Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  JULY 2015

  Salina – Filicudi – Alicudi – Sicily – Ustica – Favignana – Marettimo

  Salina

  ‘So there we were,’ I wrote in my notebook on the page dated 17.ix.78, ‘standing on the quay – a bus strike – on Salina! – one bus island – “You want to go to Leni?” says a well-dressed old man with one silver tooth in his top gum and a full set on the bottom – “I will take you.” And so he does in a battered, 1950 vintage Fiat van, chugging along at 20 kph.’

  I first came to Salina in that summer to stay with Moyra, an American friend, who had a house on the edge of Leni, the village that peered down on the tiny harbour of Rinella. At the time Salina had an other-worldly beauty and an apparently unchanging pattern of life. It was a summer of delights and the beginning of my affair with the Italian islands.

  I had hair on my head in those days, cheekbones and only one chin. I was trim and full of optimism and ignorance. Almost fifty years on I have little hair, no cheekbones, incipient jowls, several chins, and more flesh around my middle than is strictly necessary. I may be marginally less ignorant, but I still feel the sense of possibility.

  As I make my way up from Rinella to Leni, through the multiple hairpin bends, I have a growing sense of recognition, almost of familiarity as the landscape unfolds: forbidding hills erupting abruptly from the sea; the thick pelt of holly-green trees cloaking the higher slopes; white, yellow and ochre houses scattered among the vineyards; olive groves and fields that mark the lower slopes in regular shapes.

  I have clear memories of Moyra’s house. It lay just off a path of volcanic cinder that ran between fields of caper plants on the hill above Leni. The house hadn’t looked much from the outside, I remember, just two linked cubes in bad need of repair, but inside it was light and cool, with a decent-sized kitchen, a sitting/dining room and two high-ceilinged bedrooms that looked out over the sea, a terrace on which we used to eat breakfast and, very important, a cistern in which the winter rain was gathered to provide all the fresh water during the summer months.

  Now I can’t be sure exactly which house it was or even where it had stood. My memory may have blurred over the years, and the neighbourhood seems to be subtly changed. The houses have got bigger and more stylish. It’s all a bit smarter and tidier. I’m certain there weren’t so many vineyards in those days. And surely there were more capers, weren’t there? Is this the path? Or that? Or the one over there? Could it’ve been that house? Or the one above?

  I have flashes of semi-recognition, but no certain identification. All the houses look more substantial than I remember, modified and modernised for holiday use. It’s like trying to identify a friend who I haven’t seen in years. Frustrated and disappointed, I come to the conclusion that the elegant simplicity of the original has been submerged beneath the accretions of decades. It’d be surprising if it hadn’t. Nothing could remain unchanged for so long, but I feel a pang of sadness, and something lost.

  I first walked along the path to the black-pebbled, long-curving bay of La Spiaggia di Venezia, with its sparkling, fish-rich waters, that summer. Stone and dust, the track wound unconstrained between terraces set with cactus, capers and olive trees, and smelt of freshly ground pepper. Now the old meandering route is formalised, paved and made orderly between low stone walls. A wooden fence guards approaches to the cliff edge.

  At the path’s end, Moyra and I would skitter down the steep, uncertain slope, relieved to reach the beach without mishap, and there Moyra would climb up on her rock to read, splayed upon its crest, and I would rummage among the friendly waves, before we scrabbled, laughing, back up the jumbled face hours later.

  Now careful, regulated steps lead down the abrupt incline. I descend them with some deliberation. There’s no fear of tumbling now, or the fizz of novelty and freedom.

  The beach is empty but for a couple in their middle years sitting on towels just above the water’s edge. Their skins are pale. Recent arrivals. We smile and politely say ‘Hello’, they a shadow on my nostalgia, me an intrusion on their intimacy.

  After a swim, I climb back up, sharply aware of breath, sinew, muscle, gravity, pausing at each section of the steps, to admire the ferrous stain of iron in a rock, a face made by chrome-yellow lichens, the heavy roundness of a cactus lobe, a fan of dried lily petals, and ease my panting, and dwell a moment on the unfettered past.

