Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  There’s an even more ancient association with the past just outside the town. The salt pans of Nubia lie on the sea side of the road that runs between Trapani and Marsala. The Phoenicians harvested salt from the sea in the same manner on the island of Mozia down the coast 5,000 years ago.

  Seawater flows into the shallow pans the size of a large swimming pool through a series of channels. The wind and sun combine to slowly evaporate the water, moving every so often from pan to pan until all that’s left is a crust of salt that looks like a rime of ice. The few remaining salinai (salt farmers) take away the salt. It’s beautiful in its simplicity. Aside from the chug of the small digger and rumble of the conveyor belt taking the salt to the salt hillocks along the edge of the pans as it’s harvested, there’s just the riffle of wind, the slip of water against the tufa sides of the pans and far-off bird cries. It’s a landscape with a strange, spare beauty. Rectangular mirrors of water stretch away to Trapani on the horizon, with the occasional stump of a deserted windmill that used to pump the water around the pans breaking the flatness of the landscape.

  Of course, the salt pans of Trapani can’t meet the world’s salt needs, or match the financial advantages of more highly geared production. Modern techniques, international competition, the methodical nature of production have all whittled away at the number of salinai. Only a handful remain. But is there a quieter, more tranquil, sustainable, environmentally sensitive form of farming? How long will it be before these salt pans, like the windmills, stand derelict and abandoned?

  ‘After you,’ says a tall man with a bushy beard and a bushy ponytail, as I stand in the queue waiting to collect my ticket for the ferry to Pantelleria.

  ‘But you’re ahead of me,’ I say.

  ‘And you’ve been waiting longer,’ he says.

  Such consideration is unheard-of in Italy, where queuing is treated as a blood sport in which the ruthless self-interest is reminiscent of gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome.

  I thank the man for his graciousness. He’s clutching a motorcycle helmet, and so we start chatting about the joys of two-wheel travel.

  His name is Mariano Brischetto, and it turns out that he’s a tenor at the Teatro Massimo Vincenzo Bellini in Catania. Catania has been a centre of opera since its most celebrated operatic son, Vincenzo Bellini, the Swan of Catania, genius of bel canto opera, became one of the most famous composers in nineteenth-century Europe. Mariano has just spent two weeks travelling around Sardinia, the first time he’s used his bike, he tells me, for anything other than going to and from work. It’s been a liberating experience for him, and he’s keen to enjoy the experience again. We exchange phone numbers and promise to meet up on Pantelleria.

  Pantelleria

  The harbour of Pantelleria is a working port not a posing port, a berth for tramp steamers and beaten-up coasters and the odd ramshackle trawler rather than scenic, decorative fishing boats and what Lisa on Filicudi referred to as Tupperware yachts, aside from a sleek, black number that belongs to Giorgio Armani, who has a house on the island. The buildings around the harbour are 1950s utilitarian, put up in place of those destroyed by Allied bombing during the war. Not much thought was given to their design at the time, and not much thought has been given to their maintenance since, by the look of things. The sea front strikes a slightly grungy note, beyond a few bright bars and the odd beachwear shop. Perhaps the constant flow of traffic along the lungomare is a deterrent to serious development. It’s a busy town. It has a sense of purpose about it.

  I meet up with Mariano by the filling station, as arranged, and we set off to explore the hinterland, he on his monster black and orange Kawasaki Versys and I on dainty Nicoletta.

  We follow the coastal road to Tracino. The shore is a long, winding, volcanic crust the colour and texture of elephant skin. Here and there it slopes down from precipitous cliffs to exquisite, crystalline waters. Then we turn inland, passing close to a number of peaks with pine and cork tree cladding, through scrubby land and scattered villages. In some ways Pantelleria feels closer to the Maghreb than Europe. There’s an unmistakably Arabic cast to the names – Kuddia, Khaggiar, Rekhale, Khamma – and many of the houses, known as dammusi, which are like boxes with a distinctive dome at the centre and painted white to deflect the sun, could have been lifted from Tunisia or Morocco.

