Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  There are a good many Negombos – Cava Scura, Castiglione, Poseidon, Aphrodite Apollon to name a few – thermal spas, where they harness the geyser-heated waters in which the island abounds, to the benefit of your health and their commercial advantage. There’s almost nothing, it seems, that can’t be treated by the magical thermal waters of Ischia. Pliny and Strabo praised the curative qualities of its waters. Garibaldi came to Casamicciola to treat the injuries he sustained during the Battle of Aspromonte in 1862. He’d been accidentally shot in the ankle by troops in Victor Emmanuel’s army sent to stop him storming the Papal States. Garibaldi had become disenchanted with the slow progress of unification, and decided to try to speed things up by leading a campaign to conquer the Papal States. Ironically, he was stopped by the troops of the very man to whom he’d ceded his conquests of Sicily and Southern Italy. Marie Curie came to test the efficacy of the waters in 1918, and apparently found they contained radon, the gaseous form of radium.

  My Negombo looks like the kind of place you’d expect some Hollywood white hunter to turn up suave and natty in a pressed safari suit, treading in a manly way among carefully choreographed lush vegetation, curvaceous plunge pools, blue loungers and raffia umbrellas. Bishop Berkeley would probably have taken a dim view of Negombo, but Busby Berkeley would’ve immediately appreciated it.

  In place of an immaculate white hunter are dozens of Italians and Germans of every age and family grouping, wandering around in a fabulous array of beach wear – briefs and board shorts; bikinis strained to the point of indecency and one-piecers as formal as bondage gear; sensible blue baggies to mid-thigh, to the knee, to the calf; and sporty cherry triangles moulded to the genitals, cerise and paradise blue, bougainvillea and leopard spotted, black (the default colour for women above a certain age) and tiger-striped; even itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny yellow polka-dot scraps of cloth.

  There are hour-glass figures through which sand would pass very slowly and figures with a certain voluminous generosity to them. There are tummies as round as the sun and others as flat as the pampas, wrinkled tummies and taut tummies, tummies concave and convex, tummies drooping with no shame, tummies made magnificent by sheer will power.

  A man in a pair of orange and yellow-flamed Speedos clinging on for dear life beneath the curving brown overhang of his belly. A middle-aged daughter guides her blind father down the path to a thermal pool with patient tenderness. Out on the beach the old biddy with an aureola of hair of improbable colour engages her friend with unadorned grey curls in endless chatty discourse. Not far away a pale, solitary woman carefully turns herself onto her front and then, after fifteen minutes, turns herself onto her back again, a shapely, alabaster sausage browning under the grill. A very, very large man in a T-shirt, a baseball cap and five chins occupies most of the small, high-temperature Jacuzzi pool like a baleful hippo. And in Thermal Pool 3, there’s a courtly sarabande as elderly folk move and move about, taking it in turns to press their flabby/speckled/drooping/wrinkled tummies/breasts/backs/necks against the nozzles projecting the health-giving, age-reducing, body-toning, geyser-heated waters into the pool.

  Who can tell which children belong to which adult as they dash and shout and laugh and shriek, into the sea and out, up the beach and down, pushing and shoving and belabouring each other? They don’t care. Why should they? Everything’s concentrated into this moment.

  There’s something utterly disarming about this mass exhibition of human flesh and frailty and self-delusion. Of course, there’s pointless optimism and narcissism, but there’s also a kind of innocence, a trust that no one’s going to sneer or call you Fatty or Spotty or Saggy or Pot-Bellied or Shaggy when there’s more hair on your back than on your head, or the hundred other names you would have been called when you were younger.

  There’s a basic decency about Negombo. Absurdity, yes, comedy, yes, crass commercialism, yes; but there’s humanity, too, in all its saggy, baggy, quivery, shivery, wobbly, knobbly, firm and flexible, hirsute and follically challenged, laughing, smiling, tender, caring, thoughtful, loving, material variety. Bishop Berkeley was right. Ischia is a singular orchard – of human shapes, in all their diverting diversity.

