Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  ‘Dad, Dad, are you OK?’ She sounds as distressed as I feel.

  ‘No,’ I choke, and put the phone down and weep.

  4

  ODYSSEUS REFLECTS

  2014–2015

  Gloucestershire

  Initially, I had a good deal of pain, particularly at night, as if hundreds of white-hot needles were being driven into my heel. I couldn’t put any weight on the damaged foot, and so I learned the art of crutch and hop management. When you have to lug your body around the place on your arms, shoulders and chest, you resent every gram of surplus weight. My chest became perfectly formed just as my leg was shrivelling away. If you don’t use a muscle, it loses definition very quickly. Above the waist I was Arnold Schwarzenegger; below I was a tadpole.

  My right foot, ankle and calf were braced inside a rather natty air boot, which looked like the kind of thing spacemen wear when they walk in space. It was certainly a good deal easier to deal with than the orthodox plaster cast (or, indeed, the iron brace Edward VII had to wear when he did in his Achilles tendon by stepping into a rabbit hole).

  ‘Year succeeded year with placid verisimilitude,’ wrote Harold Nicholson to describe years in the life of King George V, when absolutely nothing happened in the monarch’s life, beyond sticking stamps into the royal collection and shooting pheasants. That’s pretty much how I felt about my days of convalescence. Days were marked by the striking of the church clock, two, three, four o’clock, the sound of wind in the leaves of the infant cherry trees and roses in my garden, the chittering of swallows overhead, iced coffee in the afternoon. I got used to seeing the same views and landscapes every day.

  Sometimes it was difficult not to descend into self-pity and a tendency to mope. I had to remind myself frequently that, while a torn Achilles tendon is bloody in its way, and takes an unconscionable amount of time to heal, it really isn’t that terrible. No life threatened. No limbs removed. No chemotherapy to endure. All I had to do was sit around a lot. Immobility was dreary.

  Hugh Kingsmill once said that your friends were God’s apology for your family. In my case I seemed to have been uniquely blessed with both. I wondered if I would have responded with such big-hearted kindness if any of them were immobilised as I was. I liked to think so, but I wasn’t sure. It was tremendously cheering in dark times, and there were some very dark times.

  August gave way to September, September to October. It was a remarkable autumn, as perfect in its way as summer had been. The weather was beautiful; classic English days of warm, soft honeyed sunshine, mists and mellow fruitfulness. It was a great year for blackberries and sloes, for mushrooms and hazelnuts. But my own foraging was reduced to scrabbling for hazelnuts that had fallen from the bushes in my garden.

  But little by little I became more mobile. I started curing pigs’ cheeks for bacon – English guanciale – and baked my first cake in several decades while my mind and imagination wandered over sparkling seas beneath blue skies, along dusty paths that smelt of pepper and pine and juniper, waited on quaysides for ferries to dock and depart, followed roads unspooling beneath Nicoletta’s wheels, lingered on plates of seafood vivid with marine brightness and fruit dripping with juices and listened to people whose lives had opened up like the doors into a welcoming house.

  One evening in March I sat at home listening to the percussion of rain on the glass roof of my sitting room. It had started as a tropical deluge, dramatic and compelling, before settling down to a steady, professional downpour. At least I won’t have to water the pot plants outside, I thought. I felt restless.

  Well, I had taken the Adventure and for two months heeded the call that the Seafaring Rat had conjured up so eloquently. Was there any reason why I shouldn’t heed it again? Go back and pick up where I had left off? My ankle was healing. Nicoletta was resting on Ischia. I couldn’t think of any reason why I shouldn’t. I had nothing better to do. Plan A might have been scuppered, but now I had a Plan B.

  5

  RETURN TO THE ISLANDS

  JUNE 2015

  Ischia – Procida – Capri – Ponza – Ventotene – Stromboli

  Ischia (once more)

  ‘Travel must be an extravagance, a sacrifice to the rules of chance, from daily life to the extraordinary, it must represent the most intimate and original form of our taste. That’s why we must defend it against this new fashion for the bureaucratic, automated displacement en masse, the industry of travel,’ that indefatigable traveller, Stefan Zweig had written in his essay ‘To Travel or Be Travelled’ in 1926. ‘Let us preserve this modest gap for adventure in a universe of acute regulation. Let us not hand ourselves over to these overly pragmatic agencies who shepherd us around like goods. Let us continue to travel the way our ancestors did, as we wish, towards the goal we, ourselves, have chosen. Only that way can we discover not only the exterior world, but also that which lies within us.’

