Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  John had been a formidable footballer in his youth, growing up in Carlisle. His hero was Roberto Bottega, the great Juventus and Italy forward.

  ‘Known as Bobby Gol!’ John says. ‘I was a good header of the ball like him, and I was famous for my backheels. Backheels.’ They must have been a novelty in Cumbria in the 1970s. ‘I played up to university level, but in truth, I was more of a spectator. I loved watching football, although I went on playing for quite a long time after I knew about my condition.’

  He looks back fondly, but expresses no regrets.

  ‘When you start to think about things too much, they spoil your life.’

  A plate of octopus and potatoes arrives and staunches the flow of his memories. I get mackerel with zucchini a scapace, fried and then doused in vinegar.

  Do I know the story of Carlo Pisacane? John asks.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Well, we’re sitting in the Piazza Carlo Pisacane. He’s an interesting man, Carlo Pisacane.’

  ‘Well, go on,’ I say, by this time occupied by candele con cacio e pepe e ricciola, candle-shaped pasta with Pecorino Romano and cracked black pepper, technically speaking a Roman pasta dish, with chunks of amberjack giving it a local accent, luxurious and austere, creamy and peppery, flubby and firm all at once.

  ‘He tried to provoke a rising in the Kingdom of Naples in 1857. First he came to Ponza and freed hundreds of prisoners held in the gaol here. Ponza. Then he went to Sapri on the mainland, where he was killed by the locals, who thought he was a gypsy who had been stealing their food. Stealing their food. It’s all there in Mercantini’s poem “La spigolatrice di Sapri”, “The Gleaner of Sapri”. Perhaps you’ve come across Longfellow’s translation?’

  I haven’t, but Pisacane’s fate reminds me of the fate of Joachim Murat. Murat was a dashing cavalry general with a penchant for fancy uniforms and he was Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law. At the high tide of his fortunes, Napoleon, who had the provincial French (and Italian) trait of looking after members of his family, put Joachim on the throne of Naples, where he was a decent and reformist monarch. Joachim was deposed in 1815 as a result of the settlements after Waterloo. Desperate to reclaim his throne, he landed at Pizzo to inspire an anti-Bourbon rebellion. Sadly for Murat, the citizens of Pizzo proved too apathetic and failed to rise up. Instead they turned on their would-be liberator. Murat made a run for his boat back on the shore. His outsized spurs got caught in a fisherman’s net. Unable to free himself, he was captured. After a short incarceration, he was tried, condemned and shot.

  It strikes me that Murat’s and Pisacane’s stories illustrate the accidental, human nature of history, not subscribing to some grand, unifying theory or the vast movements of political action, but to incidental, mundane, personal quirks. Somehow high-minded endeavour in Italy seems to go hand-in-hand with low farce, with tragic consequences. If Garibaldi had had any sense of the absurd, he would never have set off for Sicily with the Thousand. It’s a miracle that Italy was ever unified.

  A second bottle slides quietly to rest, and a fine dish of squid stuffed with salt cod with little dabs of olive puree and others of lemon emulsion (meaty muscular squid; soft, pillowy pungent salt cod; sharp lemon; smooth, acrid olive puree) comes and goes.

  The lights down in the harbour still wink and oscillate on the slick, black sea. The moon has risen. That’s enough for me, but John has a pudding, sfera al cardamomo ripiena di frutto della passione, that has him cooing with pleasure. And now it’s time for coffee and grappa. The food, we agree, has been exceptional, cracking, a model of skilful, intelligent cooking.

  ‘The chef has taken traditional forms and reinvented them with understanding, polish and technique, to create sophisticated dishes which still carry the weight of the earthy originals,’ I say.

  John raises an eyebrow, and I get the feeling that he thinks that I’ve lurched into gastro-pomposity.

  ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself, better myself,’ he says drily.

  As we make our way back through the quiet town, John says ‘Do you know, the last time I was in England I saw a headline in the Carlisle newspaper. It read “Dead Body Found In Graveyard.” Well, there would be, wouldn’t there?’

  Mainland Italy

  John leaves early the next day. I feel a bruise of sadness at the loss of his company: warm, ironic, passionate, discursive, droll, opinionated, and informative over an astonishing range of topics, always ready for an ‘aperitif’ or an adventure. He’s a graceful human being, and has illuminated my days on Ponza.

