Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  Around them flows la passeggiata, the evening ritual that divides the working day from domestic pleasure in Italy, when, around 6 p.m., everyone slowly perambulates up and down the public spaces. Here on La Maddalena it has a relaxed, looser form than the stately ritual I noted when I first came to the country. It used to be part of the fabric of every Italian town or village, but in recent years it seemed to have gone the way of hole-in-the-wall barbers’ shops and family alimentari. Watching the conversations, the groups forming and reforming, the couples pushing buggies, grandmas and grandads, the gossipings, the greetings being tossed around, shopkeepers sharing the day’s news, I have the sense of a strong, vigorous community and the pleasing continuation of old ways.

  Sardinia (again)

  Ian and Henny occupy another room at Qui Si Sana. Ian is English and in his mid-seventies, slightly stooped, tanned, with a long, handsome face, a full head of hair and a trimness that puts me to shame. He speaks in a manner that unites lugubriousness and irony to dry, droll effect. He was born in Scotland and, he says, lived in Italy and Japan before ending up in the Netherlands. He’s had a career of singular variety that took him from engineering to rubber and tyre manufacture to industrial belting and finally to the shoe industry before he retired. He makes the progress from one to the other sound inevitable, although, on reflection, it seems pretty remarkable to me.

  Henny is Dutch, the same age as Ian, and equally tanned, with a pretty, open face, astute eyes and the quick, crisp, no-nonsense manner of the nurse that she is, ‘like her mother’.

  How did they meet? I ask. There’s a quick, complicit glance, and they smile.

  ‘Computer dating,’ says Ian. ‘Henny’s was the first photograph I saw when I logged on, and that was that. Eight years ago.’

  They’d both been divorced before they met, but they don’t live together.

  ‘But we talk every day.’

  ‘And we get together two or three times a week.’

  ‘Why don’t you live together?’

  ‘Why should we when we are happy as we are?’ says Henny.

  They both have children about whom they worry, although the children don’t worry about them.

  ‘They’re very happy we have each other.’

  Each year they take a month’s holiday together, exploring different parts of Sardinia.

  ‘How do you find it when you spend so much time in each other’s company?’ I wonder.

  They look at each other again.

  ‘We don’t fight or squabble, do we?’ Ian says to Henny.

  ‘That’s one of the advantages of age,’ says Henny.

  I’ve been wrestling with the Nuraghi Question since I arrived on Sardinia. The Nuraghi dominated Sardinia from the Bronze Age to around AD 200 and left a string of monumental stone buildings as evidence. Aside from that, almost nothing is known about them. There are no nuragic Rosetta Stones or cuneiform tablets. Indeed, it’s not known if they wrote at all. Consequently they left fertile ground for speculation among contemporary archaeologists. Theories about them abound: they were warlike; they weren’t warlike; they were pastoral farmers; they weren’t pastoral farmers; they traded with other parts of the Mediterranean; they weren’t into trade as such, but they were retailers and so on and so on.

  What is without question is that they were master builders. They left buildings, villages and temples all over the island, massive, brooding, cone-shaped constructions formed out of great, uncut stones fitted together with extraordinary skill. They might look as if they’ve been made by a race of giants, but the rooms inside are better suited for a race of gnomes.

  Along the way, I’ve seen any number of signs alerting me to nuragic villages, necropolises and temples. I’ve studiously avoided them because… because… for no good reason, really. Idleness, possibly, or the thought that everyone visits them and what could I possibly say about them that hasn’t been already said more ably by someone else. However, there’s one nuragic homestead conveniently at Albucciu not far from Qui Si Sana, and I decide I’d better confront the Nuraghi Question once and for all.

  The site stands in an olive grove just off the road, massive, protective, familial, made from colossal stones laid one on top of the other, tapering inwards, in a crude but immensely effective jigsaw tower. Form and function blend with a kind of elephantine grace. There are some similarities to Bronze Age houses I’ve seen in the Orkneys, but the design and scale is far more sophisticated. There’s one door lintel, a single gargantuan stone, lying across two upright irregular columns. It’s curious to think it’s been resting there, possibly, for three-and-a-half millennia. For all its monumentality, there’s something touchingly domestic about it. It’s a home, not a fort.

