the cracked and dilapidated tombs stacked among sea grasses, cacti and low shrubs sprouting from the sandy earth within a crumbling wall pierced by a rickety gate of driftwood. It’s a spot of melancholy and sweetness, with only the creaking and tonk-tonk from the windmill above a water borehole a couple of hundred metres away to disturb the silence.

  Here I find the history of the House of Bertoleoni told on the gravestones, which reach back to the first king, Paolo. That of Carlo Paolo Bertoleoni ‘Re di Tavolara 30.11.31 + 6.5.93’ bears the subscript ‘ti pensano sempre la mamma, e tuoi cari’ (they think of you always, your mother and your dear ones). La mamma, Italia Murru, ‘Regina Madre di Tavolara’ died in 2003, outliving Carlo Paolo by ten years. To the left of these tombs is that of Principe Carlo Ernesto Geremia, Luogotenente Generale del Regno, with a photograph of Principe Carlo Ernesto who bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Omar Sharif.

  While Paolo Bertoleoni had been quite serious in his claim to the kingship of Tavolara, it seems that his original high purpose has gradually modified over the years, and now the Bertoleonis accept the humorous side of their family history and acknowledge that it’s in the best interests of the family and the island to continue the myth but to change the emphasis. In the end, when it comes to royalty on Tavolara, comedy is king.

  Past the cemetery, the foot narrows and slides out into the translucent sea. I slip into it. Fluid, lacy patterns of sunlight, thin bands of white and gold, ripple over the ridged sandy floor. I come across a single boot, toe down, dancing lightly on the sandy floor of the cove, laces floating on either side. I feel the same fascination and revulsion I experienced in Cervia when I’d watched the carapace of a crab slowly swaying over the same kind of sandy bottom to the rhythm of the sea – ‘a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’. I’m relieved to discover there isn’t a foot inside the boot.

  Back in the court of Little Tony, I sit at a table open to the sea front, looking down the shore where a ramshackle jetty, a long, arthritic wooden finger, stretches out over the barely crinkled surface.

  After a while la zuppa di cozze e arselle arrives. Sweet, fat, flubby mussels and taut, meaty arselle clams in a sparkling tomato and white wine broth shot through with lush clam and mussel juices, are heaped up like Tavolara itself.

  Across the water a line of pristine white clouds form a fluffy buffer between the lumpy skyline and the ethereal blue sky. Just outside the restaurant a very large man with a red, fleshy face shaded by a peaked military cap, a voluminous blue polo shirt and knee-length khaki shorts, erects a tripod, screws a very small camera to the apex and starts taking photographs. There’s something anomalous about his bulk, the thin, spindly legs of the tripod and the diminutive camera. Presently he packs up his gear and moves off down the shoreline, and sets up his tripod and camera all over again, a small, mysterious, inconsequential diversion.

  The plate of mussels and clams disappears. Its place is taken by a dry, rustling fritto misto of little fishes I’d seen swimming in the sea an hour before, crunchy prawns of a caramel sweetness and supple squid. After, a few fingers of pecorino cheese. Half a litre of white wine, and I’m in that deeply agreeable state: mind empty of all thought, just staring out across the bay, perfectly happy just being.

  Sardinia (again)

  ‘Political satire became obsolete when they awarded Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize,’ said the great satirical American songwriter/mathematician, Tom Lehrer. I feel the same way about Porto Cervo and the Costa Smeralda, the development created by the Aga Khan in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s a monument of pristine ghastliness to manufactured taste and all the most meretricious values of commercialised Europe. It’s beyond adequate description or comment. I once spent a few days at a wine festival there a number of years back, and have no wish to return. Olbia next door is another matter. Modest, dusty and a bit down at heel Olbia might be, compared to the ersatz glitter of Porto Cervo, but there’s La Gallura, I remember.

  Olbia is in the province of Gallura, and the eponymous trattoria was one of the finest restaurants I’ve ever had the pleasure to eat in. Not fine in the sense of spit-and-polish, designer-bred elegance, sophistication of food or any of that conventional palaver, but fine in spirit and style. Great restaurants aren’t about breaking boundaries, pushing envelopes, blue-, or any other colour-, sky thinking, although they may well do that as well. They aren’t about designer luxury, Bible-sized wine lists, and super subtle service either, although they may have a part to play. They’re about feeding people really well irrespective of the style of food; and making sure the customers leave feeling happier than when they arrived. That was La Gallura. It was old style, a bit gloomy, comfortable, time-weathered, confident. It was great because of its rare sense of character and the absolute quality of the dishes it served. I had left it not so much happy as euphoric.

  When I last visited it, Rita Denza was La Gallura’s chatelaine and presiding spirit. She must have been in her seventies, as small as a sparrow, and even more energetic. Her one objective, it seemed, was to persuade you to eat as much as you possibly could, because by eating as much as you possibly could, you could try an almost unending series of remarkable dishes.

