Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

When the fishermen want to harvest the fish, they open the sluice gate on the canal, sending a heavy rush of salt water into the lagoon, oxygenating the water, and maintaining the height and salinity of the lagoons. Fish are naturally attracted to oxygenated water, and so swim towards it and into the trap. The system is beautiful in its simplicity.

  The smaller fish escape through the gaps between the palings to grow larger. The larger ones congregate in the round chamber. The fishermen scoop up the trapped fish in a net, load them into large plastic buckets and transport them to a metal table where they’re sorted by species and size by Pietro, a man with a bald head, tattoos on his biceps and a singlet speckled with glittering scales like sequins stretched over a magnificent tummy. He throws any undersized fish back. The rest are loaded into polystyrene boxes ready to be sold off to the ready buyers lining up.

  It’s as efficient, practical, natural and effortless a system as I’ve ever come across. There are no concerns about stocking density or fish feed because nature takes care of all that. Nor does the fish harvester have to worry about sea lice or fish shit, or any of the other challenges that dog more orthodox forms of fish farming. At Porto Pino they simply harvest at a sustainable level what the environment serves up.

  Pietro’s a bit cagey as to exactly how much fish he and the other fishermen take out of the lagoon each year, but points out that it’s in their interests to keep stocks stable, and that the fishery has been going for forty years.

  Does he eat the fish himself? I ask.

  He looks sheepish. No, he says, he’s more of a meat man.

  All the time he’s been sorting the fish, a group of regular buyers have been gradually assembling like gulls around the sorting table. While Bianchi, Nadia and I are waiting around for Pietro to finish, we fall to chatting with two ladies also looking for something for supper. One has gold sandals and toenails painted pillar-box red. Her friend is a motherly looking woman with reddish hair and glasses.

  ‘Ah,’ says the motherly looking woman with reddish hair and glasses. ‘Take fillets of muggine’ [grey mullet] of course scaled, and slices of potato cut thinly. In a dish put down a layer of potato and then a layer of fish, parsley, a little garlic, and then more potato, another layer of fish, parsley, garlic and so on, until it’s all gone. A little oil, a splash of white wine and then put it into the oven until it’s cooked.’ She purses her lips to express how delicious the dish is.

  ‘How about basil instead of the parsley?’ suggests Bianchi.

  The ladies look horrified. He might just as well have suggested devil worship. Basil! Absolutely never! Only parsley.

  ‘But,’ concedes the woman with gold sandals and toenails painted pillar-box red, ‘you could use tomato sugo with the fish and potatoes, and you could put basil into that.’

  ‘Yes,’ agrees the first lady. ‘Potatoes, fillets of branzino, potatoes, dried tomatoes, tomato sugo. With basil. And a little Parmesan. And white wine.That’s very good, too.’

  ‘Buon appetito,’ they call out as we leave.

  Sant’Antioco

  Both Sant’Antioco and San Pietro, about twenty minutes to the north of it, have close connections with tuna fishing. For millennia tuna have tracked migratory routes across the Mediterranean. Their importance as an icon and a food source goes back to the first settlements on its shores. Images of the fish occur frequently on Greek pottery. The Romans were very fond of tuna, too. According to John Wilkins, the classical scholar, and Shaun Hill, the chef, in their translation of and commentary on Archestratus’s Hedypatheia (Life of Luxury), the poet recommends using the tail of a large female tuna from Byzantium. Apicius, with typical Roman restraint, recommends a sauce of lovage seeds, celery seeds, black pepper, fresh mint, fresh rue, date syrup, honey, vinegar, olive oil and sweet wine.

  Curiously, not much is known for certain about the migratory and breeding patterns of blue-finned tuna, and yet, for years, their demise in the Mediterranean has been forecast with a kind of gleeful gloom by a whole range of international bodies. The same has been said of the swordfish. Overfishing, fishing piracy, greed, inadequate policing, official corruption, pollution and general mayhem have all been blamed.

  I’ve long been sceptical about the reliability of the data on which the self-appointed guardians of our piscine heritage base their forecasts and strictures. It seems odd to me that no fishermen are listed on the various rosters of experts, advisers and directors. I know that the relationship between fish scientists and fishermen is pretty adversarial, and even two marine biologists to whom I’d spoken on an earlier visit to Sardinia and who had some kind of relationship with local fishermen, admitted that they had to tread warily. Still, it seems odd to omit such an obvious source of information altogether.