  It’s time for me to move on, too. Nicoletta and I catch the traghetto back to Formia, where I have to leave her temporarily while I go to Ventotene, where scooters aren’t welcome. As I’ve got several hours to kill before the aliscafo takes off for Ventotene, I go in search of lunch.

  Zi Anna is a shock after the quiet civilities of Ponza. It’s rammed, jammed and heaving; Babel and Bedlam; a whirl of activity, hubbub and bustle; waiters dashing to serve a hundred or more animated eaters, carrying two, four, and, in one instance, six plates; plates piled with pasta draped in scarlet sugo, heaped with hummocks of blue mussels, hillocks of scarlet strawberries capped with fluffy whipped cream. They greet and dismiss regulars with affection. ‘Ciao Bepe.’ ‘Buongiorno Signora.’ Kiss hello, kiss good-bye. ‘Ciao Francesco.’ ‘Uehi, Luciano.’ ‘Alla prossima.’ Everyone seems to know everyone. Children pop up and vanish like rabbits in a warren.

  It’s a marvel that a mountain of grilled squid, prawns, a langoustine and sea bream should suddenly appear out of this mayhem, each element limpid and perfect, meat-and-butterscotch, with nips of bitter charcoal where the grill has charred the skin or shell, a sharp bite of lemon to set things off. Happy and drowsy I go and sit on a stanchion by the harbour wall to wait for the aliscafo.

  The ferry service is one of the minor miracles of island hopping, not simply because these ocean-going buses run pretty much on time, but because they run at all. Their comings and goings impose a certain discipline on my travels, and, inevitably, I spend a good deal of time waiting for them to turn up and sitting on them when they do. It’s a form of enforced leisure, almost meditation; not unpleasant, but one which has taken a little time to get used to, gearing down, watching the everyday dramas unfold around, listening to my thoughts. It’s in sharp contrast to the way I dealt with time and time dealt with me before I set off. Then, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds linked together to create a kind of temporal prison in which, like everyone else, I was confined and by which I was tyrannised. In this more leisurely world, time has become expansive, fluid, imprecise even.

  In an essay ‘The Two Faces of Time: The City Calendar and the Country Calendar’, Piero Camporesi, Professor of Italian History at the University of Bologna, explores our historical interpretation of time. He makes the point that ‘The precise measurement of time began with the rise of the urban mercantile society, and from that measurement arose a stern philosophy of time for work and time for death.’ He goes on to argue that this was not the case for rural peasants in the Middle Ages, whose whole notion of time was framed by the hours of sunlight and by the seasons, and, possibly, by the disciplines of worship if they lived and worked within earshot of a church.

  With the growing ubiquity of clocks from the seventeenth century onwards, particularly in towns, what Camporesi refers to as the ‘natural day’ was replaced by ‘psychological duration’. Our sense of what makes a day ‘became abnormal, longer or shorter, the cycle of dawns and sunsets, of longer and shorter seasons, yielded to the exasperating scansion of hours, half-hours, quarter-hours, minutes, hurrying us onward to death. The ever increasing divisions of time have led to a parallel sensitivity to its passing.’

  Of course, my time is tempered by certain temporal constraints – ferry schedules, hotel check-ins and check-outs, restaurant and museum or monument opening and closing hours. But by giving myself six months (even if the six months had been involuntarily split into two and fou
r months) in which to travel, explore, watch, wait, sit and think, I’ve also given myself the rarest of luxuries – time. Time that’s not subjugated to the ‘exasperating scansion’ of seconds, minutes, quarter- and half-hours, hours, days, weeks, and months, but that is fluid and flexible. Already I’ve lost any sense of the day of the week. Is it Wednesday? Or Friday? Or Sunday? I neither know nor care. I can move or stay as I please. What’s the time? Time for a swim. Time for a snooze. Time for a walk. Time to sit and do nothing. Time for lunch. For once in my life I’m the master of time, not mastered by it.

  Ventotene

  I arrive in the early evening and plod up from the harbour to the mulberry-coloured Hotel Julia. From the window of my room I look down on the black volcanic sand of the Cala Nave, the island’s only swimming beach. The last sunbathers and swimmers are packing up, folding up their parakeet-coloured sunbrellas, shaking out towels, pausing for a last chat, climbing up the steps back to their hotels, apartments, B&Bs. The streets are already streaming with family groups in an ad hoc but orderly passeggiata.