  La Signora didn’t really deal in menus. She served what was local and in season in overwhelming abundance. I forget how many dishes we ate in the end. Many of them were based around fish. Anchovies, sea urchins, whelks, limpets, prawns of various colours and sizes, raw and cooked, baby crabs, squids and squidlets, variations on octopi, winkles, and other unidentifiable marine creatures, came and went; each curious, individual and above all delicious. Vegetables – fresh tomatoes and dried, olives, zucchini, melanzane – all enjoyed strong supporting roles.

  The flavours were precise and pointed. Each dish had its roots in Gallurese traditions, transfigured by La Signora’s taste and imagination. It had been a memorable meal, culminating in a brilliant large sea bass cooked in a crust of salt, as theatrical as it was glorious to eat. Thank God I wasn’t paying the bill, because none of this came cheap, but then great food, great fish, great imagination, great fun rarely does in my experience.

  The lure of another epic meal at La Gallura is one of the main reasons I’ve come here, so I’m puzzled when I can’t find it. I wander across the road and ask a lady running a newsagent’s kiosk where it is.

  ‘It’s closed,’ says the lady.

  ‘Closed!’

  She gestures at a building site that had formerly been La Gallura. Men a
re carrying chairs and other fixtures into it.

  ‘Closed? For ever?!’ I reel.

  ‘La Signora, she’s very ill,’ says a sympathetic bystander.

  I’m appalled and devastated. Further enquiry reveals that, indeed, Rita Denza is sick, but that’s not the end of the story. It seems there’d also been dubious shenanigans involving landlords and the law behind the closure of La Gallura. How bloody typical. Italy is probably the only country where it’s possible to believe that there’s a conspiracy rather than a cock-up behind every malign act.

  I wander off to nurse my grief and unexpectedly find sanctuary in the Basilica di San Simplicio that stands on a piazza, part of a hinterland of smart, modish examples of modern urban chic set back from it, as if maintaining a respectful distance. The basilica, itself, is a formal statement of Romanesque aesthetics, simplicity and moral strength in keeping with the principles of San Simplicio – Saint Francis of Assisi. It was built in two stages, during the first half of the eleventh century and then at the end of the twelfth.

  It takes a little while for my eyes to adjust to the dimness of the intimate interior. It’s without a trace of pretence or adornment of any kind. Square columns alternate with stocky round ones to form the central nave, with a narrower nave to either side, rising to a flat, beamed roof. Above the altar is a half cupola. Here and there the narrow windows pierce the walls, shafts of light bursting through them, tunnelling through the shadow. It’s a calm, intent, serious space.

  A woman comes in, kneels at prayer for a few minutes and goes out without glancing at me. A few minutes later a man enters and busies himself with some maintenance. I stand in front of the plain altar and say a prayer of thanks. As I leave I look around for postcards, leaflets, boxes in which to leave a donation or any of the other delicate commercial activity that you habitually find in any church these days. There’s nothing. For a moment I think of taking a photograph, but it seems wrong to disturb the calm of the place, so I imprint it on my memory and go out.

  That evening I bump into some of my fellow guests from Casa Anna at Est Istana, a café-cum-deli-cum-wine shop on the road between Porto Istana and the main Olbia-Siniscola highway. It’s run by Giovannino and Piera, who are as canny as they’re charming and energetic. Piera flirts with the customers and doles out the food – prawn, celery and tomato salad; stuffed mussels; octopus salad; lasagna; roast suckling pig; carta di musica-grilled zucchini, peppers, and melanzane – while Giovannino deals with the wine and keeps a beady eye on the profit margin.

  I’ve only gone in for a beer, but I’m spotted by Ian, a charming young American banker taking a few days’ refuge from the sturm und drang of City of London life who I’d met the day before. He’s with a group of four German TV techies, photographers, sound technicians, a film editor and a political advisor, all in their late twenties or early thirties, who are celebrating the last evening of their holiday. Genial and kindly, they invite me to join them. They’ve all been boating together that day, visiting both Tavolara and Molara, a small, uninhabited lump of rock hard by Tavolara.

  The odd magic of Tavolara that I’d found seems to have passed them by.

  ‘The sea, it was fantastic. It was so clear.’

  ‘But at Molara it was better.’

  ‘That was where Klaus and Alex jumped off the rock. It was so funny.’

  They’re relaxed and ebullient, with that surging energy of their age. I remember it, vaguely. They ask me what I’m doing there. I explain my mission.

  ‘But that is fantastic. That is a dream,’ says Alex.

  They finish eating, and move on to more beer, mirto, the sweet, vaguely medicinal liqueur made from myrtle berries, and limoncello, the equally saccharine liqueur flavoured with lemon peel. They insist I drink the same.

  ‘Let’s buy a house here,’ says Alex.

  ‘And then we can come out whenever we feel like it.’

  ‘It’s only a couple of hours from Berlin.’

  The world’s full of possibilities and potential. It’s a pleasure being with them.

  ‘Come on, let’s go to the beach,’ says Klaus.

  ‘I’ve got a couple of litres of wine.’

  ‘And I’ve got a bottle of limoncello.’

  ‘Come on, Matthew. You’ll be coming with us, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, you must.’