  That evening I drink a Campari and soda on the terrace at the Hotel Belvedere, scoffing some stuzzichini and looking out across the scarcely rippling sea. The sun sets behind the neighbouring islands of Alicudi and Filicudi, to which I’ll be travelling in a few days’ time. They’re soft against the hazy, cashmere sky above and beyond them.

  ‘My pen strove in vain to equal this superb creation of divine artifice,’ the great Japanese poet and inveterate traveller, Matsuo Basho, wrote of the islands of Matsushima in The Long Road to the High North. I’ve been reading this extraordinary combination of travelogue and haikus as I’ve been going along, and growing increasingly fond of the troubled, crotchety, kindly poet. I wish I had his ability to distil the essence of a scene, incident or thought into sharp, resonant verses. And if he couldn’t ‘equal this superb creation of divine artifice’, what hope have I? Still, it’s deeply agreeable to ramble through my past.

  ‘Oh, come on, Dad,’ exclaims Lois in exasperation on the phone when I tell her. Sometimes I wonder at my suitability as a traveller, given my tendency to drop vital bits of equipment along the way, in this case both chargers for the various electronic accessories I have with me. They join an ever lengthening list of items that I’ve left like spoor to mark my passage – notebook, camera, towel, toothpaste and now the chargers. Through the twin marvels of human decency and the island ferry system, I’ve been reunited with all of them except the towel. After the usual buzz of phone calls, emails and general botheration, yes, they will be delivered to Santa Marina Salina on the afternoon ferry from Stromboli.

  As I’ve got time to kill before I can reclaim my lost technology, I decide to visit Lingua, a few kilometres the other side of Santa Marina Salina. I can’t remember visiting it on previous stays on Salina. So I take the shaded, winding road, edged with wild fennel, mullein, acacia trees, purple and blue convolvulus and bamboo. Dozens of goldfinches burst out of the green curtain ahead of me, and vanish back into it again.

  The road stops at Lingua, just runs out, as if from lack of interest. There isn’t a lot to the place, a modest marina, a cluster of houses and eateries of various kinds, including Da Alfredo, ‘world famous’ for its granitas, and a stagnant lagoon, once used to make salt, but now abandoned. And the Museo Civico, tucked away on a back street, looking out over the car park beside the salt lagoon.

  It doesn’t look much from the outside, scruffy and a bit unloved. Inside it’s charming and melancholy, a sequence of rooms, each filled with the lovingly displayed artefacts recording ways of life that have vanished from these islands within living memory.

  One room houses a baker’s oven, the walls decorated with the wooden paddles with which the loaves were once moved in and out. The next contains a granite wheel for crushing olives, and the sisal mats on which the crushed olives were shovelled before being pressed. In a third room is a splendid donkey-driven mill for grinding corn, and a smaller, hand-driven mill for family use. Behind them are various pieces of fishing equipment – harpoons for tuna and swordfish, tridents for squid and fish, a hemp pot for catching the gamberetti di nassa, so the caption reads, and a large cauldron in which nets were dyed so that they didn’t show up in the water. The final room contains a rough-hewn double bed and a cradle. There is a broad shelf above the bed for storage, a water basin and spindles and shuttles for weaving.

  All this is shown to me with great patience and grace by a charming, white-haired old gent who limps around, leaning heavily on a stick. I think he’s pleased that someone has come in. When I sign the visitors’ book, I notice that the last signature was dated four days earlier.r />
  I like the Museo Civico for its modesty, its humanity and its wistful charm. The rooms tell the story of those who have no history, a quiet memorial reflecting the patient endurance that defined those lives.

  ‘Decide to walk to circus at Malfa,’ one entry in my notebook of 1978 begins. ‘At 7 o’clock we set off over the hills, knapsack with picnic supper on back – a lovely walk abt 1 hr – on arrival we discovered we were abt an hour early – it was dark and we had our picnic by the cemetery because that’s where there was a light (made more sinister by a total eclipse of the moon).’

