by Matthew Fort
Away from the designated roads and paths, in what the locals call ‘il paese’, the countryside, I stumble across a rather different San Domino – encampments of mouldering mobile homes, caravans and shacks, piles of rusting machines, stashes of pipes and bricks, pick-up trucks, pens with chickens and geese, abandoned boats higgledy-piggledy, guarded by formidable women and men. There’re orchards and patches for growing vegetables, parts of the support system for the thousands who rent the houses or stay in the hotels every year, carefully tucked away out of casual view.
Curiously for a short time, San Domino was the only place in Europe at that time where gays could be openly gay. Between 1938 and 1939 Mussolini sent homosexuals there. That, in itself, is curious, because homosexuality wasn’t officially recognised by the Fascist state. It was deemed inconsistent with Italian virility. Out of sight, out of mind. By all accounts the living conditions had more in keeping with a boot camp than a holiday camp, but there must have been worse places to be imprisoned (in Germany, open homosexuals were sent to concentration camps).
I settle down to chill, too, writing, lying about, snorkelling, walking, reading, dozing, eating and dozing some more. The weather is becoming more changeable by the day, cool and blowy and damp one moment, hot and sunny the next. Little by little the island is beginning to shut up shop for the season. After the weekend, the crowds thin. One or two of the bars and eateries have already closed. The remaining holidaymakers are scattered across the tables that, only a week or so ago, were crammed with folk. The cale, the inlets, that appear to have been designed by nature for sun and sea bathing, are usually empty by 5 p.m., the paths deserted, the roads quiet. Twice a day, the road to the harbour below my room in the Hotel Rosanna resounds to the clatter of suitcases on wheels and the flap-flap of flip-flops coming down to catch the ferry.
San Nicola
The energy, the determination, the willpower, the sheer blinding confidence, that’s what strikes me about San Nicola. There, on the crest of the island, the archipelago’s nominal administrative centre, is a fortified, castellated, towered and postern-gated abbey, the Abbazia di Santa Maria a Mare, a powerful statement of the Church Militant. Walls merge into the vertical sides of the island. A steep, narrow, walled path leads to a fortified postern gate. Any invading force would struggle to get two abreast. Just before the gate, the path takes a sharp left turn, so that any attacking momentum would have to check and swivel before carrying on.
The abbey was founded by Benedictine monks in the ninth century. They built the core of the existing structure and walls in 1045 to guard against Muslim incursions. Later Cistercian monks took over guard duties, although not as effectively as they might as the abbey was sacked by the Dalmatian ‘pirates’ from Omis in 1334. In 1442 the Lateran Canons bought the islands and set about rebuilding and improving the defences to such effect that they managed to hold off an attack by the Ottoman Navy in 1567.
Later the monks were thrown out by King Ferdinand of Naples, who, in 1843, turned the island into a colony for the criminals and prostitutes deported from the slums of Naples to start new lives, with a view to letting them create and run their own society in quiet seclusion. There may have been a thought that, left to their own devices, they would create an Eden-like sanctuary, full of equality, liberty and sisterly and fraternal love. Sadly, that was not how things turned out. Some became fishermen, but in a few years the island became so chaotic and violent that the king had to send in the military to establish order.
It’s difficult to associate modern-day San Nicola with such a seamy past. The older buildings aren’t exactly in pristine condition, and the more modern ones are crumbling away, and there’s quite a lot of unsightly pipework and scaffolding around the place. But the scraps of the medieval original and subsequent monkish additions – a chapel, a long arcade with fine elegant pillars, and, I’m pleased to see, a substantial and spacious refectory – show how impressive the place had once been.
The chapel, in particular, is a handsome structure built of creamy stone, with an exhilarating sense of space. It has an unusual square nave with a wooden roof above, decorated with biblical scenes and supported on massive quadrifoliate pillars, and below, a Byzantine mosaic floor of geometric patterns and symbols in cream, black and umber. These mismatched elements have been blended into a moving whole by the passage of time and the force of the history.