  I sit down on a large rock mottled by age and lichens, sitting where a man might well have sat 3,500 years ago, give or take, in a grove of olives spaced for light and shade and dreaming. I sense his presence, quiet and comradely. Herder? Grower? Trader? Warrior? Husband? Father? He doesn’t say. I watch ants on the speckled earth at my feet, moving matter with determined energy, fetching and carrying, carrying and fetching, and wonder what he dreams of.

  I wave goodbye to Ian and Henny and Qui Si Sana with much regret. They were kindly, generous and interesting company.

  I head for Stintino, a small town that’s the jumping-off point with the next minor island, Asinara. The road leads westwards from the top right of Sardinia to the top left, through an enchanting landscape, undulating and thoroughly farmed. Parts are more like Sussex than Sardinia. There’re fields of toasted gold wheat, some already harvested, leaving straw bricks strewn in abstract patterns across the stubble; blocks of vines; tilled café-au-lait earth; a herd of cream and brown cattle resting in a grassy field. The fields merge into hills covered with holly-green shagpile woods. Signs for Sant’ Antonio di Gallura, Luras, famous for its bitter arbutus honey, and Tempio Pausania ease past. The SS672 from Tempio Pausania is so straight and long, the countryside so unchanging, the flicker of trees, of light and shade, shade and light so repetitive that there are moments when I have the hallucinatory sensation that I’m not actually moving at all.

  From the moment I clap eyes on it across a flat tongue of land stretching out into the sea, there’s something about Stintino that fills me with what my brother, Tom, once referred to as ‘les anticipations lugubres’. Once it had been a bustling tuna town. The tonnara, the tuna processing plant, closed in 1974, and it’s obvious that Stintino has given itself over, heart and soul, to tourism. Not that I’ve got any theoretical objection to that, but there’s something bogus about the place. The streets are too clean, the houses too recently painted, the shops and bars and eating places clearly streamlined for filleting tourist wallets and purses.

  My lugubrious anticipations are amply borne out by my B&B. John had emailed me that it was novel for a B&B to offer B but no B. Not only is there no breakfast, but the bedroom, in a new development on the outskirts of the town, proves to be a dark, windowless box smelling of damp socks and mushrooms.

  To cheer myself I go to a bar that looks out over the harbour for a beer. It’s a pleasant enough spot to rest and ease the wrinkles of the day’s travel out of mind and limb. A woman at a table close by is giving her order to a waitress.

  Waitress: Would you like your tuna steak grilled medium or rare?

  Woman (who was clearly Northern European): Medium.

  Waitress: That’s fine. Anything else? Chips?

  Woman: Oh, yes, chips please.

  Waitress: With ketchup or mayo?

  Woman: Ketchup and mayo.

  Waitress: Would you like the chips at the same time as the tuna?

  Woman: Yes please.

  Tuna, chips, ketchup and mayo. Oh, God. This doesn’t promise well.

  In my experience, it’s virtually impossible to find true Italian food outside Italy. The Italian cooking you find in Britain is far removed from the pure version I’ve been used to finding as a matter of course throughout Ita
ly itself, where salsicce means two or possibly three sausages on a plate, with no gravy or ketchup or seemly vegetables to distract from the qualities of the sausages; and costolette di agnello, lamb chops, come naked to the plate, with, possibly, only a crescent of lemon by way of companionship. The focus was, and still is in many places, entirely on the qualities of the primary ingredient.

  Such simplicity doesn’t sit easily with the tastes of eaters schooled in the baroque architecture of British food, where no plate is complete without a lump of protein at its heart, and buttressed by vegetables, gravy, sauce and condiments. Consequently, Italian dishes (and not just Italian, incidentally) are remade in a form that we find acceptable, but that would be unthinkable in Piedmont or Calabria or wherever the dish originated. And what is true of Britain, is true of every other European and non-European country as well.