  We pass through the Piana Ghirlanda, a long, flat valley of irregular fields in capricious shapes and sizes – straggly triangles, hexagons, rectangles, squares and some of geometric designs that defy precise description – shaped by dark, forbidding walls and terracing of volcanic rocks the colour of anthracite. Within these enclosures huddle diminutive olive trees, crouching caper bushes and lines of vines creeping over the ground, each designed to flourish in a landscape scoured by wind virtually every day of the year.

  There are various theories as to why Pantelleria is called Pantelleria, but one suggests that the name is the Italianised version of the Arabic Bint al-Riyah, meaning Daughter of Winds. Life on Pantelleria is shaped by wind. It was no more than a breeze when I arrived, but it isn’t always as gentle, and growing anything depends on mitigating its effects. Who knows who started the tradition of building walls to protect crops growing in the island’s rich volcanic soil? The original Iberians? The Carthaginians? Romans? Most probably the Arabs from Tunisia and Egypt, who occupied the island from AD 700 to AD 1123. They were supreme agriculturists. They created sophisticated and flourishing agricultural systems throughout Sicily, in Southern Italy and Spain, wherever the caliphate of Baghdad held sway. Even the terraces that mount the surrounding hills are structured in such a way as to reduce the effect of the wind, and every now and then we pass topless towers built by the Arabs, with fruit trees growing within their sheltering embrace.

  It’s claimed that the vines on Pantelleria are descended from the muscat of Alexandria introduced by the Romans. They’re known as zibbibo these days – zibib meaning raisin in Arabic – and twenty or so producers turn them into Moscato di Pantelleria and Passito di Pantelleria, famous for their luscious sweetness. So luscious, indeed, that Passito di Pantelleria has been designated as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, whatever that may mean, by the Director of UNESCO.

  The harvest is just beginning. Here and there we pass groups of pickers bent over the rows of squat vines. Nearby APEs, those distinctive three-wheeled agricultural workhorses you still see all over Italy, and small trailers are parked nose to tail, stacked with small boxes of grapes. We stop to talk to one group of pickers.

  ‘All the grapes have to be picked by hand because the grapes grow so close to the ground,’ explains Michele, the wine maker, trimming out the dodgy grapes from among the healthy ones, before placing the perfect bunch carefully in a crate.

  ‘It’s bloody hard on the back because we have to bend down all the time,’ he says.

  According to Michele, the combination of the volcanic earth, the hot sun, the dry wind and the salt from the sea is responsible for the unique qualities of the wine. Some of the grapes will be dried (passito) for two to four weeks to concentrate the juices still further, before being pressed and added to the juice of undried grapes to create that special combination of intensity, harmony and balance between sweetness and acidity.

  ‘But this isn’t a good year,’ he adds glumly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Rain in August. Too much rain in August. It’s diluted the concentration of the juice. And a lot of the bunches lay on the wet ground, which isn’t good for them.’

  Mariano and I leave Michele and his crew to their back-breaking labour, and take the road that climbs up out of the Piano Ghirlanda. We stop to inspect some Byzantine tombs tucked away in a grove of ilex, cork trees and holm oak on a spur of rock overlooking the Piano. They’re just two elongated, coffin-shaped stones, but there’s a certain gentle sweetness to them in the scented air, light and shadow flickering over them.

  We end our ride at Scauri down on the coast, where what
purports to be a ‘Punic-Romano Village’ turns out to be rather less interesting than it sounds. It’s a pity the remains don’t match the view. I can almost hear some Punic estate agent waxing lyrical about the ‘fine sea aspect’, but in reality it’s just a series of holes in the ground running along the shore. We have an agreeable and much needed swim, and a reasonable lunch including dentice alla pantesca, a kind of sea bream in raw tomatoes, garlic, capers and almonds at La Vela at the water’s edge.

  There’s something rather dour and self-absorbed about Pantelleria. It’s a little like Elba in some respects, insular and self-absorbed. The agriculture is fascinating, the sea is beautiful, the wines are intoxicating, but there’s some kind of invisible, impermeable barrier that I can’t penetrate. I don’t feel drawn to stay on and head back to Trapani.