  Silvia d’Ambra, Riccardo d’Ambra’s daughter, and I crouch above a pit about two metres deep, which is topped by a wire fence. Silvia is even more dedicated to the cause of Ischian food than her father, if that’s possible. A hole – the cave – in the hillside opens into it. Actually, the cave is less of a cave than a hillside burrow, in part man-made and in part rabbit-made. Silvia throws a branch with plenty of green leaves into the pit. We wait. Nothing happens. Silvia explains that rabbit management isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. Hazards include high infant mortality, inbreeding, disease, diet and the habit of rabbits to try and escape. Keeping cave rabbits is hard work, she says. Small wonder the practice has all but died out.

  I’m beginning to doubt that the rabbits will be tempted by this ad hoc addition to their diet, or, indeed, that they actually exist at all, when there’s a slight scuffling at the mouth of the cave, a flicker of movement, and there it is, a real, live cave rabbit, larger than I had expected, with a fine pair of ears and a rich, velvety black fur. Presently out comes a second, equally large, with a rather fine stippled brown coat.

  I have a faint sense of disappointment. As with the white asses of Asinara, the notion of a cave rabbit suggests something legendary, rare, exotic, mysterious, but in the end, the cave rabbit is just a rabbit, a handsome rabbit, and no doubt a tasty rabbit, but a rabbit nonetheless. And what is a cave but a burrow spelt differently? In theory, I can understand the importance of the project for the d’Ambra family, but, in truth, it doesn’t speak to me in the way that seeing a British lop pig or a Huntingdon fidget pie would.

  ‘Siamo chiusi perché stiamo preparando la cena’ (We’re closed because we’re cooking the dinner) reads the notice by the door to Da Assuntina. It doesn’t look much, a nondescript front tucked away on a nondescript side street that runs down to the beach at Ischia Porto. Da Assuntina is about as far removed as it is possible to be from the polish, the sharpness, the discreet good taste in various shades, the insistent waiter/touts, the menus in Italian, German, English and Russian, of the more fancied ristorantes and trattorias, but the notice suggests a decent attention to the business of cooking; and the exterior dares me to go in.

  There’s a perceptible break in the various conversations around the room. People peer at me and goggle. I feel as if I’ve wandered into a Bateman cartoon – ‘The Unwitting Tourist Who Dared to Enter Assuntina’s’. The chatter picks up again.

  The inside is as free-spirited as the outside. Moulded plastic tables and chairs; paper tablecloths and napkins; tongue-and-groove walls; barrel-vaulted ceiling; white and all-purpose Med blue paintwork; haphazard decorations and yards of fishermen’s netting festooned with bits of various sea creatures, along with a football painted in the Italian colours and a Forza Napoli sign. The lack of design finesse is reassuring. In my experience in Italy, the less polished the external display, the better the food.

  It’s difficult to tell customers from members of the family. There are a number of matrons at work in the kitchen at the back and a revolving cast of improbably sexy women as well as children of all ages by the bar in front. Papà, a tall, silent man with a certain gravity in spite of a grey T-shirt stretched over a paunch, hair pulled back into a short, grey ponytail and a faraway look in his eyes, does most of the fetching and carrying.

  Lunch? Fish, inevitably. There are days when I yearn for a chunk of meat, but there isn’t any point in going to somewhere like Assuntina’s and asking for the meat option. So fish it is – fat, sweet mussels; nice, chewy octopus; fine marinated anchovies with a hint of chilli; a plate of penne all’arrabbiata, with bright tomatoes just broken and warmed by the heat of the pasta; and finally orata (bream) with green olives.

  The bream is obviously cooked to order because it takes about twenty minutes to arrive. I couldn
’t care less. I’m caught up in the fluid dramas among the cast of family and friends, the conversations in three acts, the jump cuts from comedy to tragedy and back again, the vivid diorama of hand and facial expressions. The tableau has the energy and theatricality of an Eduardo de Filippo play. And when the fish arrives, it’s fresh and firm, the cooking juices and the oil thickened to an emulsion, nutty chunks of salty green olives providing weight and seasoning and a nip of chilli for very good measure. It’s robust and delicate, luminous and gutsy, and oh yes, worth waiting for.

  I’d seen a poster for a concert performance of Gaetano Donizetti’s opera buffa L’elisir d’amore at La Mortella, the garden created by Sir William Walton and his Argentinian wife Susana in the 1950s. Jolly music and an evening ramble through a famous garden – it was irresistible.