  In the interests of research, Bianchi and I are on our way to meet Fernando Fois, who runs Solky, a small tuna-canning business in a back street of Sant’Antioco. Like many artisan operations in Italy, if we hadn’t known it was there, we’d have missed the small notice ‘Solky – Affumicati e Salati’ above the door of a narrow-fronted terrace building.

  Inside, however, is a small shop-cum-office where we find Signor Fois. He’s a trim man in his sixties, with a dapper moustache, canny brown eyes and a thirty-a-day habit. He explains that Solki was the name given to the town by the Phoenicians when they founded it in the eighth century. They were catching tuna back then, and locals have been catching them ever since. He shows us a form that he has to fill in every time he takes delivery of a fish. It runs to several pages detailing where the tuna has come from, carefully documenting and authenticating that it’s been line-caught and by whom.

  Beyond the shop-cum-office is a tiny, shiny workshop/factory where each tuna is painstakingly steamed in salt water and cut into chunks by hand ready to be packed into cans or pots with olive oil by Signor Fois’s niece and a young man, and then sold under the generic brand of Carloforte. Nothing of the fish is wasted. Even the heart is smoked and vac-packed and there’s a stack of cured tuna roes (bottarga di tonno) the size of cricket bats.

  He leads us to a café on the seafront of Sant’Antioco, and continues his exposition of the tuna industry over a glass of white wine. He hasn’t always been involved in the tuna industry, he says. At one time he was an engineer, building all over the region. This experience made him open-minded about the tuna business, sceptical of official statistics and intolerant of officialdom in general. When he retired, he started smoking salmon out of curiosity and to have something to do, and from that branched out into canning tuna.

  ‘There are plenty of tuna,’ he says. ‘Red tuna – you call them blue fin – yellow fin, bonito, albacore, palamita. Whatever people say, there are plenty. For years, scientists have been telling us that the blue fin tuna is being fished to death, is almost extinct, and yet they come back in good numbers every year.

  ‘The trouble is that the industry isn’t properly policed. For example, there’s still one mattanza each year. It takes place off San Pietro, the island next door. The mattanza is the annual ritual when migrating tuna are trapped in nets as they swim between Sant’Antioco and San Pietro, and then gaffed and slaughtered, a violent, bloody and curiously inefficient (and so sustainable) method of harvesting fish that’s been practised for thousands of years. Aeschylus compared the slaughter of the Persians at the battle of Salamis to the mattanza in Sicily, and the ferocious Mafia wars of the 1960s were known as La Mattanza.

  ‘The number of tuna they can kill in the mattanza is strictly controlled,’ Signor Fois goes on. ‘But let’s say the numbers in the nets are more than the kill quota. The tuna are kept alive, transferred to other nets and slowly taken to Malta, where the controls aren’t so strong. They’re fattened up off Malta, and then sold to the Japanese market.’

  He suggests that this process isn’t just restricted to the mattanza surplus. ‘There’s a strong Black Market, too,’ he says. ‘What do you expect when taxes are so high and there’s so much bureaucracy? The incentive to ge
t around the rules is pretty strong. I’m all in favour of quotas, and properly enforcing them. But they must be based on facts, and only the fishermen really know how many fish are out there.’ He waves his hand at the open sea.

  San Pietro

  A few days later, I go to Carloforte on Sant’Antioco’s smaller sibling, San Pietro, on my own. I take the ferry from Calasetta, which looks like a fishing port of fifty years ago, but accommodates tourism without losing its soul.

  Once again I settle to the easy content of sitting on the dock of the bay, watching time just rolling away, waiting for the ferry to turn into the quay, the sea slipping and sliding in the sunlight. How wonderful to be spendthrift with minutes and hours, to feel the agreeable anticipation of the unknown.

  Carloforte is a dainty, pink-and-white icing-sugar town stretched around the curve of the bay, with a large barracks-like building the colour of ox blood above it. In a process tortuous even by the standards of Mediterranean migration, coral fishers from Pegli, near Genoa settled on Tabarka off the Tunisian coast in the sixteenth century. They lived there for 200 years before moving on to Carloforte in the eighteenth century. The locals still speak a Ligurian variant of Tabarchin.

