Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  And finally, finally a little plate of pompia sweetmeats, one version cooked in honey that has the texture of warm wax, the other candied with orange and mixed with almonds, which is chewy and crunchy, fruity and nutty.

  It’s been an ordinary lunch on an ordinary day, just good, simple, brilliant food cooked with precision, assurance and instinctive understanding, without any fuss, any show, any flourishes. I compliment the young woman looking after me on the excellence of the food. She looks surprised and pleased. There are days when you’re glad to be alive and thank providence for unexpected joys and this is one of them.

  In easy time, Nicoletta and I move to Arzachena, high on the northeast corner of Sardinia. By the scale of recent trips, it’s a short haul along busy roads. We arrive at Qui Si Sana, an agriturismo just outside the town, as quiet as a Trappist monastery, but rather more comfortable.

  Arzachena has never made much of an impression on history. ‘Mildly interesting’ is about the best anyone has said about the town, but Qui Si Sana is perfect bolt hole, and only a short hike to Palau, the port from which I’ll be catching the ferry to the islands of La Maddalena and Caprera.

  Of the two, Caprera is the more interesting as far as I’m concerned, because it was the home of Giuseppe Garibaldi, about whom I’ve been curious, half-admiring, half-exasperated, for years.

  On the way back from checking the ferry times in Palau, I take a detour along the coast, nibbled and ribbed on one side by the sea, and honed and shaped into rocky spines and quiffs by the wind on the other. At some point I stop to get my bearings, and spot what appears to be a path leading to the sea. It’s littered with broken glass, paper and other detritus, but something about it lures me on. After a few metres the rubbish vanishes. The path winds down through rocks, juniper, myrtle in blossom and wild rosemary, to a little sandy cove. I skitter down the last few yards and sit in the sun. A light breeze feathers my skin. The glassy sea slip-slips on the sand. Reflected light moves mazily on the underside of the rocks on either side of the cove.

  I take off my shoes and take a couple of steps into the water. It’s crystalline and warm. I look down at my white feet. They don’t seem to belong to me. A tiny fish comes up and inspects them. I peer round and carefully check the cove. Then I strip completely, and swim naked, with delicious sensations of freedom, surreality and pleasure, heightened by the fear that someone may appear on the little beach at any time.

  Many years before a younger me had done the same thing and had the same sensation in a cove near Marina di Maratea in Basilicata. ‘And then the pagan spirit of the place took hold and I shed the last vestiges of civilisation and swam naked’ I had written afterwards. Had I changed that much in the years between? Physically, certainly. Mentally? Hardly at all, it seemed.

  Palau. The harbour is a frieze of incidental activities – a blue-and-white fishing boat puttering to the quay; a fisherman hosing down a deck; another sorting out his nets; yachts, masts gently rocking; sleek, identikit ocean cruisers bobbing quietly at their berths. The sea, lapis lazuli here, periwinkle there, cobalt further out, the blues eliding one into the other, sharp points of light flickering off fluid facets. A ripe reek of oil, diesel, fish, brine, iron filings, ammoniac vegetal decay.

  Three men stand in animated conversation. Travellers in twos, threes, tribes; people waiting to greet friends or relatives off the arriving ferry; people dragging suitcases on wheels; people just watching. A cream scooter weaves its way between them, its rider shouts greetings to various friends. Trucks line up like elephants to form an orderly queue. Cars sit nose to tail, drivers and passengers tethered to them.

  Then there she is, our ferry, white, shaped like a trug, roll-on-roll-off stern and bow, Delcomar, the name of the shipping line, in large letters on her side, turning in, slowing. There’s a slight shiver of anticipation. People turn their heads, drivers and their passengers disappear into their cars; two stout men position themselves on the quay to catch the ropes that’ll be flung from the deck to tether the ferry during its short stay.

  The ferry edges in, closer, closer, hovers a few feet from the quay, towering above us. Shouts between the two stout men and the crew. Foam seethes up on either side of the hull. More shouting from the deck of the ferry and bystanders on the quay. Weighted lengths of twine come looping through the air, unravelling in their parabolas. The two men catch them and haul up the attached heavy mooring ropes, pull them in, loop them over bollards along the quay. The ferry’s secure.

