Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  The scale of the Stabilimento Florio, the tonnara on Favignana, is prodigious, a succession of canning rooms, cooking areas, boat-houses, offices and storage facilities. But even more impressive, to my way of thinking, is the handsome style of the place. This may have been an industrial unit of its day, but, like Brunel’s Paddington Station, it’d been designed with an eye to aesthetics as well as efficiency. Built of local creamy-white tufa blocks, it combines classical proportion with contemporary convenience, laid out on impeccable assembly line principles to accommodate the natural flow of the process. Here’s the boathouse where the old fishing boats are still poised, ready to slide down ramps straight into the sea below. Here’s the quay where the tuna were landed next to the dissection area where they were cut up before being loaded into vast metal tureens in which they were cooked. Behind these are the canning rooms with ranks of old tuna tins, all neatly laid out, as if ready for processing. The cans were topped up with olive oil here; sealed here; stored here; distributed here. It has the elegance of form and function in perfect harmony.

  It’s difficult to imagine in the pristine present that these practical, handsome, high-ceilinged rooms with their linking neo-Gothic arches and paved floors would have reeked of slime and blood and fishiness. It’s all neat, clean and tidy now, of course, a model of tasteful restoration, a multi-purpose cultural space. Nostalgic black-and-white photographs evoke vanished people and processes.

  In one room a black-and-white film celebrates la mattanza, the annual round-up and slaughter of migrating tuna that used to happen each year off Favignana, producing at least some of the raw material for the Florio production line. It was shot in the 1930s, a hymn to the fishermen, their community and their fish, a moving, conscious tribute to the rhythms of the past. Everyone on Favignana depended on this harvest, and most of the community were involved in la mattanza in one way or another. The nets were mended communally, prepared communally, loaded communally. The boats were launched and rowed, eight oars per side, into position. The fishermen waited. The sun went down. The sun came up. The fishermen still waited. And then the tuna arrived and the slaughter began. It was operatic, cruel and noble.

  But la mattanza no longer takes place off Favignana. All that ended some years ago, and with it the industry it supported. Tuna made this community in the same way that coal and steel made communities in Britain, and, like them, the community and its culture has vanished, destroyed by ineluctable economic forces.

  Its place has been taken by a mattanza of a different kind. Instead of the migrating tuna come migrating holidaymakers, just as predictably. The seas may not flow with blood any more, but the streets flow with money. The whole community is united as it had been formerly, serving together, servicing together, feeding, managing, entertaining together, and unlike the schools of blue fin tuna, the schools of holidaymakers are only likely to grow.

  Giusy, the young woman with the black tooth, tells me that there’s going to be a concert held in a natural theatre between the bar and the wall of the quarry. The singer is a friend of hers, ‘a star from Broadway’ she says emphatically.

  By the time I settle at a table at the back, with a mojito for company, the Broadway star is well into ‘Killing Me Softly’ in a voice that ranges over a wide dramatic landscape. She follows this up with ‘As Long as He Needs Me’, from Oliver, in which, she announces, she’d starred on Broadway. The singer gives it some welly, milking it for all it’s worth. There’s a storm of applause at the end. Lionel Bart, who wrote the musical, ended up living above a laundromat in Acton. I think how pleased he would’ve been. Time for a second mojito.

  Soon ‘Wherever You Are’ soars out over L’Oasi. Many people talk right through it, sipping their own White Ladies, Margaritas and Aperol spritzers, clapping vigorously at the end, although not as enthusiastically, I’m pleased to note, as they had after the Lionel Bart aria. Then comes ‘Questo è Mio’, a very theatrical chanson that has something of Mercedes Sosa’s great anthem ‘Gracias A La Vida’ about it. The nattering and chattering continue unabated.

  Behind me, some kids start playing in an open-air Jacuzzi. The dusk’s coming on as the singer gets stuck into Claudio Baglioni’s great ‘Piccolo Grande Amore’. Another mojito. It may be cheesy, but there’s something fabulous about people basking in collective pleasure. This is the essence of L’Oasi. It hovers on the edge of the seedy, an amateur Butlin’s in an exotic location. I feel a great warmth for my fellow humans. Perhaps it’s the mojitos.