  When visitors, like the woman ordering chips with her tuna, habituated to the Italian dishes of London, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, wherever, arrive for their two weeks of sea, sun, sand and spaghetti, they want the stuff they find at home. Increasingly, Italian cooks give it to them. Why not? It’s less trouble and more lucrative. They don’t need to work so hard or put up with idiotic requests. It makes for an easier, more profitable life. But it debases the relationship between customer and restaurateur, and leads to rip-offs, double charging and the like. It’s by no means universal, but I’ve noticed enough examples – in Livorno, Palau, and Bagnaia on Elba – to get the impression this slippage from the principles of classic cooking, unthinkable fifteen or even ten years ago, is not uncommon. In a reflective mood I make my way to the Ristorante da Antonio, which previous reconnaissance suggested was the place most likely to serve decent food.

  Ah, vain hope. Tagliatelle alla Sarda comes with a copious, watery, gutless tomato sauce with nuggets of sausagemeat as gritty as gravel. I’m actually grateful that there aren’t many of them. Gloom descends on me.

  But then things look up with the next dish, scorfano con patate (scorpion fish with potatoes), which is a cracker, the fish chunky and sweetly juicy in a delicate puddle of tomato, potato and olive broth. There’s proper precision in handling the fish and a deep understanding of its qualities in the delicacy of the broth. A sense of pleasure is restored. I call for the bill.

  I don’t often check bills. I tend to pay them with that casual brio produced by a certain amount of drink, but on this occasion I run my eye over the figures. What’s this? A cover charge for two people? But I’m only one. And a euro has been added on the total in an arbitrary manner. Oh, bollocks!

  It isn’t the amount that bothers me. That’s piddling. It’s the stupidity and cynicism of the attitude behind it.

  I draw my waiter’s attention to the anomalies on my bill. He apologises profusely.

  ‘Ah, signor, it was a mistake, an oversight.’

  I have the impression that there’s a genuine sense of embarrassment, but I’m not sure if it’s genuinely for making a mistake or just for being found out. Retiring to my dank cell of a bedroom does nothing to improve my dark mood.

  Asinara

  There’s scholarly debate whether Asinara means ‘inhabited by donkeys’ or whether the name derives from the Roman word ‘sinuris’ meaning sinuses, which, so the theory goes, the lanky, lumpy island resembles. No scholar, I vote for the donkey explanation myself, if only because Asinara is home to the mysterious albino donkey, a natural mutation found only on Asinara, a descendant of donkeys abandoned by the farmers or fishermen when they abandoned the island.

  Asinara has a rather spotted history in terms of human habitation. No one seems to have stayed for long. Even Genoese fishermen who colonised it in the nineteenth century were evicted when the island became first a lazzaretto, a leper colony, and then, in 1885, a prison island. The Genoese decamped to Sardinia and established Stintino, where Genoese is still the dialect. In time the prison was enlarged and became famous for housing some of the most brutal Mafia capi, including Toto Riina, the man who waged war on the Italian state during the 1980s and 1990s. The prison closed down in 1997, leaving the island to the albino donkeys.

  Although abandoned, the prison still remains a place of curiosity to judge by my fellow travellers on the ferry, mostly sturdy, gnarled retirees. Me, I’ve had my fill of prisons on islands. Asinara isn’t exactly Robben Island and Toto Riina wasn’t exactly Nelson Mandela. While the doughty senior citizens head for the prison en masse, I set off around the island in the opposite direction.

  I take a path that winds over a flat plain more or less parallel to the sea. I come round the corner of the path, where it runs between an area of marsh and a pool of pungent stagnant water with a rim of dark, viscous mud dotted with the brilliant white of egrets. Suddenly a section of mud heaves into life and takes concrete shape. A wild boar. It must have been having a mud bath. Looking distinctly peevish, it trots across some open ground and vanishes into the marshy space between the path and the shore. I’m relieved it’s only been peeved and not cross. There’s no convenient tree to climb if it had decided to challenge the interloper.

