Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  Lampedusa

  Lampedusa looks as if someone has left a slice of tart floating on the sea. This is the final frontier, the last outpost of Europe, 113 kilometres from Tunisia and 205 kilometres from Sicily, a scrubby, dusty, stony tump of sandstone rock, with one town and no villages, between 5,000 and 6,000 inhabitants, a few dips but no elevated spots, and scarcely a tree worthy of the name.

  Its position made it a useful naval base for the usual succession of ancient Mediterranean superpowers, the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks and Romans (who rated the island’s garum – that pungent, potent, fishy HP sauce of the Roman world made from fermented fish – very highly). At one time the British considered using it for the same purpose, but chose Malta instead because Malta has deep-water ports. And it gave a title to one of the greatest of all Italian writers, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of the immortal The Leopard, although I don’t believe he ever set foot on the island. Aside from that, Lampedusa doesn’t have a lot of official history, until recently. It’s impossible to escape the refugee ‘phenomenon’, as one person I met called it.

  At first sight, Lampedusa is an unlikely Promised Land. There’s little agriculture of any kind because the earth is so thin. All basic supplies have to be ferried over, and even though its waters are rich in fish, the survival of the community has always been fragile. But it’s been the principal point of arrival for refugees from North Africa for over twenty years, or more. In recent years the numbers of those who have made it or been rescued, and those who have died trying to make it to the island, have been a constant theme in the news.

  Italians have some reason to understand the forces that drive people to move from their homes in their millions. Italy has had its own experience of internal and external emigration. Some of the islands were largely depopulated in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a result of repeated pirate raids and economic hardship. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw hundreds of thousands of Italians head for America, Australia and the UK. The ‘economic miracle’ of Northern Italy of the 1960s was built on the muscle of millions of Southern Italians moving north for work.

  Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean that Italy is better equipped to deal with mass immigration, so how does Lampedusa cope, I wonder?

  20 GUIGNO 2015 LAMPEDUSA CELEBRA LA GIORNATA DEL REFUGIATO 365 GIORNI L’ANNO (20 JUNE 2015 LAMPEDUSA CELEBRATES THE DAY OF THE REFUGEE 365 DAYS A YEAR) says the banner outside the school library on Lampedusa. I remember what Salvatore, the taxi driver who drove me from the airport to Trapani, had said. ‘You won’t see many rifugiati on Lampedusa. They spend a couple of days there to check their health and papers and then they’re moved to camps here, at Trapani, or Palermo and Catania. There are three or four camps here.’

  ‘How do you feel about them?’ I asked him.

  ‘For myself,’ he said, ‘I’m very sympathetic. I think it’s fine for them to come here, as long as they have papers and they can find jobs. There’s plenty of room in Sicily. But if they don’t have papers, there’s a problem. It’s difficult to keep track of them. And some of them may be ISIS jihadists. That’s a worry.’

  I’d first seen rifugiati that night in Porto Empedocle, disembarking from the ferry that runs every day between Sicily and Lampedusa, a column of men and women snaking out of the boat and across the quay to a waiting bus in the sulphurous glow of port lights.

  I spend an hour or so watching the other end of the operations, a few hundred rifugiati being put aboard the ferry. They line up, quiet and orderly, tall and elegant, each clutching a sports bag and wearing obviously new trainers. They’re roughly one-third women and two-thirds men. The Carabinieri handle them without any bossiness or force. There’re one or two representatives of NGOs standing by. The whole process looks humane and well practised. It’s the only time I’m actually aware of their presence on the island.

  ‘Lampedusa is a fishing community,’ explains Damiano Sferlazzo, the vice sindaco (deputy mayor) of Lampedusa. He’s a trim, tanned figure in jeans, polo shirt and trainers and a five-day stubble. He looks too young and too good-looking to make suitable deputy mayoral material to me, but he speaks with the passion and authority of someone who has to deal with the daily practicalities of the situation. ‘If we find someone in trouble on the sea, we do what we can to help. That’s the way it’s always been. So when we find a boat full of refugees, our instinct is to see what we can do. It’s just a human response.’

  Many people now living on Lampedusa, he goes on, originally came from Tunisia and Libya, from where most of the immigrants now travel. ‘They still have relatives there. Of course we want to we can.’