  I remember that evening with peculiar clarity. The moon had been so bright that it gave the landscape around a luminous, chiaroscuro clarity. I suddenly noticed that it was getting darker and darker. I looked up at what had been a full, brilliant, silver disc, and saw that a perfect semi-circular section appeared to have been bitten out of it. It was then I realised what was happening. Slowly, bit by bit, the moon vanished completely, plunging the world into utter darkness, but for the single inadequate lamp by the entrance to the cemetery. If the dead were ever going to walk, then surely it would be on the night of a total eclipse of the moon. And where were we? Images conjured up by a lifetime of reading H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, W. W. Jacobs, and other Masters of Horror as they used to be called, capered through my imagination. I waited for the rattle of bones, the whisper of the ghost-like figures, but they never came. It’s ridiculous how superstitious even the most rational mind can become if the circumstances are right; and my mind isn’t always among the most rational. I hadn’t admitted my superstitious horror to Moyra, or my relief when the moon emerged whole and perfect after fifteen minutes or so.

  ‘At 9.15,’ the notebook continues, ‘we made our way into the big top of the Circo Relli – although the show was due to start at 9.30 it actually got off the ground at 10.15 – a motley audience – us, obviously stranieri, in the good seats + a few well-to-do Italians – and then the locals on benches behind us – the first act was a playlet in Neapolitan, Pagliacci-like, but with a happy ending – I slept through most of it and the rest I didn’t understand.’

  And neither had Moyra, who was a specialist in Italian dialects, so impenetrable was the local patois. I do remember, however, that the audience were obviously so familiar with the dialogue that they were able to say the lines at the same time as the actors, rocking with laughter as they did so.

  ‘… then came a lady in a black chiffon dress that was almost as large as she was, but not quite – her act, if you can call it that, was with pigeons, each mottled and blotched in a different colour, pink, yellow, white; with pale blue eyes – that were picked out of a coffin-like box and hurled at her by an aged crone, whereupon they flapped desperately for a few yards and settled down on their appropriate perches and shat copiously – occasionally one failed to make it and flopped to the ground at the old lady’s feet and scuttled away under the benches – the audience joined in capturing them with great enthusiasm – then came a sketch that I couldn’t understand but was funny because of an excellent clown – then acrobatic children climbing up a ladder balanced on the feet of a fat girl who took a bow after every trick, brushing her copious hair off her face with a sweep of a pudgy arm, extending the other (arm) sideways, bending stiffly – she walked with the self-confidence of a weightlifter – then came a dance routine that made Cabaret seem straight with three pudgy ladies in black linked to a singing duet of indescribable awfulness; the man with a shock of modishly crinkly grey hair, tight black trousers and black shirt that looked as if it was about to burst although largely undone; the girl with a beaky nose & hair pulled back and black boots and skirt – then extremely straight-forward conjuring tricks done by a lady in a voice more in keeping with a washing machine demonstration – then a blonde contortionist with a dumb face and a nymphomaniacal smile who smoked a cigarette held in her toes as she bent between her own legs – then onto the stage came a chunky young man and a chunkier lady with a boa constrictor wrapped round her, which she shed before shinning up a rope – she dangled from a device he held in his mouth, which says a lot for the strength of his neck, jaw and teeth because she must have weighed 14 or 15 stone – culminating in a neck spin velocissimo – one final humorous sketch and about 12.15 we stumbled out into the night – the mixture of amateurish styles was very enjoyable – its unpretentiousness was like a Fellini evocation of his youth – even the colours were Fellini-like, bold, strong but slightly faded like nostalgia – a hair raising drive back.’

  What a clear-eyed observer I’d been then. My memory of the occasion is vivid and precise, but tempered by the affection and nostalgia that my thirty-one-year-old self had presciently identified all those years ago.

  I find the cemetery beside which Moyra and I picnicked during the eclipse. It’s harmless in the full light of day, devoid of anything remarkable. I search for a spot of flat land nearby, on which the circus tent might have once stood, but all the likely spots have been planted with vines, and so I’m just left with the memory of the big top with the words ‘Circo Relli’ in lights along the crest.

  The white houses of Pollara stand on a plateau, the floor of what had once been the crater of a volcano, between a semi-circle of steep hills and the edge of a great, curving curtain of cliff where the sea has taken a semi-circular chunk out of the crater. The cliff falls 200 or 300 metres to a narrow beach. It’s another place gilded by the affection of memory.

