Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  But I’ve impinged on Bianchi and Nadia’s holiday enough. There’s still a multitude of islands left to explore. Reluctant though I am, I know it’s time to pack up, load up Nicoletta and head for Cagliari, and on to the islands of the Bay of Naples, Capri, Ischia and Procida.

  My stay at Is Xianas ends in the same way that it began, with food, wine, music and laughter. I cook dinner for Bianchi, Nadia, Antonio Balia and his family. I’m quietly pleased by the sardine fillets, as silvery as chain mail, marinated lightly in lemon juice, with lemon peel and basil; more noisily pleased by the friggitelli – mild, green, grassy peppers the shape of arthritic fingers – fried with prawns; and by the time we get to the shoulders of seven-month lamb braised in white wine, vinegar, anchovies, capers and rosemary, I’m quite carried away.

  Antonio plays his guitar. His son gives a virtuoso display on his. Bianchi gives the first, and I suspect the last, performance of his composition, ‘Un Ballata di un Uomo Inutile’ (The Ballad of a Useless Man). It’s a typically humorous, graceful, self-deprecating note of a clever, generous, kindly, ironic, passionate person. It makes us laugh. As the music flows on, I reflect how decent these people are, in the way they’ve taken time out of their lives to show me things that matter to them, to draw a stranger into the warmth of their own friendships.

  Sabrina, Alberto’s wife, sings.

  Tenis s’axina prus famosa

  Po su gestu e po sa bellessa

  O Sardinnia prefetosa

  Fais cumbido in donnia mesa

  Famosa ses o terra mia

  Po si binu prus preziau

  Su sabon de su Cannonau

  E su gust’e sa Malvasia

  Po sa Monica preferia

  Un’esempiu di sinzillesa

  O Sardinnia prefetosa

  Fais cumbido in donnia mesa

  Su Nuragus de Campidanu

  Un donu de sa natura

  Vernentin de sa Gallura

  Sa Vernaccia du Oristanu

  in Prus nc’est su Carinnianu

  De su Sulcis vera ricchesa.

  O Sardinnia prefetosa

  Fais Cumbidu in donnia mesa

  (Yours are the most famous grapes

  For their appearance and beauty.

  Our beloved Sardinia

  Invites you to her table.

  You are famous, homeland of mine

  For your most precious wine

  For the flavour of Cannonau

  And the taste of Malvasia,

  For your favourite Monica

  A model grape.

  Our beloved Sardinia

  Invites you to her table.

  Nuragus from Campidano,

  A gift of nature,

  Vermentino from Gallura,

  The Vernaccia of Oristano

  And Carignano, too,

  The real treasure of Sulcis.)

  Our beloved Sardinia

  Invites you to her table.

  Her voice echoes through the olive trees around the house.

  The next day I head back along the road on which I’d arrived two weeks before, through Nuxis where Domenico has his bakery, through Aquacalda, on to where the ruined castle of Aquafredda on the top of a vertiginous hill watches over the valley below, to Cagliari where I’ll take the overnight ferry to Naples.

  It’s 7.05 p.m. The ferry, the Dimonios, judders, as if straining to be on her way.

  The evening sun flattens out the façades of the buildings along the front, crisp shadows delineating each window, pediment and coping. The newer art nouveau buildings, as stately as liners, merge seamlessly with the older town as it mounts up the hill to the cathedral and to the cupola of the old castello, that stands against a gentian sky. Somewhere in Cagliari’s narrow streets are a Matthew’s Bar, a MacPuddu’s Fast Food Emporium and the delicious church of St Michele, its façade a joyful riot of rococo ornamentation and scantily clad young women wearing what appears to be eighteenth-century admiral’s cockades on their heads, just three of the marvels I’d stumbled upon as I meandered through the streets earlier in the day.

  At 7.20 p.m. we begin to move. The juddering shifts to a smooth surge of power. A wake of arctic ice blue churns up behind us. The Mola Sanità recedes. Cagliari stretches along the seafront, more and more of it, swinging away. Tugs flirt with our bow. The sun’s light flares off the sea. A yacht carrying the British ensign drops away to stern, heading for a berth in the port. We swivel on our axis and ease out past the protective arm of the harbour wall. Cagliari dwindles, dusted with the saffron gold of the evening light.