  ‘When it was fifty, sixty, seventy people a week, there was no problem. They’d arrive. Some stayed. Others eventually would leave. But now there are thousands a month. It requires significant organisation to deal with the numbers arriving these days.’

  He explains that any refugees arriving on the island are taken to an old army camp designed to hold 5,000 people at any one time. It’s managed by a combination of NGOs and local officials. In theory, the refugees are held there for two to three days for medical checks and to have their papers checked, if they have any. Then they’re sent on to other centres on Sicily via the ferry for Porto Empedocle.

  ‘The system is fine as long as the flow is controlled,’ says Sferlazzo. ‘But from time it gets overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people. It’s not just Lampedusa. Kos and other Greek islands have the same problem. And see what happened in Hungary.

  ‘On the whole,’ he says, ‘the islanders accept the situation. There are always one or two who complain, but most islanders see this as part of their humanitarian responsibility. They’re just angry with politicians who don’t seem able to deal with the situation. This is a problem that’s been building up for years. It’s not just suddenly happened.’

  But recent media coverage of the situation has a serious effect on the Lampedusan economy. ‘This is a very small island with very few resources,’ Sferlazzo says. ‘Our economy’s fragile. We’ve just got fishing and tourism.’

  Any stories about problems with the refugees, mass drownings, even ones in which the islanders play a heroic part in rescuing refugees from sinking boats, tend to have a negative effect on people thinking about Lampedusa as a site for a carefree holiday.

  ‘This may seem selfish,’ he says, ‘but it’s the reality.’

  Clearly a good deal of trouble is taken over segregating the refugees from the main part of the island. Non-European faces are a rare sight on the island. The people walking up and down the via Roma in the evening are middle Italy on holiday, ordinary folk taking advantage of post-August, off-peak prices to soak up the sun on the beaches of golden-blond sand, crowd onto pleasure boats and sport in the clear waters, out to forget about La Crisi, political shenanigans, football failures and the gruelling business of life.

  When I ask some what they think of the situation, they respond with tolerance.

  ‘If they can work, let them.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing against them.’

  ‘They need shelter. Why shouldn’t they come?’

  The generosity and lack of rancour makes me ashamed of my fellow countrymen. In general, the calmness and acceptance of responsibility by the people I talk to contrasts strongly with the hysteria and outright viciousness of public utterance and press comment in the UK that I’ve been following online. For months there’s been an absolute lack of measured assessment, rational argument or the basic human decency shown by the people of Lampedusa. Yeats’s line about ‘The best lack all conviction while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity’ seems peculiarly pertinent.

  And yet the refugee phenomenon should come as no surprise. As Damiano Sferlazzo said, it’s been building for over twenty years; twenty years in which to recognise what’s going on, to come up with some kind of co-ordinated policy, to create pan-European structures and systems. Simply telling people who
have spent all they have and risked their lives to come to Europe, to go back home, is not an option. As Sferlazzo points out, ‘The Berlusconi government tried to turn off the tap, and just send them back, but that didn’t work at all.’

  ‘Lampedusa is simply a portal to the rest of Europe,’ he says. ‘The situation can only be dealt with on a European basis. Of course we should accept those facing political persecution or exploitation in their own countries. That’s our humanitarian duty. Perhaps the answer for economic migration is to invest in the countries they come from, to create jobs for them there so they don’t need to come here looking for work.’ He acknowledges that this is a long way off.

  As he says goodbye, he adds, ‘We came across some refugees in a boat when I was out sailing with some friends earlier this year. We couldn’t just leave them. You can’t.’

  I park Nicoletta beside the road and go to look for a place to swim. On the map I’d identified a long narrow inlet, a cala, and I’m fairly certain that there’s a path hereabouts that’ll lead me to it. As I wander along an escarpment looking for the beginning of the path, a reddish, sweating, sunburnt man in shorts and a sweat-stained shirt suddenly pops up out of the scrub like a rabbit. His appearance is as startling as it’s improbable. He stares at me and mutters away in a dialect so particular I can’t understand a word he’s saying. I explain that I’m looking for the path. He obviously understands me better than I understand him. He gestures for me to follow, dashes off over the edge of the escarpment, and vanishes among the bushes.