A group of some thirty Poles file in, arrange themselves in a semi-circle and begin to sing. Their unaccompanied voices fill the space, austere and richly textured at the same time, plaintive and celebratory, communal and singular, past and present woven together in faith by faith. I’m transported to a time when the abbey thronged with martial monks and such plainchant was commonplace. It’s odd to think of the prostitutes, jades, robbers, cutpurses, bagmen and murderers of nineteenth-century Naples capering around the place.
An undulating flat area of stone and low-growing sea shrubs extends well beyond the part enclosed by the fortifications. It ends at a rather rickety monument to 1,300 Libyans who were sent to the island between 1911 and 1912 for resisting Italian colonial rule. Most of them died there.
From the crest of San Nicola, I look out over the narrow stretch of sea to Caprera. In theory it isn’t inhabited, although I can see one house. Another mystery. As I walk back along the path, I smell goats. But that’s absurd. Why on earth should there be goats on San Nicola? And then I see them, far below me, scampering along the rocks by the sea’s edge, jet black, and with magnificent, corkscrew horns. How the devil had they got here?
San Domino (again)
I lie on my back in the amethyst water of the Cala Matana, looking up at the rim of crinkled sandstone rock just above sea level, at the billowing clouds of Aleppo pines, their tops turning green-gold in the evening sun, and think ‘This is it. This is why people come here. This is what they come for. Loafing. Idleness. Escape.’
How rarely do we treat ourselves to the luxury of such simple indulgence, a luxury that costs nothing. ‘Thoughtless’ is generally seen as a pejorative adjective, and yet the absence of thought opens the way for instinct, for pure pleasure, for the cool silk of the sea on your skin, the warmth of sun upon your head, the scent of pine resin, the oscillating lattice of light over the rocks, the canopy of intense green needles, the limitless blue sky above; just hanging there in the water, not moving, without motivation, compulsion, responsibility, the modern imperative for action.
I climb out of the sea and lie in the sun and listen to the suck and rustle of the waves. Presently a lean, muscular, tanned and tattooed young man emerges from the water. He could be some mythical, oceanic creature were he not clutching a plastic bag. He takes a limp octopus out of it, and begins bashing it on the rocks. He’s joined by his girlfriend, who’d been sunbathing higher up the shore. She comes leaping from rock to rock like a chamois, with that utter surety of the young. She could be as mythical a creature as he until she starts berating him, shrill as a parrot. He pays her no attention and continues bashing the octopus.
Is the Adriatic Sea so very different from the Tyrrhenian Sea in, by or on which I’d spent the earlier agreeable months? Aren’t they both simply two of the many seas that make up the Mediterranean? It seems to me that they each have a very distinctive character. The Adriatic doesn’t have the presence of the bigger sea. The mainland never seems very far away. It feels more like a lake than a sea, safer, sensible, more delicate. The Mediterranean is Madre Mediterranea, big-bosomy, active, muscular. The Adriatic feels like the Mediterranean’s softer, milder sister. All nonsense, of course. A sea is a sea is a sea, impersonal, powerful, occasionally violent. It’s odd the directions solitude and sunlight can spin your mind.
The sun’s sinking now, a broad golden blade gliding across the smooth surface of the water. Colour’s slowly draining from the world. The shades of blue on the sky coalesce, grow more uniform, denser. The rocks turn solid black. The sea shifts from teal and gold to teal and silver. Cooler air
is stealing in. In a day or so I’ll be heading up the Adriatic coast to Venice.
There’s still a way to go, but I have a sense that this wonderful journey, this window in life, is beginning to draw to a close. For five and a half months I’ve been a single traveller, an individual, simply following the dictates of my own desires. I haven’t had to subscribe to any group ethic or dynamic. Of course there have been periods of loneliness and moments, places or episodes when I’d thought ‘I wish so and so was here to share this,’ but taken all in all, it’s been sublime, the sense of freedom exhilarating. Still is exhilarating even though, little by little, the fetters of a more ordered, responsible, humdrum existence are beginning to snap into place.