  The expanse of sea grows, its surface twitchy but not rough, a touch of steel in its navy blue. Our wake curves behind us like a jet stream. The lumps and bumps of Sardinia become misty silhouettes. We’re following the same course that travellers have been following since the Mediterranean became inhabited. Boats may have become larger, but they carry the same cargoes, transport the same people – Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Turks, French, Arabs, Africans. The Mediterranean is a highway carrying the freight of history.

  The wind turns persistent and chilly. I go inside and buy a Mars Bar, the first piece of processed food I’ve eaten since I set out. It unleashes an electrifying sweetness and a Proustian gush of nostalgia. I left England on 13 May, exactly forty-nine days, or seven weeks ago.

  Outside for one last turn about the deck. There’s a man with a battered appearance and an expensive camera capturing the setting sun, a vast, glowing orange tablet sliding down into the sea. The sky shades from peach to dusty peach to dusty peachy yellow to dusty yellow to dusty yellowy blue to chalky blue. The sea is graphite. White ponies dance on the surface. The ship powers on implacably through them.

  The man with the battered manner and the expensive camera vanishes. Night closes in, each moment a little bit darker, like Grandmother’s Footsteps. I never quite catch the moment of change.

  At 9 p.m. it’s time to go below decks. I opt for a seat in the dozing lounge. I mean to stay awake for the night, noting anything there is to be noted, reflecting on the nature of journeys and my own thoughts. So I settle into my seat, notebook in hand. The television’s on, showing one of those programmes that’s so idiotic it could only be Italian. A man sitting in the row in front is talking loudly into his phone, on and on. Is this going to go on all night? Through a porthole the sea is the colour of black figs.

  Around 10.30 p.m. I fall into a fitful sleep and then, suddenly, it’s 6 a.m. and I feel stiff and bruised, as if I’ve spent the night in the stocks. The ship vibrates very gently, steaming into the dawn. Outside the sky’s light and brightening. Two espressos and a croissant filled with crème patissière restore my spirits. Other passengers begin to disinter themselves from sleep in ones and twos. Most have the stunned look of people who’ve either slept too well or hardly at all.

  Just over an hour to go. The tremulous beauty of Kathleen Ferrier singing ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’ in my headphones sparks a sharp peck of homesickness, a longing for family and friends. I wonder how the fields and hanging woods of Uley, my home village in Gloucestershire, are looking.

  A sudden cheery burst of ‘Buongiorno, buongiorno’ over the tannoy, and an energetic altercation between two middle-aged blokes at a nearby table, and the gentler patter between their spouses, rescue me from further maudlin introspection.

  At 8.30 a.m. on the dot we pull into Naples harbour, easing past towering, silent cruise ships, a bungalow among skyscrapers. They seem oddly vacuous without their passengers, Angkor Wats and Teotihuacans of the high seas. Ferries dash in and out. Pilot boats and barges scoot back and forth, sheepdogs marshalling an unruly flock.

  Painstakingly we back into our berth. It’s time to go below, mount up and work out what the hell I’m supposed to do next. The sky’s blue. The sun’s bright. It’s hot already.

  3

  SPORT OF THE GODS

  JULY 2014

  Ischia

  Ischia

&
nbsp; ‘Ischia,’ wrote George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, philosopher, and proponent of ‘immaterialism’, ‘is the epitome of the world. It seems like an enormous, singular orchard.’

  Enormous, Ischia certainly isn’t. It’s about five kilometres from east to west and three from north to south and round in a lumpy kind of way. And, at first sight, it’s difficult to identify the good bishop’s Garden of Eden Ischia through the encrustation of holiday villas, hotels, marinas, gelaterie and pizza joints around the shore. But from there it rises sharply in hills fluffy with woods and patched with vineyards and smallholdings. Things have changed since Lawrence Durrell wrote in a letter to Anne Ridler in 1950, ‘So soft and sweet and indolent it lies/Under Naples picture postcard skies’.