  I follow him gingerly, and find him in a kind of makeshift camp tucked away under the lea of the slope. He gestures that I should follow him again, and again, I scramble after him, following a barely discernible path winding between low-growing trees and shrubs. He bounds down the almost vertical slope with the agility of a mountain goat, moving with astonishing speed and surety of foot. I descend more decorously on my bottom, and there’s the cala, calm and blue and inviting. I find a shelf above the sea and spend a tranquil afternoon with mask and snorkel patrolling the warm, clear waters. There’re rich pastures of Posidonia oceanica (Neptune grass) waving languidly, but surprisingly few fish. Maybe, as Giuseppe Mascoli told me, the sea’s become so warm close to the land that the fish have decamped to cooler waters.

  Some hours later, I see my guide once more as I pass him at the road. He asks for a lift into town. Unfortunately, I’m heading in the opposite direction for the Trattoria Terranova da Bernardo on the outskirts of town. What is he? A hermit? A leprechaun? His appearance was so odd that for a moment I wonder if I imagined him.

  Trattoria Terranova da Bernardo is clearly Lampedusa’s destination restaurant, to judge by the cars outside. It’s a cavernous place, smart rustic, and has an old-fashioned antipasto buffet, which is the kind of thing I like.

  I pile my plate with Russian salad and marinated anchovies and roasted peppers and other matters of that kind. I clear it with pleasure. The appearance of Russian salad throughout Italy is something of a mystery. No one I’ve asked about it has come up with an explanation for its popularity. That doesn’t make it any the less welcome. Personally, I love the stuff, all nuggets of gravelly veg slathered in mayonnaise, with tinned tuna mashed into it, if you’re lucky. It goes along with hard-boiled eggs, another mild addiction of mine.

  While I’m eating I overhear a man at a nearby table begins hectoring the waitress.

  ‘Couscous! I don’t want Taliban food!’ he declares noisily.

  The waitress giggles and explains that couscous has nothing to do with the Taliban. It’s Sicilian. He’s having none of it.

  ‘I’m just a simple farmer and I don’t want Arab food,’ he insists. The waitress raises her eyebrows and sighs and directs him towards some definitely un-Islamic pork.

  Then I’m sandbagged by a lasagna of mussels and clams. I’m not convinced that something that looks like a vast, pallid mattress, feels like flannel and tastes of mussels and clams, is ever going to be hailed as a classic. Of course I finish it because I’m that sort of guy, but it rather casts a shadow over an equally generous portion of fried squid and prawns, which actually are very good, their natural crunch boosted by being coated with fine polenta before being fried. I finish that, too, but with a sigh of relief rather than a sigh of content.

  Back in town I console myself with an ice cream from the Gelateria Gola, a cornet of ginger and fondant chocolate, painstakingly shaped to look like a rose. It seems a pity to demolish this work of gelato craft, but I do so without any hesitation and much pleasure as I wander back to my quarters.

  There’s something deeply agreeable about the simplicity of Lampedusa. It feels more like the Isle of Wight than the Isle of Capri. It has few pretensions. Its airs and graces are modest ones. People are decent and kindly and hard-working, doing as many jobs as are needed to keep bread on the table and wine in the glass. They’re friendly, too – the man in the laundry shop, the young woman in the Gelateria Gola, the chap serving me at the trattoria. Lampedusa may be closer to Africa than Europe, but it feels more Italian than Pantelleria or Trapani.

  But the weather’s turned capricious – sunny, grey, rainy, sunny again by the hour. The light takes on an astonishing clarity and purity, washed clean of evaporating water and dust particles by the rain, giving a certain fractious quality to the land. The wind continues to scupper my plans to visit Linosa, more of an isoletta than an isola, where jellyfish-eating leatherback turtles breed and where the great singer and composer of ‘Volare’, Domenico Modugno, used to spend his summers. I don’t relish the prospect of dodging the showers and sheltering from the wind. If you can’t lie in the sun or play in the sea, there’s not a lot to do on Lampedusa. Much as I like the island, I decide that I’d be better off pushing on.