I go to Da Pino up in the village for a last supper of zuppa di pesce. Like all the trattorias and eateries on San Domino, Da Pino is decorated in the disarming style of the 1980s – naff, chintzy, fussy, cluttered, a touch gloomy. There’s a group of three at another table: a balding, bearded young man; a slightly older woman, hair pulled back from a lovely, open face; and a deeply tanned, older man in red trousers and white shirt and with round, blue spectacles, white stubble and a white skull. I can’t work out the dynamics of the relationships. Who’s with whom? Is the woman the lover of the younger man? Or the wife of the older? Or younger sister, perhaps? Or parents with a son? Unlikely. The ages aren’t right. And there are small signs of subtle currents. The older of the two men is the dominant force at the table, but the woman seems to exert a subtle influence over the other two. Their conversation is sporadic as the woman and the older man spend a good deal of time consulting their smart phones, while the young man stares silently into space. How I love the theatre of public eating.
The zuppà di pesce arrives in the same kind of terracotta bowl as Riccardo d’Ambra insisted was suitable for cooking coniglio all’Ischitana. It’s a seething magma of intense tomato and marine goo cloaking chunks of bream, red mullet, and eel. A claw of a langoustine extends out of it like the arm of a drowning man, blue shells of mussels gape, and chunks of toasted bread rise in amber pinnacles. A fall of grassy parsley freckles the surface. It has the florid tartness of tomato and the fleshy sweetness of marine life. It’s all I need.
As I walk back down to the Hotel Rossana, vertical strikes of lightning fracture the sky over the mainland every few seconds. Definitely time to go.
Mainland Italy
I head north towards Venice along the Strada Adriatica, SS16, on Nicoletta. The weather’s turned distinctly autumnal. Soon it begins to rain so hard I have to take refuge in a station until the worst has blown through. Only a few days before I’d been wandering around in a pair of bathing trunks and nothing else. Now I’m wearing two T-shirts, a waterproof jacket and socks. I would be wearing long trousers, too, but I only have one pair and I can’t take the risk of them becoming spattered with mud as I need them in pristine condition in a day or two. So shorts it is, and cold my knees and legs are. It doesn’t bode well for the next 400 or so kilometres.
The Adriatic coast is forlorn and desolate now the season’s done. Cloud and wind drain the colour out of the landscape. The sand is dull fawn, the sea a murky grey-green, the sky ashen and full of ragged, racing clouds. Most of the bars and restaurants along the foreshore are closed and shuttered. In one or two the owners and their friends sit and gossip, not seriously expecting any business, going through the motions. Various gaudy banners look grubby and tattered. Clusters of plastic boats rest on the shore, amidst the poles that would’ve carried bright sunbrellas a week or so before. The hotels are closed up, too, their windows blank and dead. Solitary walkers form black silhouettes on the beaches, sometimes with dogs, sometimes not. Kilometre after kilometre after kilometre of sand, sand, sand from which the wind has removed the traces of footsteps.
The Strada Adriatica runs parallel to the coast, through one seemingly endless ribbon of dreary development – shops, factories, hotels, holiday apartments. Resorts are marked on the map – Ortona, Francavilla al Mare, Montesilvano Marina, Roseto degli Abruzzi, Giulianova – but it’s difficult to tell where one begins and the next ends. They blur into each other, drab and cheerless. Devoid of blithe families and shouting children, they feel like the discarded husks of a lost civilisation.
There are pretty bits and handsome towns, too. I like Fano, and the centre of Pesaro with its core of a Renaissance town centre. There’s a lovely stretch of landscape just between Termoli and Vasto, and just before Ancona, where the road turns inland away from Numana and Siriolo. How beautiful this stretch of country, fought over again and again down the centuries, must have been once.
Generally, it’s day after day of hard pounding to Rimini, where I’m going to rest before advancing on Venice. I check into the aptly named Grand Hotel, an architectural pavlova designed by Paolo Somazzi and lovingly kept in pristine condition by the Batani family. Although opened in 1908, it’s a majestic monument to late nineteenth-century hotel luxury, all parquet flooring, Venetian glass chandeliers and creamy French grandiloquence. It’s the first time on this journey I’ve spent a night in anywhere so luxurious, and it’s little short of transcendental to subside into the billows of comfort, another stage in the process of re-entry into the real world.