  In theory, I’m going to pick up where I left off at Ischia. In practice, I wonder if it’s going to be quite as straightforward as that; whether an interval of almost a year will affect my attitude to the whole odyssey; whether that sense of seamless pleasure and invulnerability that I enjoyed so much will wrap me up once more; in short, whether I’m the same person who set off in May of the year before.

  For a start, will it be possible to escape the pressures of mass tourism, ‘the industry of travel’, as Zweig described it? These are far greater now than they had been in Zweig’s day, leaving smaller and smaller margins for the solitary traveller, adventurer and explorer to exploit. But it should be possible to find these margins if you give yourself the luxury of time in which to search them out. You don’t need to be constrained by exact schedules and narrow formats.

  Of course, you can’t exactly have an odyssey without travel of some kind. That means making bookings if I don’t want to find myself sleeping on park bench or beach, and being aware of ferry timetables because ferries have to be met and travelled on. I have a notional schedule, but it’s flexible and adaptable. I can stop and stay as the mood or circumstance takes me. I can choose to linger somewhere or with someone if that takes my fancy. I can hasten on just as easily. I can accept invitations unconstrained by the need to be somewhere else at a specific date. I feel the joy of being the solitary traveller with an expansive portfolio of time, and a buzz at the prospect of being reunited with Nicoletta and heading off again.

  And there she is, parked in the driveway of the inestimable Hotel d’Orta. Some kind soul has washed her clean of the dust of last year’s travel. She looks trim as ever, scarlet and glistening as newly painted nails in the bright sunshine. I have a brief frisson of nerves as I fire up her 125cc of throaty power, and bounce off over the cobbled surface of the road down into the town, but I soon feel as if we’ve never been parted.

  Procida

  I briefly flirt with the notion of revisiting the scene of last year’s catastrophe, but quickly dismiss the idea. The imperative of travel means going forwards not backwards, so I go to Procida, Ischia’s neighbour among the Phlegraean Islands that crowd the Bay of Naples.

  As I head for the ferry, a ferocious downpour suddenly bursts over the harbour. There’s no hiding place on the back of Nicoletta. Buffeted by a gusty wind, blinded by driving rain, it’s a miracle I make the ferry at all.

  How wet can a man get? On a Vespa, very. I’m wearing an admirable waterproof top and a helmet that keep my top half dryish. But below? Trousers sodden in an instant, and cold and clammy. Shoes filled with water. I look and feel as if I’ve had a serious urinary disaster. Rain not only falls on the just and unjust alike, but also onto the saddle on which I’m sitting. The force of the wind generated by even my modest forward momentum is enough to drive the rain along the seat cover in waves until it reaches the point where trouser and saddle meet. I creep aboard, not so much dripping as cascading water.

  ‘Procida, the Prochyta of the ancients, like its sister-island Ischia, is of volcano origin being composed of pumice-stone and trachyti
c tufa,’ begins the entry in Karl Baedeker’s admirable Guide to Southern Italy of 1908. It goes on ‘Procida is 2m in length and of varying width; population 14,440, whose occupations are fishing and the cultivation of the vine and other fruit. The surface is somewhat flat compared with that of its more majestic sister-isle … The white glistening houses with their flat roofs present a somewhat Oriental aspect.’

  What Germanic thoroughness, what masterly accuracy. The Marina Grande is tiny, ringed by flat-topped, cubed buildings seemingly stacked one on another, like boxes. It’s the first time I’ve really been aware of the influence of Arab architecture that Baedeker had observed. The population has shrunk to about 10,000 and the houses are agreeably dishevelled rather than ‘glistening’ like those on Elba and Giglio, but few other things have changed since 1908.