  I continue warily along the path as it follows the contours of the coastline. The landscape reminds me of Carna, a small island that sits in the mouth of Loch Sunart, below the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the Scottish Highlands, where we spent several family holidays when I was a teenager, fishing for mackerel and sea trout when the weather permitted, and playing endless games of blackjack and poker for matchsticks when it didn’t. Asinara has the same spare, laconic beauty, the same sweep and profile, a flat, scrubby coastal rim rising abruptly to broad crags of creamy rock. Low-growing, thorny scrub takes the place of heather, and sun takes the place of rain, but both share the same elemental quality; people may come, people may go, but these places will always keep to their own rhythms.

  It’s easy walking, a broad track cutting its way through bushy and often spiky shrubs. The hot air smells of camomile and myrrh. Grasshoppers fizz away from my feet. It feels as if I have the island to myself. Altogether, it’s a good place and a good time, even if there don’t appear to be any albino donkeys.

  Suddenly there they are, two of them, more cream than white, barley white, perhaps, having an early morning shag to judge by the state of one of them. They give me a long, reproachful stare before wandering off in a leisurely fashion into the scrub. It’s something of a shock. I’d begun to think that they were mythical creatures and didn’t actually exist. I couldn’t be more surprised than if I’d come across a couple of copulating unicorns. There’re about 120 of them according to the guidebook, and I’ve seen two.

  In fact, I’ve seen rather more than I’d expected, and all by 10 a.m. Properly alert now, I keep an eye open for more wildlife adventures, but no further donkeys or wild boar come my way. There’s nothing for it but to loaf on the beach, read my book, dawdle in the pellucid waters with mask and snorkel, walk on and find another beach to loaf on, read my book and potter about with mask and snorkel again. I look very hard for the endangered giant limpet that’s reputed to live on Asinara’s rocky shores but I can’t find one.

  Sardinia ( again)

  Night’s falling over Capo Falcone by the time I find the Ristorante Capo Falcone recommended by one of the crew of the ferry back from Asinara. It’s a vast, cavernous place, with a panoramic view over the cape. White water streams through the gap between headlands. Wind buffets the rugged, sombre land beyond. The gathering darkness broods over the waves dashing on the rocks. The scene has an elemental, romantic drama.

  The antipasto is insalata di polpo alla stintinesi, the familiar combination of octopus and potato, with tomato, celery and rocket, dressed in just oil and lemon juice. The octopus is very fresh and delicate, and has the firmness of semi-soft cheese. The celery gives each mouthful crunch. Diced tomato adds bulk, dash and density. Then comes a plate of grilled prawns, squid, swordfish and bream, weaving the rich seaweed-and-caramel of the prawns with the swordfish’s dry meatiness and the bream’s lucent lightne
ss, all set off by a whisper of burnt bitterness.There’s nothing novel to it. I’ve eaten more than my fair share of pesce alla griglia already on this trip, but this version just shines with the casual brilliance of scintillating ingredients and sure cooking.

  By the time I finish it’s too dark to see anything outside any more. For a while I stare at my own reflection in the glass of the window, a single man sitting alone at a table. Is there a difference between solitude, solitariness and loneliness, I wonder? Am I a natural solitary? I’m happiest in company, and yet I certainly don’t mind being on my own. I did feel lonely when Lois went back to England, but then I always feel the pang of her departures.

  Travel alone and travel in company are two quite different experiences. A companion always brings a different dimension. They see different things, react to situations in different ways. They broaden the experience of travel. At the same time you have to adjust your own schedule to their needs and take into account their whims. And they’re a distraction from the constant observation of the world about. I find it easier to chat than to watch, think about and note what’s going on around. All the same...

  I turn to watch the wide-screen TV that’s inevitably on – are the Italians the only people on earth who can eat, talk and watch TV at the same time? – and while away the time watching a fishing competition of unequalled silliness. It’s called Top Hooker.