Rimini was the power base of the brutal, cultured Malatesta family between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, and then changed hands with remarkable frequency until it reinvented itself as a resort in the nineteenth century. It suffered badly during the Second World War, but has gradually rebuilt itself as the conference centre of the Adriatic.
Personally, I find the story of how Rimini captured the Adriatic conference market rather less than gripping. However, for whatever reason, Rimini is the birthplace of a remarkable number of creative figures, among them Hugo Pratt, Italian in spite of his name, graphic novel genius and creator of Corto Maltese, a sailor-adventurer, the son of a Cornish sailor and a prostitute/witch known as ‘La Nina de Gibraltar’; Massimo Tamburini, the genius behind the fabulous, lithe Ducati 916; and, most famously, Germaine Greer’s lover, Federico Fellini, who lovingly evoked the characters and places of his native town in many of his films.
Now I’m ready for Venice, sadly without Nicoletta. I can’t take her into Venice. I arrange for her to be shipped back to England. The tachometer says that we’ve done 5,166 kilometres together. Never a complaint. Never a cross word. Never an upset. She’s been steady as a rock on good roads and bad, on piste and off, up hill and down dale. I feel about her as a racehorse owner must feel about a favourite, successful thoroughbred when its racing days are over. I can’t bear to sell her. She’ll be ferried back home to spend a well-earned retirement, pottering around the lanes of Gloucestershire when I get back. Still, it’s a tearful parting.
8
ON ARRIVAL IN ITHACA
OCTOBER 2015
Venice
Venice
There he is, standing by the pillar with a lion on top in St Mark’s Square, as he’d said he would be.
It seems rather improbable now, that my friendship with Rory Gibson was forged on the rugby fields around Berkshire thirty or so years ago; cold, muddy afternoons followed by sessions in a succession of pubs where cold and bumps and bruises were dispelled by drink and laughter.
Age has been more than kind to him. He may have made a pre-emptive strike against baldness by shaving his head, but he’s still instantly and completely recognisable as the same person. The muscular body is looking remarkably trim. Above the shoulders, a thick neck, head shaped somewhere between a rugby ball and a football, deep-set eyes full of quizzical expression, irony and good humour beneath a slightly overhanging forehead. He embraces me as if he’s a drowning man and I’m a life-jacket. Lois looks on with amusement.
‘Matt, you old man.’
‘Drink?’
‘Oh, yeah!’ he says with the faintest curl of his upper lip, and a slight wag of the head.
It’s difficult to give the exact quality of that ‘Oh, yeah!’ The
re’s the slightest of pauses between the ‘Oh’ and the ‘yeah’ before the emphasis falls heavily on the second word. The ‘yeah’ is slightly elongated, ‘yeeaah’, Rory’s inflection rising towards the end, expressing both enthusiastic endorsement of the suggestion and absurdity that it’s been made in the first place.
Rory leading, we make our way across St Mark’s Square and into a labyrinth of narrow streets beyond, each more clogged than the last with map-and-water-bottle-wielding, backpack-loaded tourists. After a few minutes, he ducks into the Devils Forest Pub, a kind of bar-cum-pub already raucous with rugby fans of all nations, gathered to watch England versus Australia in the Rugby World Cup. By good fortune we find an unoccupied corner and settle down, torn between a flood of happy reminiscence and the drama of the game unfolding on the TV screen.
Venice marks the end of my odyssey, my last port of call, my Ithaca. In some ways it’s the summation of island culture. The city, itself, is built on several islands, and its cultural hegemony embraces over a hundred others. But there’s a unique conceptual unity to it that sets it apart. Venice is as much a place of legend and imagination as it is of fact and history. Looking at it from across the lagoon, at its cupolas, domes, towers, palazzi and houses, set flat along the skyline, it seems preposterous that it exists at all. It is fantastical and dreamlike, something lifted from an antique fable. Autumn in Venice, days of mists and mellowness, of golden sunshine and the soft dying of summer, it seems the proper place to end my progress.
When I planned this, I hadn’t taken into account either the Rugby World Cup or Rory. Initially, they seem at odds with the narrative that had formed in my head, but happenstance, serendipity, fortune is part of the texture of travel. They simply add another seam of richness to the journey.