  Ventotene is a volcanic pimple jutting up out of a shimmering sea; home of winds, birds of passage and prisoners of contrasting types over the millennia. As usual, certain Roman emperors made use of Ventotene’s remoteness to get rid of unwanted family members. Augustus banished his daughter, Julia the Elder, here in 2 BC. In AD 29 Tiberius dispatched Augustus’s granddaughter, Agrippina the Elder, to Ventotene, where she starved to death. Livilla, Agrippina’s youngest daughter, managed to get herself sent to Ventotene twice, first by her brother, Caligula and then by her uncle, Claudius. She also starved to death. Claudia Octavia, Nero’s first wife, also ended up on the island in AD 62, where she was put to death on her husband’s orders.

  Out of this litany of gore and treachery comes one really remarkable figure, Flavia Domitilla, who managed to be both a Christian saint and a Jewish heroine. After her husband, the consul, Flavius Clemens, converted to Judaism, she spoke up in defence of Jews after the Emperor Domitian had ordered all Jews and Christians to be put to death. She was exiled to Pandateria, as Ventotene was known by the Romans, for her pains, where she died.

  Just off shore lies the tiny island of Santo Stefano, on which squats yet another prison; stern, abandoned but still sinister. It seems an unlikely place to have played a leading role in the formation of the European Union.

  During the war Altiero Spinelli was imprisoned on Santo Stefano, along with 700 other political prisoners, 400 of which were, like Spinelli, communists. While he was there, Spinelli drafted what became known as the Ventotene Manifesto. Spinelli, in common with many on the left wing of European politics, had come to the conclusion that nationalism and national interests had driven Europe into two savage wars. Another had to be avoided at all costs. Spinelli concluded that the creation of a federal Europe was the best way of achieving this, and the Ventotene Manifesto provided the intellectual foundation on which the Common Market, that became the EEC that became the EU, was based.

  Ventotene makes Ponza seem like a bustling metropolis. It’s one of those places to which, like Ponza, the same families go every year. Parents greet each other with cries of rapture; teenagers compare mobile phones, apps, fashions, music, romances in huddled groups; younger children renew acquaintance, reform groups, engage in ancient games. Their conversation and laughter flutters like the flags in front of the mustard yellow Municipio that occupies one side of the Piazza Castello.

  The piazza is full of children, racing about, not an electronic game in sight. Fathers play table football with all the competitive vigour of the real thing, albeit with rather better humour. Mothers sit at tables down one side of the piazza, sipping Proseccos or Aperol spritzers, keeping an eye on husbands and children. A line of elderly men are settled on a bench at the top of the square, nattering like rooks. Astrid Gilberto’s dreamy voice drifts up from a speaker, something about saying ‘Goodbye’. In the thickening dusk, the faded gold, crinkled cream, dusty pink of the two-storey buildings that frame the square evoke the gentleness of a vanished past.

  The next day it takes me about 40 minutes to walk from one end of the island to the other, peering into gardens, pausing by fields in which lentil plants, stripped of their lucrative pulses, are withering away; popping into the bird observatory already colonised by a flock of schoolchildren clutching notebooks and pens; peeking discreetly at the odd villa tucked away among the scrub and the fleshy lobes of prickly pear cactuses.

  I have a light lunch of crostone di lenticchie e polpo, and fagiolini dell’orto di Nonnina Vita, or green beans from Granny Vita’s garden, at Un Mare di Sapore, tucked into the shade beneath the cliff by the harbour. The crostone is a fragrant mulch of lentils and capers flecked with parsley and studded with chunks of braised octopus. It’s savoury, earthy, primary, sharp, luscious. The beans are French and are dressed in lemon juice, olive oil and mint and have an airy, grassy freshness and verve that remind me of the first time I came across French beans in France as a young teenager.

  It’s been a brief sojourn on Ventotene, but, in truth, a brief sojourn is all that Ventotene commands. I’d need a lifetime to fold myself into its simplicities, and, while I can go easily, I don’t have quite that much time, and so I return to Formia, retrieve Nicoletta and head for Naples.

  Mainland Italy (once more)

  I love Naples. I love the city itself, its energy, its apparent nihilism and chaos, its passion for food, its many beauties. I love Naples on foot. I do not love it on a scooter.