  For a moment I’m tempted, but some small sense of propriety and self-preservation takes me to my bed, thank God.

  The next day they go home, and I go in search of pompia.

  La Pompia is one those numerous citrus mutations you find throughout Southern Italy and Sicily. Blood oranges are one, bergamot another, and cedro a third. But pompia is possibly the grandest of all. As big as a football. As fragrant as an orchid. As yellow as the sun. So runs the legend. And it only grows around Siniscola, a small town south of Olbia.

  ‘And I can’t say much for Siniscola,’ wrote D. H. Lawrence in Sea and Sardinia, the brilliant record of the trip he made to the island in 1921. ‘It is just a narrow, crude, stony place, hot in the sun, cold in the shade.’ Not much seems to have changed in Siniscola since Lawrence’s excursion. There’s little by way of antique curiosities, impressive monuments or even civic improvements to lure the curious traveller, unless you’re looking for pompia.

  Having ridden through the ‘narrow, crude, stony place’, I turn round and pull into the side of the road in the middle of the town to work out my pompia-locating strategy. I’d assumed that there’d be a sign announcing Siniscola as the pompia capital of the world or signs of a Festa della Pompia, a celebration of some kind that you routinely find in Italy, or even a greengrocer selling them, some sign that this is the home of pompia. There’s nothing, not a sign anywhere. I’m puzzled, and baffled as to what to do next.

  A woman in glasses the size of window panes appears at the foot of some steps above my head and starts bellowing at me. At first I think she’s shouting at me for polluting the air outside her front door. Not a bit of it.

  ‘That’s a beautiful new Vespa,’ she says. ‘Lovely colour.’

  I thank her, explain my mission and ask her where I can find the elusive fruit.

  ‘Come on in,’ she says. ‘I can tell you all about pompia.’

  I follow her up the steps, past some boxes of zucchini, French beans and strawberries, and into what’s obviously her front room. She says her name is Lina Casu. She checks my spelling when I write it down.

  ‘Would you like a beer?’ Lina Casu asks, as if we’re old friends. I say I would.

  She explains that unfortunately this isn’t the season for pompia.

  ‘We start picking them in November and stop at the end of January or the beginning of February.’

  ‘It’s a kind of lemon, and huge,’ she says. She holds up her hands to indicate the size, roughly as big as an American football. It only grows around Siniscola, she says, and it’s candied or turned into liquore or kept in honey. She doesn’t have one, but she does have a cedro, which, she says, is similar. I take a picture of her holding a cedro. It looks like a very large, warty lemon. La pompia is even bigger, says Lina Casu.

  She sells vegetables and fruits that her husband grows in their vegetable garden, she says.

  ‘And honey, too,’ she adds, opening a cupboard and bringing out a box with pots and plastic containers of honey.

  ‘It’s very special,’ Lina Casu says. ‘Cedro honey, from the zagara, the blossom, of the cedro tree. It has a slight touch of bitterness you don’t get with pompia honey.’

  ‘Honey is so much better for you than sugar,’ she goes on. ‘It’s a natural product. Full of goodness. People come from Milan and Turin to buy my honey.’

  The cedro honey has a rich, brown buttery smell, and is just as full to taste, with, as she said, a slight touch of bitterness at the end.

  I ask her where I should eat in Siniscola.

  ‘Il Talismano,’ she says without any hesitation. ‘Just up the road.’

  Unfor
tunately, Il Talismano is shut that day, but a young man cleaning the dining room suggests I try the Trattoria da Bovore on the other side of the road. It’s nondescript to the point of invisibility. Without the young man’s advice, I’m not sure I’d go in.

  It turns out to be one of a disappearing breed; a modest, family-run trattoria. The walls are white, dotted with photos and pictures in haphazard arrangement. The floor’s black and white composite marble, the tablecloths and napkins coral pink. It may be modest and visually undistinguished, but it’s obviously a place where people eat regularly.

  I have a plate of moscardini alla diavola, tiny octopi braised until they’re as soft as kid gloves in a tomato sauce full of their flavour, piquant with chilli. Next, spaghetti con arselle e bottarga.The arselle – clams – are plump and flushed with garlic and fresh with parsley. A generous grating of salty, minerally bottarga seasons the dish.

  A young woman brings the dishes and carries away the empty plates. On the other side of the room, her two young children are having lunch with their father. Every now and then the young woman stops to sit by them and make sure they’re eating properly. A group of four informally dressed men, a solitary man and a middle-aged couple are all absorbed in the business of lunch. The young woman’s mother pops out of the kitchen from time to time to see how things are going. One of the group of men asks her if a particular dish has garlic in it? No, says the cook/mother, just onions. Could she add garlic? asks the customer. No, says the cook/mother, and that’s that.

  I have room for seadas, or sevada as Lina Casu had written in my notebook, a thin circular tart served hot, filled with molten cheese and with honey poured over it, and dusted with grated lemon peel. The pastry of this seadas is delicate and biscuity, the filling of goat’s cheese mild and chewy, and the honey sweet with a hint of citrus from the lemon peel. It’s a masterly pudding.