  Procida was originally inhabited from the sixteenth century BC by settlers from Mycenae in the Greek Peloponnese. After that it was subjected to the usual chequered history of the imperial comings and goings of the Romans, for whom it was a holiday resort, of Vandals, Goths, Saracens and Turkish pirates, who treated it as a source of slaves and booty. At one time or another, it’s been a feudal fiefdom, game reserve, centre of political dissent and film set. It’s the setting of Elsa Morante’s classic novel of island life, Arturo’s Island, which captures something of the hard life and limited horizons of the island before being liberated by modern transport, communications and film making – Procida has played a starring role in a number of films, Il Postino and The Talented Mr Ripley among them.

  By the time we arrive at the Marina Grande, the sun has come out. I steam gently as I dry. There’s something deeply pleasing about pottering along with no fixed purpose or particular agenda. I meander up through the port, heading for the Marina di Chiaiolella at the other end of the island. I pause briefly to fortify myself with lingua di bue (ox tongue) I buy at a natty pasticceria in the high street. The name’s a little misleading as lingua di bue turns out to be a splendid pastry roughly the shape of a calf’s tongue, with a golden brown crust and plump with crème patissière. It belongs the the class of pastries of which one is not quite enough, but two would be sickening.

  There’s no building of the slightest aesthetic or architectural interest, except for the Torre Murata at the top of the town. This has sixteenth-century walls, but not much else of note until I spot the most extraordinary collection of life-sized wooden figurines stashed away hugger-mugger in a corner by one of the walls. One seems to be Jesus hanging from two rings set in a wall. There’s a bald man in a toga with a whip in his hand (Pontius Pilate?); a brace of stiff Roman centurions; a weird assortment of cherubs and crosses; a kneeling woman in nunnish black with a white wimple; and what looks like a vast wardrobe without doors, inside which loom shadowy figures. It isn’t the artefacts themselves that intrigue me, so much as the higgledy-piggledy way they’ve been dumped, as if discarded. I assume that these are the props for one of the many religious festivals like the Procession of the Apostles of Holy Thursday and the Procession of the Mysteries of Good Friday with which the Procida calendar seems studded, but there’s no one to ask.

  I wander on, admiring the brilliance and colour range of the bougainvilleas draped like flower boas along garden walls, tumbling down in ruffles. I spot a giant lemon growing in a garden high above my head. Like the pompia of Siniscola, it’s roughly the size and shape of an American football, but more bulgy around the middle. Its skin is as puckered and lumpy as that of a rhinoceros, and it glows as if lit by an interior light.

  Every now and then I pass women wheeling baby buggies, speeding past on scooters, walking home with shopping, gossiping in the street. Almost without exception, they’re beautiful, their looks made all the more striking by the self-possessed ease with which they carry them. None of them give me a second glance.

  Generally speaking, Procida doesn’t make much effort to put itself out for visitors. There’s no glittery dross or visitor centres, no menus in multiple languages, no shops peddling the usual dross. Instead there’s a resolute, take-it-or-leave-it air to it that’s rather refreshing.

  After about an hour’s gentle rambling, I slope down into the Marina di Chiaiolella, a smaller, prettier version of the Marina Grande, and head for Vivara, a tiny island nature reserve linked to Procida by a bridge. This lies, so the map says, at the end of a narrow, winding lane leading up a steep slope. When I get to the bridge I feel that the Procidani carry their refusal to engage with tourist comfort a bit far. Gates to the bridge are shut, chained and padlocked and there’s no other way to get to Vivara. If someone had had the decency to put a sign up at the beginning of the narrow, winding lane rather than at the end of it, they would have saved me considerable time and effort.

  Rather grudgingly I slope back again towards the Marina Grande. There isn’t really anywhere else to go. Presently, I pass a sign pointing down some steps to a beach, La Spiaggia di Chiaia, and to a restaurant, La Conchiglia. I want a swim and something to eat, and so down I go, 184 steps in all. La Conchiglia is at the bottom, sitting just above a long curve of black volcanic sand, with clear, azure sea in front and Marina di Corricella down the coast to the left. It seems a perfect place to eat lunch.