  A path leads from the village down one side of the bay to a promontory of golden sandstone that wind and water have scooped over the years into chambers and terraces with supple, almost fungal, shapes that had reminded me of Gaudi’s apartment buildings in Barcelona. Once fishermen hollowed grottos out of the soft rock in which they kept their boats, ready to slide down the slope directly into the amethyst-shaded sea.

  Moyra and I had this strange, magical territory virtually to ourselves, to swim, sunbathe and read. One morning, I watched two boys, urchins, making their way along the water’s edge, dibbling an olive branch in holes that pockmarked the plateau of sandstone that extended some way out into the bay. Every now and then the boy with the branch would whip it out and his pal would deftly remove a small octopus clinging to it, and slip it into a sack strung over his shoulder. The silver/grey and white leaves of the olive tree fluttering in the water looked uncannily like small fish.

  I very much doubt that I’ll see that kind of marine harvest again, or, indeed, if there’re any octopi to harvest. In the intervening years, the rest of the world has discovered the sandstone cove below the village, no doubt in part because the bay of Pollara featured in the film, Il Postino.

  The fishing boats have gone, too, and the caves now house kayaks for holidaymakers and a bar of sorts selling Coca-Cola, mineral water and beer. Couples and families with sunbrellas and inflatable mattresses are draped over the curves and contours of the sandpaper sandstone terraces. Buoys linked by a rope mark the limit to which boats can come in to the shore. Beyond it several tourist cruisers ride at anchor, with smaller craft moving around them like waterboatmen.

  The only thing that hasn’t changed is the water, warm and clear, in which shoals of small fish graze over the rocks mined with spiky black sea urchins, and among weed that swings to and fro to a gentle but insistent rhythm. Beyond the coastal terrace, the bottom falls away steeply, light turning from flickering gold to pale blue to a deeper and deeper blue to the black of an abyss.

  Francesca, the serious and gastronomically omniscient young woman who runs the Hotel Belvedere, suggests that I go to the Ristorante da Carla for dinner.

  ‘It’s something different,’ she says.

  She’s right, although to call the Ristorante da Carla a restaurant in the conventional sense is misleading. It’s Carla’s home, where twenty or so people – a young German couple, three gnarled businessmen, a family group of a dozen or so and I – sit at various tables on the terrace, ready to eat the dishes she cooks in her domestic kitch
en with the help of her mother, while her husband buttles around handling wine and service. It turns the evening into somewhere between a pop-up trattoria and a dinner party, formally informal or informally formal.

  Out of the kitchen comes deep-fried sage leaves, aromatic wafers as crisp as crisps; fried zucchini flowers, vegetable flames trapped in light batter; fluffy potato croquettes; deep-fried balls of dough, intriguingly springy within their crunchy carapace; a slice of grilled melanzana; strips of grilled zucchini; and a caper salad. It isn’t sophisticated cooking, but it’s masterly in the understanding of the nature and potential of each ingredient.

  The same’s true of the primo piatto, the pasta dish: ravioli, plump with minced shrimps, the pasta as soft as suede, resting comfortably in a sauce of creamed zucchini crunchy with chips of toasted hazelnut, flavours elegant and airy; and linguine with chunks of scorfano (scorpion fish) and parsley oil, languid, sweet and perfumed.

  The secondo piatto is also made up of multiple small dishes on an anchovy theme, one of which, fresh anchovies marinated in lemon juice and then sandwiched in lemon leaves and baked, a whisper of citrus oil infusing the sweet flaking meat, is radiant and bewitching.

  And finally ricotta salata al forno, salted ricotta that’s been baked in the oven and sliced as thin as a communion wafer, its toasted saltiness matched to a glass of light, layered, sweet Malvasia di Lipari, a strikingly happy combination. It’s possible, of course, that I’m inclined to happiness by the pleasures of the foods and the oddity of the circumstances.

  They don’t look much, capers, just little buds of green tucked away among fleshy green leaves of a bushy, low-growing shrub. If the buds are allowed to grow out, they produce a flower of unexpected splendour, about the size of a coffee-cup saucer, pure white except for a tinge of imperial purple around the edge of the petals and a spray of exquisite, long, purple stamens like the tentacles of a particularly beautiful sea anemone, that release the seductive perfume of marshmallow.