  And yet, even as I revel in the corn of another Bart classic, ‘A New Day’, I know that I don’t really share the experience that everyone else here is feeling. It’s a form of communication conducted in a language to which I don’t have access. My pleasure is personal and selfish, and at the opposite pole to the collective emotion sweeping through the bar.

  Of course, it would be impossible for everyone to travel as I am. More, the people around me wouldn’t want to, any more than I would as they are. Being a part of the collective, being with folk like themselves, is a great component of their pleasure. For me, travelling, alone for the most part, is the delight.

  We arrive at the finale, ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’. What else could it possibly be? The cantante gives it the full treatment. We join in. The collective heart is put through the collective wringer. I can’t help a still small voice in my head murmuring ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake’, but, in truth, I’m very happy to be there, to see it all, even if I’m not swept away.

  There’s a storm of applause and whistles and cries of ‘Bis’. ‘Bis.’ A man in a woolly cap, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Compo in Last of the Summer Wine, dashes up and embraces her. The Broadway star looks very pleased.

  Marettimo

  Marettimo is the smallest and most remote of the three Egadi Islands, about thirty minutes by aliscafo from Favignana; a rugged, uncompromising scrap of rock stuck in a topaz sea. The port’s a cluster of square-topped, white and blue cubes. Around 300 people live here full-time, all fishermen and their families.

  The fishermen of Marettimo are famous. However, for a few short weeks, a good many of them desert their traditional vocation for the more productive catch of tourists, who come over to ooh and aah over the island’s many grottos and swim in its unspoiled waters.

  Pietro, an urbane, Toscano-puffing Sicilian I met while swimming one afternoon on Favignana, had told me a round-the-island cruise was the best way to see Marettimo, so I’m quite happy to be snared by an elderly boat tout almost as soon as I set foot in the tiny harbour, along with a young couple, she from Liguria, he from Pisa; a couple of handsome, silver-haired silver surfers from Milan; and two sets of cheerily chatty middle-aged women. We’re bundled on board with little ceremony, and, after a certain amount of careering about the harbour, head for the choppy open sea.

  Our captain, Salvatore, explains that it’s too rough to go all the way round the island. He does an eloquent mime with his hands. However, he’s determined to give us our money’s worth, and that means taking us to the two nearest grottos at a cut rate. The practicality of this becomes questionable as we hit open water, alongside several other former fishing boats all heading in the same direction. It’s a powerboat race without the power, and Salvatore is going to win it.

  The sea rolls in long, slow surges, interspersed with a lot of short, sharp furrows. It makes for exhilarating, if not exactly comfortable, travel, not appreciated by all my fellow sailors. We don’t really have time to assess the situation properly before we’re actually inside the first grotto. Salvatore has out-manoeuvred his rivals in a ruthless manner that would have suited a cut-throat skipper in an America’s Cup race, and the other boats have to sit outside, pitching and rolling, while we have first dibs.

  A section of the ceiling has fallen in, so that sunlight lights up the inside of the grotto, casting liquid, shifting webs on the sides. Salvatore is eloquent in his appreciation of this marvel of nature. We are suitably impressed and snap away. And the
n Salvatore begins a multiple-point turn inside the grotto to get us out. This brings us within millimetres of the rocky sides, and involves a good deal of pushing off – ‘Look out for your hands,’ ‘Not too hard,’ ‘Careful,’ Salvatore roars at intervals – before we’re pitching and yawing outside once more.

  We head up the coast. The sea becomes increasingly choppy. One of the middle-aged ladies is clearly not a happy traveller.

  ‘I don’t want to go into the grotto,’ she says.

  ‘No, no, Signora, we have to,’ says Salvatore. ‘You’ve paid for it.’

  ‘I’ll pay not to go there,’ says the lady.

  ‘But the others have paid, too, and they want go.’ We look at each other blankly. No one says anything. We’re all terrified of Salvatore.