  It is a perfect place to eat lunch, with totani stuffed with ricotta and breadcrumbs bound with egg and light, deep-fried balls of neonate, tiny fish each the size of the tine of a fork, standing out among the shimmering mix of flavours and textures. The lady in charge sells me stracci, large, floppy pieces of pasta which look like pieces of torn fabric, studded with mussels, pine nuts, broccoli and dried grapes, an idiosyncratic combination that turns out to be unexpectedly seductive, a combination of marine sweetness, sweet and sour fruit, vegetable modulation and nutty density.

  I talk to her about food on Procida. The dishes at La Conchiglia are hers, she says. Some are typical of the island, others like the stracci, aren’t.

  I mention the giant lemon I’d spotted earlier. ‘What’s so special about them, apart from their size?’ I wonder.

  ‘Of course, you only find them on Procida, they’re quite different from the lemons of Amalfi, Sorrento or anywhere else,’ says la signora. ‘We call them limoni pane because they have so much pith. The skins have more oil and the flavour is gentle and full.’

  ‘What do you use them for?’

  ‘Insalata di limone – peeled, sliced lemon, chilli, olive oil and mint,’ she says.

  Mint – it’s curious how that very Arab herb crops up in so many dishes around the Mediterranean, a distant echo of the era of Saracen imperial conquest.

  It’s time for a snooze on the beach and a swim in the cool linen sea. It may be the sun, the sea or the lunch, but I feel this year’s journey melding seamlessly into last year’s. The time between exists in another dimension and belongs somewhere else.

  Capri

  There’s always been something rackety about Capri, the island of Augustus and Tiberius, Axel Munthe and Curzio Malaparte, Maxim Gorky and Thomas Mann, Alfred Krupp and Graham Greene, Norman Douglas and Gracie Fields, who all lived there at one time or another. It epitomises a kind of Mediterranean loucheness and cosmopolitan brilliance to my mind, redolent of licence and abandon.

  It’s quite difficult to see any of this as my aliscafo queues up with seven others to decant its load onto a quayside already milling with visitors. There’s a long line of people waiting for the funicular transporting visitors from the port to the Piazzetta, that ‘little theatre of the world’ as Norman Douglas called it, in the town of Capri above. It’s only 11 a.m., but waiters are already touting for business at the cafés, bars and trattorias along the promenade. Even the sparrows scavenging for titbits have a cheeky, begging air to them.

  On the recommendation of my nephew, George, an old Capri hand, I go to the reassuringly ordinary Salumeria da Aldo on the sea front and buy a panino caprese to eat while I wait for the queue for the funicular to shorten. ‘You have to leave it in the sun for a couple of hours to so
ak up the juices,’ George had directed. Hunger gets the better of me, and I eat it sitting in the sun and watch the great circus playing along the harbour front. George is right about its crunchy, squidgy, chewy, fruity, gently cheesy excellence.

  The Italians have developed a crafty way of dealing with mass tourism, whether in Rome, Florence, Venice or any of the other primary destinations around the country. They shepherd them along well-established routes to well-established cultural targets, just as you might herd flocks of sheep from one pen to the next. As most people come to see one or two well-publicised sites, museums, churches or artefacts that they’ve been encouraged to see, they are happy. At the same time, the system lets the authorities manage the incessant pressure that the visitors create.

  This policy reaches its apogee with Capri. Each day hordes arrive from Naples, Sorrento, Pozzuoli and other points of departure on the Costiera Amalfitana, to scale to the heights of Capri and Anacapri from the landing stages of the Marina Grande, thus drawing tourist fire from Procida and, to a lesser extent, Ischia.

  The visitors arrive in squads, units, platoons, even brigades, a foreign legion of all nationalities, hundreds of them, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, ready to storm Capri’s historical bastions and to inspect the Villa Jovis, the Villa Fersen, the Villa San Michele and the several other notable villas that dot the island.

  These shock troops of modern tourism are armed with maps marking the key sites, cameras, mobile phones, GoPros, dark glasses, rucksacks and bottles of mineral water, bottles and bottles of mineral water. Usually the squads are led by a father or other would-be dominant male, narrow-eyed and focused, commanding or flustered depending on the attitude of those following. They march or straggle in single file along Capri’s narrow lanes, only wide enough to allow the flow of one person in either direction, taking swift evasive action from time to time as one of the numerous electric buggies collecting rubbish or carrying suitcases or supplies glides by.