  Sir William was the distinguished composer of very avant-garde (for its time) Façade, the jazzy Belshazzar’s Feast, and the stirring Spitfire Prelude and Fugue for the film The First of the Few. He died in 1983 and is buried at La Mortella, but Susana lived on until 2010, tending to this extraordinary creation.

  The garden is enchanting and exhilarating. A maze of pathways meander up the precipitous hillside, through a teeming mass of lush, luxuriant, exuberant plants and shrubs; of fleshy leaves and spiky leaves; of geraniums and magnolias and hydrangeas, of ferns, and canopies of palms; and emerald lily pads the size of tea trays and grasses and flowers; grottos and leering satyrs, pools and streams, and a bamboo-clad lavatory with a toilet sign that had formerly been used on the London Underground.

  At the top, the garden flattens out around an amphitheatre where the concert performance is due to take place later this evening. It looks out over the Bay of Florio where a twin-masted schooner rides at anchor with theatrical precision in the space behind the amphitheatre. Thyme grows between the steps leading to the seats and its scent fills the evening air. The only place of comparable romance I know is the exquisite Greek theatre at Tindari on Sicily. House lights are beginning to prickle down in Florio and on the facing hillsides.

  People make their way up through the garden and shuffle into place around me, a curious mixture of smart, well-to-do Italians and a rag-tag-and-bobtail assembly of Americans, Germans and British.

  The night air is warm. The light grows hazy. The twin-masted schooner fades into the gathering gloom. I can hear the occasional hoot of a car and a keening siren. The singers warm up, running through their scales, la-la-la-la-la. Violins begin tuning, their runs broken by the odd toot of a trumpet or cooing of a clarinet. There’s the tension of anticipation that precedes any performance, heightened by the noises of the unseen performers. A prolonged pause, and then suddenly there they are, the members of the orchestra taking their places, dressed in rather showy costumes as if they’re going to take part in the drama as well as play their instruments. The conductor makes his way to the centre, bows to the audience, bows to the orchestra, raises his hand and we’re away.

  Gaetano Donizetti wrote L’elisir d’amore in six weeks in 1831, and it’s been part of the repertoire ever since. It’s a banker, an opera the music-loving public never tire of, a masterpiece of bel canto lyricism, a dependable, jolly counterbalance to those heavyweights of the nineteenth century, Verdi and Wagner (who wrote a piano version of the score), and has one really famous aria – ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ – that really is a tear-jerking show-stopper.

  But I don’t think that Donizetti had taken into account the effect that extraneous sound effects might have on an outdoor performance of his work. Car horns and sirens punctuate the dancing bars of the overture, with barking dogs, braying donkeys, zithering crickets and fireworks by way of variation. To add to a sense of surreality, the orchestral sound has the same tinniness and frenzy of the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, and the tenor playing Dulcamara looks and sounds disconcertingly like the meerkat in a long-running series of TV commercials.

  And then there are the frogs. As I’d wandered around earlier, I’d noticed pools and ponds at almost every level of La Mortella, each of which had a healthy population of small green frogs. It’s astonishing how penetrating the co-ax co-ax croak of one small green frog can be. Multiplied by several hundred, there’s a remorseless cacophony that would have cut through a crowd singing ‘You’ll never walk alone’ at a Cup Final. Donizetti’s lively score seems to encourage the frogs to greater and greater efforts. The choruses become vocal battlegrounds, arias are massacred wholesale. And ‘Una furtiva lagrima’ sung to the irregular, discordant, antiphonal accompaniment of several hundred frogs –

  Una furtiva lagrima

  negli occhi suoi spuntò:

  (co-ax co-ax)

  Quelle festose (co-ax co-ax) giovani

  (co-ax co-ax) invidiar sembrò.

  Che piu cercando io vò?

  (co-ax co-ax, co-ax co-ax)

  – provides a musical treat of a most unexpected nature. I treasure the last quatrain in particular:

  Di più non chiedo, non chiedo

  (co-ax co-ax ax)

  Ah cielo! Si può morir!

  (co-ax co-ax)

  Di più non chiedo, non chiedo

  Ah cielo! Si può morir d’amor!