  Perhaps my first impressions are clouded by the discovery that I’ve lost one of my notebooks, a natty number with a red leather cover that matched Nicoletta’s high colour. This disaster may not rank alongside the loss of such masterpieces as the manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom that T. E. Lawrence absent-mindedly dropped at Reading Station, or Hadley Hemingway losing all her husband Ernest’s drafts of short stories and their carbon copies on a train, or John Stuart Mill’s maid using the manuscript of Thomas Carlyle’s great work, The French Revolution, to light the fire, but I feel my notebook’s absence keenly. It contains much of the material about Sardinia, and those glorious days at Is Xianas in particular.

  But I soon warm to Ischia. There’s certainly something of Donald McGill about seaside Ischia, but there’s also still something of La Primavera about inland Ischia. It morphs from a ring of seaside towns that have much of the jolly vulgarity of Bognor-cum-Blackpool-on-the-Med about them, to the classically wooded slopes of Monte Epomeo, 788 metres high at its centre.

  ‘You see, there are six continents on this island the size of the palm of your hand, zones with their own microclimates and environments,’ Riccardo d’Ambra tells me. Riccardo is patriarch of the numerous d’Ambra family, wine makers, restaurateurs, chefs, keepers of the flame of Ischia’s traditional produce and cooking culture and passionate proselytiser of all things Ischian. He must be in his seventies, with the imposing face of an Easter Island figure, eyebrows like rampant white hedges above brown eyes that flash with animation behind steel-rimmed glasses, and alarming amounts of hair exploding from ears, nose and even from the end of his nose. Hobbled by arthritis he may be, but that doesn’t diminish his vigour or fervour.

  ‘Do you know that tomatoes ripen on one part of the island one month – one month! – before they do in another a few kilometres away?’

  He goes on to explain that there are six communes on Ischia, each with its own council, its own policies and its own dialect. There are differences between the mentality of the coastal dwellers and the inlanders, he says. ‘These days tourism is the most important economic force on the island, but before agriculture was far more important to life here.’

  We’re sitting in the family restaurant, Il Focolare, tucked into the woods on the edge of Barano. It’s as idiosyncratic as its founder. Oatmeal hessian lines the ceiling in swags. The floor is paved with tiles the colour of biscuits, the tablecloths are orange. A rough-hewn, unpainted bookshelf occupies the middle of the restaurant, loaded with cookery books and pots with drooping peonies. A kind of brown gloaming thickens the light. The walls are covered with faded posters of films part or all of which have been filmed on Ischia – a virile Burt Lancaster in Il corsaro dell’isola verde; Appuntamento a Ischia with the great singer, Domenico Mondugno; and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in their Cleopatra phase, looking like waxwork dummies. I’m surprised not to see one of The Talented Mr Ripley with Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and Cate Blanchett, but perhaps such brash modernism would be out of place in the particular rusticity of the interior, where even the air seems rich with the dust of the past.

  Clearly, the food and persona of Il Focolare are rooted in historical Ischia rather than contemporary Ischia. Not for Il Focolare menus in English, German and Russian, which I’ve noticed outside the restaurants clustered around Ischia Porto. Its menu is as much a manifesto proclaiming the principles and virtues of Ischia’s culinary culture as it is a list of dishes, and the dishes themselves celebrate the traditions of the land rather than the sea.

  While Riccardo talks, I eat a plate of mezzanelli, a rustic relation of bucatini. The dough has been freshly made and incorporates two different herbs foraged on the hillsides around that give the pasta a slightly bitter note that pierces the amiable fruit of the tomato sauce.

  ‘When you say the name “Ischia” to anyone, they automatically think of the sea, Matthew,’ says Riccardo. ‘But what about the land of Ischia? The land where we grow the vines and vegetables and fruits?

  ‘If you live by the sea, you look to the sea for your food. It’s the catch of the day. It doesn’t change a lot through the year and the methods of cooking are quite simple. In the interior of Ischia we look to the land. We cook what it provides by the seasons. We depend on vegetables and herbs more and we use braising and other slow cooking techniques, so the food is quite different.’