  Pause. Shouting from inside the hull of the ferry. The bow slowly clanks upwards, like the visor on a giant knightly bascinet. A metal drawbridge descends. A covey of motorcycles scoots out of the bowels of the ship and moves in a phalanx through the small crowd of onlookers, along the quay and away. The first car emerges cautiously followed by another and another, bouncing over the metal drawbridge, which heaves and clatters as each vehicle, and then the trucks and lorries, pass over it.

  Now the reverse traffic, foot passengers first, then cars; the tickets are checked and cars beckoned to their appointed positions in the hold. The drivers of trucks and lorries exchange familiar banter with the ferry hands. Nicoletta and I bump up the ramp and into the maw of the ferry. A sailor indicates where I should park her, tucked away to one side. He loops a rope over her handlebars to hold her steady. I pat her saddle in reassurance and make my way up the steep steps to the passenger deck.

  Slowly the drawbridge clanks upwards and settles into place; the thick ropes are hauled back inside, choreographed by the orange-jacketed crew; the ferry shudders; a surge in the fume of diesel; water beside us churns; we begin to move; shouting and laughter from the passengers; cameras emerge, poses are struck, loos sought, drinks provided. Children chase each other. Parents look on with indulgent smiles. Couples lean against each other. The port recedes, grows distant. A fine marine breeze tempers the heat of the day. Sunlight winks Morse code from the clipped waves.

  My father used to shout ’All aboard the Nancy Lugger,’ to encourage his family to get into the car to go anywhere. It transformed each outing into a voyage, an adventure. I remember my father’s call each time I line up Nicoletta to slither and bounce up the gangway of a ferry.

  Caprera

  La Maddalena, the island, is just a shape, low slung, a curved mound silhouette. Maddalena, the town, a blob, a blur, a mound within a mound; now less of a blur; now taking shape; now individual houses, buildings with precise form, crisp-painted in the sun; the quay waiting for us; palm trees; bougainvillea as brilliant as a sari; people; cars lining the quay; our turn to be disgorged in a disorderly queue. Nicoletta judders as we clatter over the lumpy flagstones of the road along the sea front. We follow the signs to Caprera about seven kilometres along the coast. A causeway joins La Maddalena (the island) to Caprera. It hadn’t been there in Garibaldi’s day.

  It turns out that there are quite a lot of other things on Caprera that weren’t there in Garibaldi’s day, including a German film crew with film trucks and film cars and film catering facilities and numbers of film people standing around doing whatever it is that film people do. It’s hard to tell what, exactly. Is there any other activity in which so many people devote so much ingenuity and so much time to produce something so nugatory?

  My indignation turns to fury when I discover that the film crew have also taken over Garibaldi’s farm buildings. These original structures have been adapted to serve food to visitors like me. Not only could I not soak up the atmosphere of the place, but worse, far, far worse, I can’t have lunch there either. A board by the gate promises ‘Antipasti verdure al forno, pecorino, salumi; gnocchetti sardi; porchetta al forno; dolce; vino, caffe e digestivo’ for a princely twenty-five euros. The apple in the Garden of Eden wouldn’t be more tempting than those dishes seem to me. I feel like a small boy with his nose pressed up against the window of the sweet shop with a notice saying ‘Closed’ hanging on the door.

  It’s easy to understand, though, why Garibaldi would have wanted
to live on this remote craggy, rocky, wooded island. Caprera was far removed from the belligerent world in which he played such a significant part for so long. Even with today’s trappings of tourist culture – tarmac roads, signposting, picnic spots and refreshment stalls – Caprera has an austere and elemental tranquillity. It rises through a series of burly hills to a central point that commands an immense view of the surrounding seas and their islands. Much of it is covered with thickets of pine and rough brushwood through which erupt violent humps.

  Garibaldi bought half the island in 1855, before his adventures in Sicily and Calabria, the other half being bought by some English admirers and given to him ten years later, and it was here that he retired after ceding his conquests of Sicily and southern Italy to King Victor Emmanuel II.

  Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, the Prime Minister of Savoy, may have been the political genius manipulating the political landscape that allowed the unification to become a reality, but Garibaldi was its undoubted hero. His reputation in his own lifetime was prodigious throughout Europe, and it has scarcely diminished since in Northern Italy and Northern Europe.

  Garibaldi was particularly lionised in Britain from the beginning of his remarkable career. True, he understood the part that journalism could play in moulding public opinion, but there was something about the directness of his manner, his courage, his actions to promote political freedom, his advocacy of democratic principles that appealed to many in Britain, particularly among the working classes. When he visited Britain in 1864, an estimated half a million people turned out at Nine Elms to greet the ‘Hero of Two Worlds’ and the dockworkers of Tyneside clubbed together to buy him a sword. More practically, the British navy shepherded him and his little flotilla to allow them to land at Marsala in Sicily in 1860, and begin the decisive war against the Bourbons that led, de facto, to the Unification of Italy. My great-great-great-uncle paid for a platoon of the Thousand.

  However, not all contemporary Italians lionise him in this way. For many southerners and Sicilians he was ‘il traditore del Sud’ (the betrayer of the South, as one Calabrese put it to me once). Until his deal with Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi had been a staunch, vigorous republican. In the view of many Southern Italians, he abandoned his republican principles and left them at the mercy of exploitative northerners. In place of the tyranny of the Bourbons came the tyranny of the robber bankers and industrialists of Milan and Turin.

  My own views on Garibaldi are somewhat ambivalent. I admire his courage and the audacity with which he led men, not simply the Thousand in the invasion of Sicily, but earlier, in the wars of liberation in South America, and subsequently in France during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when, at the age of sixty-two and crippled by arthritis, he commanded the Army of the Vosges, the only French army to enjoy any success against the Prussians. There are few self-taught soldiers who enjoyed his level of glory. His energy, resilience and inspirational qualities were remarkable.

  But I can’t help feeling that he was the most impossible figure to deal with. He was a man of great contradictions, exhilarating and infuriating in equal measure, humane and brutal, generous and implacable, radical and dictatorial, with an utter conviction in the rightness of his cause and an intolerance of others who might disagree. He may have been very good at winning battles, but he was inept at sorting out the peace afterwards. Sicily descended into administrative chaos for a decade after its liberation. Politically he was a radical and a maverick, and he didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humour.

  So overwhelming is the presence of the public Garibaldi, that the private Garibaldi has all but vanished. The tragedy of his pregnant first wife Anita, who died of malaria in his arms during his hide-and-seek retreat after the failed rising in Rome in 1849 is treated as a footnote to the great man’s progress. And what of his other wives and his eight children? There had been two more wives, one of whom he had only been married to for a day. Two of his sons fought alongside him during the Franco-Prussian wars, and one, Ricciotti, married an English woman, Harriet Constance Hopcraft. One of their sons, Giuseppe Garibaldi II, served in the British Army during the Boer War, carrying the very sword the dockers of Liverpool had given his grandfather.

  I know that he kept a hospitable table on Caprera, serving wine to his guests while drinking water himself, but what about the rest of his life at home? How, for heaven’s sake, had the Scottish radical, John McAdam, come to Caprera with a plan to set up a salmon hatchery on the island with funds from the Glasgow Ladies Sick and Wounded Fund? The historical hero and the drama of his public life buried the domestic, private man. I hoped that a visit to his house and farm on Caprera would redress that balance and show that he wasn’t the monumental, humourless pain in the arse he seems to have been.

  A fort, built on the highest part of the island several years after Garibaldi’s death, has been converted into the Giuseppe Garibaldi Memorial Museum, with ‘interactive multi-media installations’ describing the ‘pivotal hubs’ and ‘decisive moments’ of the great man’s life. I can think of no reason why I should want to spend daylight hours wandering round a ‘pivotal hub’. Its contemporary grandiosity seems out of keeping with a man known for his personal austerity.

  I head back down to the house he built for himself and his family. I find it delightful, sympathetic in a way I never expected, in spite of the gracelessness of a stone-faced guide, who hurries the group of Italian visitors to whom I attach myself from room to room, reciting the relevant facts about the house and Garibaldi in a robotic monotone, as if we’re making her late for an important engagement and she’s determined to be shot of us at all possible speed. Any dream of communing quietly with the past at my leisure that I might have seems impossible.