  (co-ax co-ax, co-ax co-ax, co-ax co-ax, co-ax co-ax)

  It’s all I can do to stop from adding my own guffaws to the sound effects. But no one else seems to notice. It’s a precious memory, full of pleasures that I can never imagine having at Glyndebourne or Garsington, let alone the Royal Opera House or La Scala.

  It’s a splendid morning. Riccardo d’Ambra introduces me to Gaetano, a potter, who makes the tegami pots in which the rabbits of Ischia regularly end up. These are clearly a small part of Gaetano’s output, which consists largely of fauns, shepherdesses and large bowls of unimpeachable vulgarity, but Richard is enthusiastic about Gaetano’s contribution to the island’s cooking tradition. It takes a couple of weeks to make a pot, he explains, waiting for it to dry out, firing it, glazing it and firing it again. He seems very pleased that he’ll soon be able to cook rabbits that he’s raised, in a pot made from clay from the same area, an integrated culinary experience.

  I come down to Barano in search of swimming and lunch. The water is still a bit murky, as if churned up from some vast storm far out to sea. But the beach is as compelling as ever, a jumble of Liquorice Allsorts, brown bodies swathed in a range of brightly coloured wrappings. I lunch properly, but lightly, pay my bill at the Nettuno bar and make my way back to where I parked Nicoletta.

  As I do so, I pass the spot where, earlier, Gaetano the potter had interrupted his sunbathing on the terrace above the beach to advise me where to eat. I want to thank him, but can’t see him and move on. But it seems ungrateful not to at least make some kind of effort, so I turn round and retrace my steps.

  There’s a steepish concrete apron next to the terrace he’d been on. I’ll just nip up that, I think, lean over the wall, and say my goodbyes. I don’t notice that the concrete apron ends with a steep step. I drive the ball of my right foot down. It hits the edge of the step. As I move forward, my heel drops. There’s nothing to stop it. The angle becomes too great. Something snaps with the sound of a gunshot and a searing pain.

  The air fills with Anglo-Saxon swear words. I lurch around, looking for somewhere to sit down. The only people who notice anything amiss are two African tat-peddlers, a man and a woman. They help me to sit down on the wall they’d been resting on.

  I’m pretty certain that my Achilles tendon has broken. I hope, hope, pray that it isn’t as bad as that, but in my heart of hearts I know it is. I feel sick.

  After a while the initial agony subsides to a savage throb. I haul myself up to where I’d left Nicoletta, and, with my right foot flapping uselessly, get onto her with some difficulty, and ride back to the hotel.

  Francesco, the manager, immediately assesses the gravity of the situation and gives me a bag full of ice on which to rest my ankle. I spend an uneasy and largely sleepless night. At one point I f
eel something like a rubber band snapping and shrivelling up inside my calf and scream in pain.

  ‘È rotta,’ Dr Maio at Ospedale Rizzoli in Lacco Ameno confirms the next day. And then again, with a certain grim satisfaction. ‘È rotta. You need an operation, and a long period of treatment. Do you want it here?’

  ‘I think I’d better go home,’ I say.

  While Dr Maio binds up the wounded ankle, and applies gesso (plaster) with unsentimental efficiency, I lie on my front moaning ‘Oh God!’ into the thin mattress of the couch on which I’m lying. By nature, I’m quite a resilient sort of chap, but there’s no disguising the implications of this news.

  I try being philosophical. True, I’m not dead. True, too, that I’ve seen others in far worse states than myself coming through the swing doors of the hospital. But no amount of philosophising can reduce the crushing sense of disappointment, misery, self-pity and hurt.

  I trace and retrace the circumstances leading to that moment, obsessively, running memory’s video over and over again. Each step is small and insignificant in itself, related to the next only by the fact that they’re part of a sequence that cumulatively ends in disaster; the consequence of inconsequence. I have the delusion that if I can change one detail of the sequence, then I can change the outcome.

  Finally, I take a taxi back to the Hotel Villa d’Orta in Casamicciola. With kindness and immense thoughtfulness, Francesco, the manager, moves me to a room on the ground floor to minimise my discomfort. I ring Lois to tell her what’s happened, but I can’t speak to her.