  By the time we actually get to the grotto, we’re bouncing around. The grotto is quite small and impressively dark. I can’t actually believe that Salvatore is really going to take us into it, but he does. It’s a tight fit, but it’s calm and we can admire the various side grottos and the darkness undistracted by fear of capsizing. And then it’s time to back out from the calm of the grotto into the, well, not exactly pounding, but agitated sea. I might have questioned Salvatore’s sanity in taking us into the grotto in the first place, but, to his credit, he gets us out again with aplomb and a stream of reassurance. The eyes of the lady who didn’t want to go to the grotto in the first place are firmly shut throughout, and most of my fellow passengers look apprehensive.

  There’s relief all round when Salvatore announces that we’re going to a nice quiet cove where we can swim to our hearts’ content. Which we do, along with the human cargo of some fifteen other boats.

  While lying on the rocks in the sun, I fall into conversation with Marco, a marine biologist with a ring through his nose. He’s come from Trapani that morning, and walked from the village, about one and a half hours. I’m suitably impressed.

  He was born in Naples, he says, but now works in the Netherlands. He specialises in phytoplankton.

  ‘Phytoplankton?’

  ‘Very small organisms, even smaller than plankton. They’re very important because they form the beginning of the food chain in the sea.’

  He’s studied in Southampton, Australia, France and now the Netherlands.

  ‘It’s very difficult to get a permanent job,’ he mourns. ‘The problem is funding. The best centres attract the most funding and they’re all in Northern Europe and Scandinavia. It’s very competitive to get a position in any of them.’

  He’s pessimistic about the future of the oceans.

  ‘The levels of pollution are better than they were, but not as good as they need to be. Towns and rivers are discharging too much pollution into the sea.We need to invest more money in pollution control. It’s always a question of money, and that’s the problem.’

  ‘So are fish stocks being seriously threatened?’ I ask.

  ‘In some places, of course they are,’ he says. ‘But the balance in the sea is very complex. We don’t really understand it yet.’

  He’s as pessimistic about the political situation in Italy as he is about the future of the oceans. He’s pessimistic about the economy, about the future, about life. He doesn’t seem cheerful about much. He gets up to walk back to the village in time to catch the ferry back to Trapani. The one thing that would make him happy, he says, would be a permanent job. ‘It doesn’t matter where.’

  Favignana (again)

  The heat is penal. The early part of the morning, every morning, 6.30, 7.00 or so, has a delicious cool to it. From about 8 a.m. the heat begins to quicken, seeping into the skin and through the flesh beneath, remorselessly building up and up, as if some invisible furnace is being stoked. Pavements, roads, earth and sand become too hot to walk on barefoot. By midday the heat reaches 30°C and higher, and becomes palpable, wringing energy out of people, cars, dogs, cats, me. People move in a curious torpor. Small shadows become sanctuaries of relative cool.

  It’s the last morning of this leg of my summer in the islands. The character and fragile beauties of the islands are already vanishing beneath a mass of holidaymakers and tourists. They’re a jolly lot, but I can’t see the point of hanging around for a month observing inadvertent pillage by the marauding hordes, and the consequences, good and bad, that I’ve already observed. I’m going to head for the Monti Lucretili north of Rome to spend August in the cheery company of my brother, Johnny, and his wife, Emma. It was here I spent so many agreeable summers in my youth, enjoying the relative cool of the hills and the well-fed simplicity of life.

  There’s still time for one last breakfast of croissant filled with pistachio cream, coffee and fresh orange juice. A stiff scirocco flaps the awning of the café in the town square. People are revving up for the beach. Delivery vans arrive with supplies to restock the shops, bars and eateries. Bicycles glide back and forth. Wheeled suitcases rattle over the paving. Someone’s sound system goes hiphophiphiphiphop. The sounds of the morning, the greetings and chat, burble like water over the rocks.