  Sicily (once more)

  Porto Empedocle, the port for Lampedusa, lies on its southern coast, over a hundred kilometres from Trapani. As I have plenty of time in hand, I make a small detour to Segesta, a Greek temple of extraordinary beauty that I’ve long wanted to see. Unfortunately when I get there, Segesta is closed. Wild fires are leaping and gambolling along the surrounding valleys, and the temple, itself, is threatened.

  Leaving a large number of puzzled and disgruntled tourists wandering around outside the locked gates, I head off again, passing several fire engines deploying firemen. It’s dramatic and exciting watching stands of trees suddenly bursting into flame, dying down, leaping up again, sometimes several metres away from the last blaze. There’s a sinister, random malevolence to their movement. From time to time lumbering fire-fighting planes turn in just over the tops of surrounding hills on water-bombing runs.

  Thwarted in my attempts to see Segesta, I decide to pay homage to the battlefield of Calatafimi, where the crucial battle of Garibaldi’s Sicilian campaign was fought, not far away. The grand warrior led his rag-tag-and-bobtail assembly of volunteer troops up against the nominally superior force of Bourbon army regulars in a series of bayonet charges uphill with the cry ‘Qui si fa l’Italia o si muore’ (Here we make Italy, or we die). The battle won, the way to Palermo was open, and Garibaldi’s reputation as a leader of genius, somewhere between a guerrilla leader and a conventional military commander, was made.

  Oddly, while there’re plenty of signs to Segesta, I can find none to the battlefield. I search high and low, along main road and side road, but I search in vain. Then I get lost – a not infrequent occurrence – in the town of Calatafimi itself, come out on the wrong side, and set off in the wrong direction. It takes me time to realise my mistake, and a little longer to rectify it. However, I’m quite happy, pottering along the empty roads through the austere, abstract beauty of the undulating land, a vast, rolling inland sea, sere brown where wheat’s been gathered in, and café au lait where the earth’s been tilled, broken from time to time by brilliant green blocks of tousled vines and plots of silvery green olives, as bushy as shaving brushes.

  I finally chunter into Porto Empedocle at about 6 p.m. very hot, very sweaty, very smelly and very tired. As I register in a hotel right by the port, an elderly white-haired woman sitting in the reception area with her husband obviously overhears that I’m English. With no preamble the old biddy addresses me.

  ‘You English are very clever.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You’re just letting the Syrians in.’

  ‘Um. Oh. Ah. Yes. I –’

  ‘We’re getting Africans. Blacks.’ There’s a whip of contempt in her tone. Her husband looks visibly embarrassed. I open my mouth to tell her that I would rather them than her, but the lift doors close.

  I’m surprised because it’s the only time I’ve heard a racist remark on this journey. Everyone else I’ve spoken to on the subject of emigration has been sympathetic to the situation of refugees, if baffled by the scale of the problem.

  The ferry doesn’t leave until the evening, so I go out to explore the delights of Porto Empedocle, named after Empedocles, the Greek philosopher who threw himself into the crater of Etna to prove he was immortal. He must have had a nasty surprise. The town also lays claim to Luigi Pirandello, although, in fact, he was actually born up the road in the small village of the admirably named Kaos on the outskirts of Girgenti, or Agrigento as it’s called now. Porto Empedocle’s most famous authentic son is the writer, Andrea Camillieri, author of the thrillers featuring Commissario Montalbano. Although he’s lived in Rome for much of his life, he affectionately evokes Porto Empedocle in the fictional form of Vigata. I struggle to reconcile Camillieri’s nostalgic evocation with the reality of contemporary Porto Empedocle.

  It is a serious test of character. As far as I can see, there’s absolutely nothing of note in town, not one remotely beautiful or even interesting building. Somehow you have to come to terms with the disintegrating pavements, the crumbling houses, the weeds sprouting at random, the accumulations of rubbish, the absence of civic pride or investment, the unloved, unlovable nature of a town that simply exists, as it does now, under a sullen sky and humid, heavy heat. Of all the places in which I’ve had to idle away an hour or even a day or two, Porto Empedocle emphatically takes the biscuit in the Crap Ports department. The smell of fish hangs heavy over the port. None of this has prevented locals from leaping aboard the Montalbano bandwagon with vigour. There are no end of Vigata bars, Montalbano gelaterias and Il Commissario trattorias. Time hangs heavy on my hands.