  I make my way to the Osteria della Tonnara at one end of the promenade. The Osteria was once one of the many tuna-processing plants scattered throughout the islands. Now it’s a bright, cool dining space looking out on a lagoon to which snowy egrets and blush-pink flamingos again lent elegant decoration.

  I’ve always thought that there are only two ways to eat tuna: completely raw, as in a tartare or ceviche, or completely cooked. On the whole, I prefer the completely cooked version. The seared-on-the-outside-raw-on-the-inside thick steaks favoured by trendy restaurants in London and elsewhere are unspeakable. The taste, temperature and texture are actively unpleasant. As with most protein, cooking brings out the best of the flavour.

  The trouble is that, cooked thoroughly and without understanding, tuna becomes alarmingly dry and fibrous. There are two ways of getting round this: you can cut the meat into thin slices and cook them a padella, very fast on a very hot pan; or as they do at the Osteria, alla tabarkina, in homage to Carloforte’s past. The fish is sliced quite thickly, dried, and fried briefly in hot olive oil and then gently braised with a few cloves of garlic, a glass of white wine, tomato sauce, a few bay leaves, some capers and a splash of vinegar.

  I’ve already eaten eight fishy antipasti and another Carloforte speciality, bobba, a voluptuous, heavy-gravity soup. It’s made, so the chef, Andrea Rosso, says, by cooking a sliced onion in an earthenware dish until soft; adding dried broad beans, marjoram and sliced zucchini; covering them with water and cooking for about three hours over a low heat, stirring occasionally to make sure nothing’s sticking; adding a couple of basil leaves when the beans have finished cooking and been pureed; and serving with a splash of olive oil or a dribble of chilli oil and some dried bread. It’s something of a miracle that I can still clatter through the braised tuna with such pleasure.

  I end with a small pudding, canestrelli, pastries halfway between a bagel and a cake, decorated with hundreds and thousands reminiscent of some of Lois’s childhood parties, served with a jug of muscatel. Fully charged, I’m now ready to explore the coast and hinterland of San Pietro.

  I follow the road that weaves parallel to the coast, past a number of stylish and impregnable holiday villas along the shore line. The interior of San Pietro is rugged in an unmemorable way. By easy measures I reach the northernmost tip of the island, where the one surviving mattanza still takes place sometime between 15 May and 15 June.

  The skeleton of a long, low, abandonned stone-built tonnara stands on the shore: a sturdy, obstinate, ruined temple to fishing and fish processing, roofless, graffiti-muralled in the bright sunlight, and colonised by fig trees bearing bitter figs. It looks out across a stretch of water towards the wind farm of Portoscuso and the chimneys of the chemical works of Portovesme, moth-balled or evacuated, a similar monument to grand industrial ambition, human energy and the passage of time.

  Stone columns of forgotten usage stand in line down the scrub-tufted slipway sloping to the chortling, gurgling sea. It’s easy to imagine the bustle when the fishing boats brought in their gleaming, gun-metal blue, streamlined, barrel-chested catch; fish hauled up the slipway with brisk practicality, their viscous stench clotting the air; gutting, gilling, trimming, cooking, dissecting, canning. The offices dealing with the paperwork. First the carts, later the lorries pulling in, to be loaded up, the shouts, noise, movement. That had all gone years ago. Now silence and stillness fills the place. Even the wind has died in the heat. It feels remote rather than sad. There’s a toughness about the place, a certain bloodymindedness that mitigates the melancholy.

  Sardinia (again)

  The gates to Terre Shardana are wide open, and appear to have been that way for several years. They stand on the outskirts of Giba, a small, dusty town between Santadi and the coast. I’ve wanted to track down Terre Shardana ever since eating their remarkable vegetables sott’olio at lunch when I arrived at Santadi. Unlike most commercial products of the kind and my own home-made efforts, they actually tasted and had the crisp texture of the original vegetables, shaped by the lightest touch of vinegar.

  I turn in past some apparently abandoned greenhouses, a couple of large wooden boxes piled with the dry leaves of spiny artichokes and a peculiarly loopy hound that circles round and round barking in an interrogative fashion.