  We start with a tour of the outbuildings that show that Garibaldi was a useful carpenter and turned his hand to blacksmithery. He was also an innovatory farmer and a keen vegetable grower, and there’s the remains of an extensive vegetable garden. Sadly, it isn’t planted with Garibaldi-heritage vegetables.

  Garibaldi designed the family home himself. It’s pleasingly bourgeois, solid and substantial; a house for living in, comfortable, sensible and practical. The bedrooms of two of his children are next to that of him and his third wife, Francesca Armosino, who he married when she was eighteen, and who survived him by almost forty years. The kitchen is a good size, and, unlike British houses of the same period, next to the dining room.

  And clearly he was a sucker for a gadget. The kitchen has an up-to-the-moment butter churner, an automated rotisserie and an ingenious fresh water system. There’s a steam-driven threshing machine in a stable and a proto-fridge. He had a number of ingenious chairs in which he could sit and write, and state-of-the-art bath chairs for getting around in when his arthritis got too painful in later life. I think that at least one of these bath chairs was English-made, but I’m dragged away and outside before I can make sure.

  Finally, we come to the room where he died aged seventy-four. At his own request, his bed was placed to face a window so that he could look out over Caprera to the sea. It seems natural that that was the direction in which his spirit flew at 6.22 in the evening of 2 June 1882. The clock in the room was stopped at the time of his death. Nothing has been changed. I find it profoundly moving.

  His grave lies in the shade of some pines near the house, surrounded by the graves of some of his children and that of his widow, Francesca. It’s a monumental piece of craggy granite inscribed simply with the name, Garibaldi.

  My view of him has been completely changed by this visit to his house. What a chap! The Hero of Two Worlds, admiral, general, sea captain, revolutionary politician, MP, family man, DIY expert, gadget geek, agricultural radical and a fully paid-up member of the Gardening Club. Although a preternaturally energetic, restless spirit, the domestic Garibaldi was a much more rounded, sympathetic, homely figure than I had imagined.

  La Maddalena

  I head back across the causeway to La Maddalena, and spen
d the afternoon cruising the road that runs round the perimeter of the island.

  There isn’t much to it – some nice swimming spots, and clusters of ‘tasteful’ developments in the manner of the Costa Smeralda at various points of the dramatic coastline. I stop at one of them, Porto Massimo, for a beer. There’s hardly anybody about, aside from the engaging, droll girl manning the bar. It’s dinky enough, and chic in a counterfeit way, looking out over a pretty, rock-strewn bay, with a few smart, shark-shaped boats, but nobody to man them. It has the dead, immaculate look of a place that’s just been taken out of bubble wrap, waiting for people and money to give it a marionette existence for a few months before being swaddled in bubble wrap once more.

  But La Maddalena isn’t a vacuous, formless place, like Giannutri. Genoa and Pisa had squabbled over it in the twelfth century. Perhaps on account of frequent depredations by pirates of varied origins, no one seems to have paid it much attention from then until the eighteenth century, when the Piedmontese took control of it. Napoleon took part in an attempt by the French to capture the island in 1793. Later, his naval nemesis, Horatio Nelson, used the island as a base when conducting operations against the French navy during the Napoleonic Wars. In fact, it has been a convenient centre for any number of navies over the years. NATO and the US both maintained a military presence there after World War II. The Americans finally left in 2008, leaving the island open to an annual invasion by northern hordes shod in flip-flops and armed with sun cream and bathing trunks.

  Initially, I’m inclined to dismiss the port itself. All clip joints and no civic personality, I think. But I’m wrong. Clean, narrow streets lined with crisply painted houses cascade down to the port. And there’s at least one outstanding gelateria, Dolci Distrazione, on the Piazza Matteotti. I sit outside licking a combination of lemon, cassata and nocciola, trying to finish it before it melts down my hand, listening to the swifts shrieking through the thickening light and watching two men dressed in white shirts and blue trousers and waistcoats, arms folded, guns in sleeves slung over their shoulders, eyes hidden behind dark glasses, projecting a grim, pointless masculinity. I can’t make out whether they’re paramilitaries or simply hunters.