  I decide to make the steep walk to the Castello di Santa Caterina, the highest point of the island, which was used as a strategic watchtower by the Allies during the war, and subsequently as a radar listening post by the Italian Army. It takes me just over an hour with frequent stops, and I’m blinded by sweat by the time I finally clamber up to the crumbling ruin and the junk yard of radar equipment that looks like an installation sculpture.

  From this eyrie, I can see a rather different Favignana, one that’s difficult to appreciate from the bicycle- and scooter-clotted roads and holiday hokum of the seaside. Away from the immediate coastline are fields of wheat, dotted with bales of hay, cows grazing, blocks of vegetables, vines and olives. It’s an agricultural Favignana, a more permanent Favignana, that’ll be ticking over when the holiday season is finished, and life returns to normality once more.

  I think about my journey so far and how far I have travelled physically and emotionally, and how much further I have yet to go, and remember the poem by C. P. Cavafy that a wiser and far more literate friend sent me earlier.

  Do not hurry the journey at all.

  Better that it should last many years;

  Be quite old when you anchor at the island,

  Rich with all you have gained along the way,

  Not expecting Ithaca to give you riches.

  Ithaca has given you a lovely journey.

  Without Ithaca you would not have set out.

  I walk back down to where I left Nicoletta, and ride her back to the town, turning onto a track behind the Stabilimento Florio that runs along one side of the bay. I park Nicoletta and walk down to the sea’s edge, take off my shoes and stand in the gently roiling, rushing waves. The sounds of aliscafi and motorboats and the voices of the new arrivals calling out to each other, echo across the water. It’s very hot, and the soupy smells of the sea and its shore are pungent in the heat.

  7

  SWEET BANQUET OF THE MIND

  SEPTEMBER 2015

  Sicily – Pantelleria – Lampedusa – San Domino – San Nicola

  Mainland Italy

  August. Weeks of reading, Scrabble, cooking and pottering in the cool, upland beauty of the Monti Lucretili. I’ve spent so many happy summers here, hunting crayfish in the clear streams that run down from the mountains with Adamo, a half-wild shepherd boy; sitting lovelorn in the village piazza watching whichever of the Licenza lassies caught my vulnerable heart that year; basking in the glory of my improbable footballing success; gazing at a pair of golden eagles drifting effortlessly down the valley; cooking for eighteen, twenty, twenty-four on family holidays and bathing in the cataract of sound that accompanied lunch and dinner. I walked many of the paths that wind up through the vertiginous, heavily wooded hills; started at the snort of a wild boar; and stopped, perplexed, at the sight of a porcupine, so odd and unexpected in this place; picked wild cornelian cherries that grow in a stand in the middle of the woods so that my
brother, Johnny, could turn them into intense, jewelled jelly. It’s a place of marvellous beauty and tender memories.

  But now I’m ready for the last part of my odyssey. Away in the islands the ranks of holidaymakers are thinning, the steaming heat of high summer is tempered. It’s time to go back. I look forward to being reunited with Nicoletta, who I left in a cosy garage in Trapani, and to the joys of the high seas and open roads.

  Sicily (again)

  Trapani has changed quite a bit since I first wandered through it in 2007. It’s been cleaned and smartened up. It feels and looks prosperous. Salvatore, my taxi driver, told me that it’s flourishing thanks to its ship-handling yards, salt, wine, olive oil, marble and tourism. There are berths along the quay for the racing yacht circus that moves from friendly port to friendly port, taking part in a kind of seagoing Formula 1, each marked by sponsor logo.

  On earlier visits, I hadn’t really appreciated how handsome Trapani is. A town of a thousand balconies, I’d called it, and so it is, but there’s rather more to it than that. Much had been destroyed by Allied bombing during the last war, but a number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century churches and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century palazzi and bourgeois town houses survive and line the Corso Umberto and the via Roma at the heart of the old town, reminders of Trapani’s prosperous trading past. Between and around the Corso Umberto and the via Roma are knots of narrow, winding streets, the remains of the old souk that harks back to an earlier, Arab Trapani, an affiliation that finds a contemporary echo in the flat-topped buildings along the sea road.