  Some years ago I wrote ‘When a man has ridden a scooter in Naples, he does not need to boast. When others drawl about wrestling with crocodiles, killing wild boar with their bare hands and bungee jumping from the top of the Niagara Falls, the man who has ridden a scooter in Naples has only to say, in a quiet voice, “I have ridden a scooter in Naples”, and, if they have any sense, these other thrill seekers will fall silent and simply look at him with awe.’ I see no reason to alter a word after my latest incursion into the city.

  It all starts to go wonky when I leave the ring road to drop down into the city proper. The road from Formia to Naples had been straightforward, enjoyable even. But suddenly it isn’t. I enter a turbulent confluence of traffic – the meeting of several rivers of cars, lorries, motorbikes, scooters in full spate. Decisions have to be made at dizzying speed. This way? That way? Which way? Which way is that way? The Neapolitan road system makes Kazuo Nomura’s celebrated insoluble maze seem a model of lucid simplicity. The broken road surface and then cobbles set my head juddering. Double vision? Triple, quadruple vision. Sweat courses down my brow and into my eyes. The world becomes a blur. The sun hammers down.

  Is that a sign for the city centre? Which direction does it point? Who knows? Who cares? Certainly not the man who carves me up from the left, or the car squeezing past me on the right or whoever it is on the scooter that pulls out in front of me without warning.

  We stop suddenly. We start abruptly. The rucksack, the one that’s supposed to be firmly wedged between my seat and the steering column and held in place by my knees, threatens to topple sideways, does topple sideways, half on the road. Desperately I haul it back in place. Pip goes a horn. Pip goes another. Paaarp goes a third. Pip. Paaarp. Pip-pip. We head right. But I don’t want to go right. I want to go down there. There. But I can’t because of the bloody one-way system. Inexorably I’m being forced away from where I think I ought to be going, although I’m not sure any longer. Who can be? Who can be sure of anything in the maelstrom of Neapolitan traffic? And my bloody bag shakes loose and falls into the rushing, pushing, heedless torrent of traffic again. Why, oh why did I ever set out on this trip? On a bloody scooter. I’m too old, too infirm for this malarkey. Why didn’t I stay at home? How are the broad beans getting on? And the carrots? Is anyone watering the pots? Haven’t I been through this tunnel at least once already?

  And then, miraculously I find myself on the seafront, where I want to be, without any clear idea of how I got
there. All I have to do now is find a) the Siremar ticket office; and b) the quay from which the boat to Stromboli sails. This turns out to be easier said than done. It takes me four passes along the seafront, and further engagement with the murderous Neapolitan traffic, to locate the ticket office. The man in the ticket office tells me that the ferry sails from quite another part of the port complex. He tells me how to get there. It’s possible I’ve misunderstood his instructions, because I can’t find the quay or the ferry. I ask another man. He confidently directs me to quite another part. He’s wrong, too. The sun’s a golden bludgeon, and my temper is very bad. I’ve almost lost the will to live. I ask a young woman in the booth of another shipping line. Her instructions are clear, explicit and correct. I love her.

  Stromboli

  When I wake in the early hours of the next morning, the ferry, the Lauriana, is still ploughing a purposeful furrow across liquid silver in cool light. The only sounds are the throb of the engines and the rush of water beneath the hull. A few passengers move about with the stunned expressions of the ill-slept, newly wakened. Others lie stretched out, still wrapped in sleep and clothes, with something – hat, handkerchief, eye shade, sock – covering their eyes.

  And then, suddenly, there is Stromboli: a perfect, solid isosceles triangle rising up out of the sea, its summit pearly pink in the closest equivalent I’ve yet seen of Homer’s ‘rosy-fingered dawn’, artichoke-coloured damask patching the slopes below, stretching down to where neat white houses hem the shore. A few yachts ride at anchor. A tramp coaster swings aft of us. The man standing beside me hawks noisily and spits.

  I discovered the Aeolian Islands – Vulcano, Lipari, Panarea, Stromboli, Salina, Alicudi and Filicudi – in the late 1970s, when a kindly American friend, who had a house on Salina, invited me to stay there, and I took to escaping to this archipelago. In those days, they seemed to me to be a pre-lapsarian Eden, untouched by the crass commercialism that had corrupted the South of France and the Mediterranean coasts of Spain and Portugal.