  After the mezzanelli comes an earthenware bowl of coniglio all’ischitana, rabbit in the Ischian style, braised for about two hours, with tomatoes, white wine, a touch of garlic and, in the case of Il Focolare, a very particular, pungent wild thyme that grows on the Ischian hills. At the end of cooking, much of the cooking juices are strained off to serve as sauce for pasta con salsa di coniglio, another thrifty Italian culinary tradition, before the pot is brought to the table so you can gently prise away the tender flesh from the bones and savour the tomato-infused, thyme-pricked, sweet richness of the rabbit itself.

  To be honest, I’m not sure I could pick coniglio all’ischitana out from coniglio alla casanese, coniglio in tegame, coniglio all’astigiana or any of the other innumerable rabbit dishes that employ the same battery of ingredients with slight local variations. However, while the dish is served all over the island, cognoscenti make pilgrimages to Il Focolare for its coniglio all’ischitana.

  In an ideal world, Riccardo says, coniglio all’ischitana should be made with coniglio da fossa d’Ischia, Ischia’s once famous cave rabbits. In former times, agricultural workers would head off for their fields, smallholdings or vineyards carved out of the vertiginous and cave-pocked hills for days at a time. It was easier to find food on the spot than it was to return home every day for a sustaining lunch or dinner. Rabbits also have an easy knack of providing more rabbits, and so by popping them into convenient caves and feeding them on abundant herbs and greenery, the farmers provided an accessible, renewable and tasty source of protein. The fact that these rabbits tasted better than those kept in cages was another attraction.

  ‘When I was growing up here, we had cave rabbit on Sunday, only on Sunday,’ Riccardo goes on. However, as agriculture became mechanised and transport improved, the need to stay out for prolonged periods on the land stopped, and with it the tradition of the cave rabbits of Ischia. It’s a tradition Riccardo is enthusiastic, almost to the point of obsession, about re-establishing.

  ‘Young people have forgotten their food heritage,’ he says. ‘We need to keep these things alive, Matthew.’ For Riccardo, and his family, Ischia’s food culture is quite as important as any other part of its history. He sees a direct connection between the islanders as they are and the islanders as they were. So, along with two or three other producers, he and his daughter Silvia have started breeding the rabbits again in caves just up the hill from the restaurant.

  ‘When we started our own breeding programme, we had to talk to the old-timers to discover how it was done, create the caves, feed the rabbits and so on and so forth. Now there are three of us doing this, with the backing of Slow Food. The demand for these rabbits is far bigger than the number we can produce, but not many people want the bother of looking after the rabbits. It’s far too much trouble. But for us the rabbit is a symbol of the land of Ischia, of our – our! – agricult
ural and social history.’

  It’s too late to see the rabbits today, but before I leave Riccardo insists on taking me on a tour of the grotte – a chain of caves – behind the restaurant dining room. They’re as idiosyncratic as everything else about Il Focolare. The first once served as a wine cellar, but now it’s cluttered with a motley collection of bric-a-brac – a boxing glove, patent corkscrews, odd bits of agricultural equipment looking like pieces of a medieval torturing kit, a plank bench, a table made of a single rock or stone, a couple of disused barrels and ancient bottles festooned with cobwebs. The other grotte are empty, but in one Riccardo shows me where he has excavated some clay with which he proposes to make his own tegame, the classic earthenware pot for serving coniglio all’ ischitana. This fusion of practical and culinary processes embodies a holistic totality connecting past and present that gives Riccardo great satisfaction. His eyes gleam in the dim light.

  Ischia has always had an attraction for literati. Stendhal chatted to vineyard owners as he rode over Ischia on a donkey. Henryk Ibsen is supposed to have finished off Peer Gynt while staying on Ischia, although there’s some dispute about this. Pablo Neruda spent time here. Yet another poet, W. H. Auden wrote about

  sun drenched Parthenopea,

  my thanks are for you, Ischia,

  But most holiday-makers come just to have a jolly time, to be beside the seaside, beside the sea, tiddley-om-pom-pom. And Ischians go about making sure you have a good time with cheerful, honest venality. There’re buckets and spades and beach balls and cheap fishing rods to be bought, and countless shops selling the usual towels, beach wraps, sandals, bags, totes, caps and hats as multicoloured as a bag of sweets. There isn’t any candy floss, to be sure, but there are gelaterie, no pubs but plenty of bars, no caffs but many cafés, no piers but Negombo.