  I go for a last dinner at the Trattoria Pescheria Azzurra on the via Roma, Lampedusa’s Regent Street. A massive antipasto appears. It’s a buffet in its own right – mini tuna burger; tuna in agrodolce; salted tuna with a slice of pear; fried, breadcrumbed red mullet fillet; potato, octopus and green olive salad; polpette di ricciola, amberjack rissoles, with peas and carrot strips; rings of very thinly sliced squid with fennel, red pepper and carrot strips. This is very sharp cooking. Each mini-dish sings clearly. I rather take for granted that the quality of the fish is going to be pretty glittery, but the skill and thoughtfulness behind each element comes as a fine surprise.

  Lampedusa marks the end of one section of my odyssey. It’s the last island of the Tyrrhenian Sea on the western, Mediterranean side, of Italy. After this, I’ll be heading for the Tremiti Islands in the Adriatic, a different sea. I’ll be moving from what was, historically, the Arab sphere of influence to the Byzantine and Ottoman sphere. This gives Lampedusa some kind of emblematic significance.

  I peer at the slab of roasted ricciola, amberjack, a member of the tuna family, tiled with potato scales in front of me. Outside, couples and families saunter past, not dressed in the billowing finery of more fashionable islands, but in smarter versions of their daywear.

  The fish is taut, fine textured with a delicate veal flavour, and the potato scales are crunchy with toasted breadcrumbs. I’ve eaten quite a bit of fish since I set out on this odyssey, and the food on Lampedusa, at the Trattoria Pescheria Azzurra in particular, is some of the most imaginative I’ve come across. Contemporary Lampedusan cooks show a sense of adventure tempered by common sense and skilful precision that makes some of the more highly touted eateries on other islands look distinctly pedestrian. Finally, lemon sorbet cleans my mouth of any fishy aftertastes. So civilised.

  On the ferry back to Porto Empedocle is another consignment of refugees, kept off limits in the air-conditioned saloon area. I see them peering out of the windows as I make my way along the deck. They smile and wave, but I can’t help but think of slaves being transported. How will their dreams of Europe and a new life match up with reality?

  Sicily (again)

  The next clutch of islands, the Tremiti, lies off
the coast of Puglia on the far side of Italy. As I look at the map, I realise just what a long way it is from Villa San Giovanni, on the other side of the Straits of Messina, to Termoli to catch the ferry. Too far to negotiate by Vespa. In order to get to Villa San Giovanni I’ll have to get to Messina and in order to get to Messina, I’ll have to cross Sicily.

  Since I first came to Sicily in 1973, it has always struck me as one of the most singular places on earth, an island of great loveliness and full of extraordinary monuments, Greek theatres and Roman villas, Baroque towns and Norman churches and gracious, generous people. It’s also an island of astounding ugliness and depressing urban development, of mounds of rubbish piled beside the road, vicious criminality and bureaucratic corruption. It’s the only place I know where you come into contact with 5,000 years of history on a daily basis through its food, places, names, language and the attitudes of its people. That history has made Sicilians the masters of elliptical observation. The whole island seems to exist at a tangent to the rest of the world, a passionate, ironic comment on it.

  On return to Porto Empedocle I feel that perhaps I’ve been a bit intemperate about the place. I don’t think it’ll ever be a place of beauty, but if I’d spent a little time earlier on the vast expanse of beach running from the town to the extraordinary stratified, multicoloured cliff face of Scala dei Turchi, like one of those glass tubes filled with different coloured sands, but on a colossal scale, or discovered that potent pastry, la rustichella, my earlier reactions might have been more measured.

  La rustichella, as made at the Café Elisir, is a sweet dainty of beguiling charm. The pastry is ineffably light and crumbly, with that hidden richness produced by using strutto (pig fat) in the pastry. The base of the filling is chocolate, not too dark, but not milky. Above that is a billowing cushion of curdy ricotta, ewe’s ricotta very specifically. The top is set with toasted almonds, with a faint edge of burnt bitterness and plosive crunch. And they’re dusted, perfumed rather, with ground pistachios. Crunch, munch, crumble, cream, sweetness, balm, beauty, seduction – they’re all there.