  It takes me several minutes to locate Signor Orru, the proprietor. He’s a genial, smiling, very bald man with heavy black eyebrows. He’s surprised, but pleased, to have an English visitor.

  I explain my own particular pleasure in his products, and assessment of their characteristics.

  ‘Aha,’ says Signor Orru with a broad smile, ‘that’s because we only use very little vinegar, white wine vinegar.’

  ‘How much?’ I asked.

  ‘That depends,’ he says. ‘My aunt, Graziella, is in charge of production. She used to be a research chemist, and she takes into account the characteristics of the particular vegetable. It depends on their quality and the time of year. She tastes them before deciding how much vinegar to add.’

  Production for the season is over, a fact that I’m getting used to. In England we think of summer as the most fecund time of year for vegetables and fruit, but round the Mediterranean, summer is the least productive season, as rainfall is slight and the sun is hot. Signor Orru explains that his business cycle starts with fave (broad beans) in January/February, followed by carciofi (artichokes) in February/March, and so on through asparagi selvatici (wild asparagus), melanzane (aubergine), peperoni (peppers), cipolle (onions) and peperoncini (chillis). The funghi (mushrooms) come in autumn.

  ‘Freshness is the secret. We grow our own vegetables here. They’re picked one day and bottled the next. We use a mixture of olive and sunflower oils. If you use just olive oil, it draws the flavour out of the vegetables.’

  Improbable though this sounds, I think there might be something other than pure economics in what Signor Orru says. On the rare occasions that I’ve made flavoured oils, I’ve used olive oil, and it extracts flavour from basil, rosemary and chilli with remarkable efficiency.

  ‘Our problem,’ says Signor Orru, contracting his black brows, ‘is that everyone is making vegetables sott’olio these days. ‘But…’ he pauses for a moment, ‘most of it is industrial, done by machine. Here, everything is done by hand; picking, preparing the vegetables, cooking them, bottling them. Even our labels are stuck on by hand. You can only get our quality by taking this care of every stage, and quality costs money. There are too many people using commercial vegetables, commercial oil, commercial vinegar – and too much of it – and industrial processes, and then selling their products at rock-bottom prices. How do you compete with that?’ He looks tired.

  I buy a jar of broad beans, a jar of funghi porcini and a jar of wild asparagus from him. The loopy dog ba
rks in a loopy way as Nicoletta and I speed off.

  The lane that runs past the cottages at Is Xianas leads to Santadi in one direction, and through farmland for a kilometre or two in the other. It passes an old farmhouse that Bianchi is patiently restoring, past another farmhouse that has, oddly, an old-fashioned red British phone box in the garden, and an old nuragic village, Tattinu. Then it turns into a dirt track too rough even for Nicoletta to follow, and winds its way through thick woods to God knows where.

  It’s difficult to believe that anyone comes along the road to visit Tattinu, spread out between bushes of myrtle and olive trees, very often. At one time, 3,000 years ago, it must have been a thriving community to judge by the range and variety of the buildings, drawn by the waters of the pozzo sacro, a sacred well.

  There isn’t much to look at now, just some stones protruding from the brown earth, outlining the shapes of homes and buildings, but none of the other nuragic sites that I’ve visited possessed such a vivid connection to the past. This may be because it’s so rarely visited, or the way in which the trees cluster round the sacred well, shading it. It may be the well itself, the narrow steps descending to shadowy shapes. It may be the stillness of the encircling hills. Whatever the reason, there’s a sense of quiet community and reverence about the place. I sit on a stone in the shade of a myrtle bush. A buzzard mews plaintively as it circles overhead.

  I’m sorely tempted to stay on. I’ve fallen in love with this corner of this taciturn island, with its fields of biscuit-gold wheat, its woods, its melancholy flop-eared sheep, its remarkable honeys and honey producers, vegetables and growers, breads and bakers, wines and wine makers, its mesas and rolling hills, its fluffy-eared olive trees, its sandy beaches and the absence of grand houses. I love its wild parts and its civility. I love the way it reminds me of the Italy I met and fell for fifty-five years ago, a simpler, more vivid, tumultuous place. Here people go about their lives in the way they always have, governed by seasons and elements, chiselling a living in a difficult world. I love that it’s given me memories quite as brilliant and vital as those earlier ones. I love that it makes me wonder again at the inherent goodness of people, at their curious diversity.