  And then comes the miracle of San Calogero.

  Tatty and depressing in the bright light of day, by night Porto Empedocle undergoes a mysterious transformation, not into a place of beauty exactly, but into one of idiosyncratic enchantment. Shadows mask the decaying buildings and general dilapidation. The street lamps light the town in a mellow, theatrical glow. Young, old, very old, families, couples, singletons throng the via Roma. Suddenly there’s a buzz about the place.

  It turns out that it’s the Feast of San Calogero, the local patron saint. His image suddenly appears at the top of the steps from the church in the via Roma, accompanied by a furious, synchronised rattle from five drums, a blast from the local brass band and a peal of church bells, all at once. It’s a splendid cacophony. At the same time there’s a general sharp intake of breath, many cross themselves, a few applaud.

  I can just make out St C. through a forest of smart phones and tablets lifted like votive offerings. Raised up on a kind of wooden raft borne on the shoulders of willing bearers, he’s carried through the sea of packed humanity, lurching to one side and then the other as he comes down the steps of the church. Every now and then the procession pauses while puzzled or fearful babies are held up to touch St C., or be touched by him. Other devotees shove mysterious bits of paper into a hole in his middle, below his robes which are dotted with gold. Art nouveau lights frame each corner of the palanquin, and a halo of Christmas tree lights illuminate the saint’s austere and unmistakably black face.

  Information about St Calogero is pretty thin, and there seems to be a certain vagueness about his origins. Was he a second-century saint from North Africa? Or was he a fifth-century saint from Armenia? Was he a hermit? Or an officer in the Roman army? Or both? He pops up all over the place in Sicily – in Agrigento, Naro, Sciacca as well as Porto Empedocle – and, for whatever reason, he’s usually black.

  Of course his effigy is kitsch, magnificently so. That’s the point. If the image was in the best possible taste, it would be both vulgar and unapproachable. It’s the kitschness of St Calogero that gives his image its force. It’s direct and immediate. It appeals to our sentimental side. and makes it approachable. The massed ranks of drummers, the band and a phalanx of followers led by a man with a bell, set off around the town, stopping every now and then to allow more puzzled babies to be held aloft.

  The streets are awash with folk, eating, drinking, chatting, laughing. I wonder how many towns in Britain in Porto Empedocle’s apparently woeful state can boast at least fifteen trattorias, as many bars, not to mention pizzerias
, paninoteche and gelaterias. The people of Porto Empedocle may not care a fig for the physical state of their town, but they like to eat well. On a street corner I come across a stall selling pani ca meusa, a bun stuffed with beef spleen and other interior oddities I see bubbling away in a cauldron. It’s gloriously greasy, with a delicate, slightly livery flavour and a whiff of drains.

  Greatly cheered, I go down to the dock to wait for the ferry to Lampedusa to arrive. An old man sitting on a bollard with a guitar asks where I’m from. What am I doing? Where am I going? I tell him. What a dream, he says, what a wonderful thing to do. Pantelleria is so beautiful, he says. I ask him why he’s playing the guitar on the dock. He’s waiting to catch the ferry, too, and it helps pass the time, he says. And music’s beautiful, isn’t it? I agree. He begins strumming. ‘I love you, Pantelleria,’ he sings in English. ‘You’re so beautiful.’ Beyond him someone is cooking sausages and onions on a barbecue outside the quayside bar. A golden plume of smoke rises up into the night.

  Presently the ferry comes in. After the regular passengers have disembarked, 200 or more immigrants, Africans, quietly file down onto the quay. Each carries an identical bag containing their possessions. No one shouts abuse. No one says anything. The first bus pulls away when it’s full. Another takes its place. Four buses in all fill up and drive away, taking the occupants to centres in Trapani, Catania, Palermo, Agrigento. It’s a smooth, well-practised operation, and there’s no enmity among the Sicilians on the quayside as far as I can tell.

  As we’re about to sail, a sparkling firework display marking the end of the Feast of San Calogero suddenly glitters in the night sky. I wonder if the immigrants have seen the fireworks, and if so, what they make of them.