by Matthew Fort
‘No,’ he says. ‘This is a private hotel.’
‘What!?’ I say. ‘A private hotel? A hotel that doesn’t take guests?’
‘No,’ he says firmly, and shuts the gate between me and the terrace. I have no choice but to go back down the steps I’ve just climbed so laboriously. I feel a wave of sympathy with Lenin and his ghastly crew.
Capri, I decide, is an island on which to spend three days is too long and three months too short. I’ve been here three days. I take the ferry back to Ischia, where I left Nicoletta, and board another ferry for Naples. From Naples I take the road up the coast to Formia to catch a third ferry to Ponza.
Ponza
John Irving, the Sage of Bra, is waiting for me on the quay of Ponza Porto.
John’s a friend of many years standing, and is the project manager for my journey. This involves dealing with all the boring admin I can’t face – finding and booking hotels, reminding me of the times of ferries, suggesting places to eat, putting me in touch with a remarkable range of friends, acquaintances and people he thinks I might find interesting. He lives in Bra, not far from Turin, the city to which he moved from Carlisle because he fell in love with Juventus football club. He’s still a true tifoso after thirty years or so.
There’s a natural elegance about John, in spite of being afflicted with peripheral neuropathy, a debilitating condition affecting his hands and feet. While his gestures and movement may be inhibited, his spirit is not. He’s a living Curiosity Shop. I have rarely, if ever, come across a mind that ranges so easily over so many topics or that’s so well stocked with facts and anecdotes. His knowledge of Italian history, life, society and food is prodigious; his memory for films, footballers, books and cricketers is inexhaustible, and he speaks Italian with grace and professorial precision, and English with a marked Cumbrian accent.
We go to dinner at Gennarino a Mare overlooking the port. As we wait for the antipasto he remarks that Federico Fellini had filmed part of the Satyricon on Ponza.
I didn’t know that, I say, making a note of it, but did he know that Fellini had once had an affair with Germaine Greer?
He did, he says, and looks faintly irritated that I might’ve thought that he might not. ‘But it wasn’t very long-lived, uh.’ John has various linguistic habits. One is to inject a meditative ‘uh’ into a sentence every so often.
The antipasto arrives; a pretty decent salad of octopus, prawns, clams and mussels, and we begin discussing Italy’s most famous exports, food and criminal organisations.
‘Think of the Ice Cream Wars in Glasgow in the 1980s,’ I say.
‘But they weren’t Italian. Italian,’ says John. Repeating the last word or phrase he’d spoken at the end of a sentence is another of John’s linguistic idiosyncrasies.
‘Yes, they were,’ I say firmly.
‘I think you’ll find they weren’t, uh,’ he says. ‘You’re probably thinking of the Bill Forsyth about the wars. You know who Bill Forsyth was.’
‘Of course. Gregory’s Girl. Local Hero.’
‘Well, after Local Hero, he made a film called Comfort and Joy, about a DJ caught up in the rivalry between competing ice cream firms. And they were Italian, in the film, in the film. In real life they were Scots gangsters and the wars were about drugs, protection and prostitution, not ice cream. Although ice cream may have been involved.’
The primo piatto of linguine with prawns, clams and chilli oil arrives.
‘Well, what about the Messina family who ran Soho in the thirties? They were Sicilian.’
‘Sicilian extraction,’ John says. ‘In fact they came from Malta, uh. Malta. But before the Messinas there was Charles Sabini. “Derby” Sabini. He was Italian. Or his father was. His mother was English.’
Who remembers Charles Sabini these days? I wonder, aside from John.
We finish dinner with crema catalana and wander back to our respective hotels, his overlooking the port, mine tucked away on a side road. It’s full of families and elegant women and men with soft, rounded bodies and slender, knobbly legs, like peeled soft-boiled eggs balanced on bamboos.
Ponza is an elongated, nubbly mass, and just large enough to have two communities, Ponza Porto at one end and Le Forna at the other. The interior is a rocky, scrubby affair, scattered with a remarkable number of ruins – Etruscan, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Phoenician – that says something about its significance in Mediterranean power politics over the centuries.
Some experts have suggested the island got its name from Pontius Pilate, whose family had property on the island. Well, it’s one theory, I suppose. The Romans certainly made full use of the place. There are still Roman fish tanks carved out of the rock in certain grottos where they kept fish ready for shipping off to the market. The fish fared rather better than Nero Caesar, the eldest brother of Caligula, who was exiled to Ponza and then murdered in AD 30. Caligula also dispatched his sisters, Agrippina the Younger and Julia Livilla to Ponza in AD 39. They were lucky and were recalled to Rome in AD 41.
Ponza’s isolated position later made it a prime target for Saracen and Turkish ‘pirates’, and eventually their repeated depredations caused the island to be abandoned in the Middle Ages. Any attractions it might have had as a settlement weren’t helped when the Ottoman fleet under the command of Turgut Reis (aka Dragut) defeated the Spanish fleet of Emperor Charles V commanded by Andrea Doria, near Ponza in 1552. The island was finally re-colonised in the eighteenth century as part of the Kingdom of Naples. In 1813 it was taken and briefly held by Charles Napier during the Napoleonic Wars.
As seems to be the case with almost every Italian island, Ponza has served as a prison at one time or another. Mussolini lodged Ras Imiru Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian Prince Regent, there in 1936. A few years later, Mussolini got a taste of his own medicine when he himself spent a few months as a prisoner on Ponza after his overthrow. In view of his subsequent fate, he may have wished he’d stayed there. More recently, Ponza has been a source of bentonite, used in the steel industry and for blocking up drill shafts; and kaolin, used mainly in paper production, but familiar to me in the kaolin and morphine formulation used to treat upset tummies when I was a child.
As well as its fair share of history, Ponza has accumulated an impressive mass of legend as well as history. Some authorities have identified it as Aeaea, the island in Homer’s Odyssey where Circe had her cave or grotto. She turned Odysseus’s crew into animals and blackmailed him into sleeping with her; not that he put up much resistance, even though he was prone to burst out weeping every time he thought of hearth, home and wife. Circe said she would only release him if he visited Hades, which he duly did, and she was as good as her word.
I’ve been reading the Odyssey, at a leisurely pace, hoping to learn something from Odysseus about the nature of travel. Although the narrative rattles along, full of incidents and characters, I find Odysseus’s reputation for ingenuity and smartness to be a bit overrated. It seems to me that he owes his escapes from imprisonment, drowning, death, enchantment, and his final return to Ithaca, rather more to good luck than his celebrated cunning. And I can’t really see how Ponza can be Circe’s island. It’s a long way from what would have been Odysseus’s natural course from Troy to Ithaca, even taking into account the ferocious storms that blow up in the Odyssey every time Homer thinks the action is flagging. Reality hasn’t deterred the Ponzesi from playing the Circe and Odysseus cards for all they’re worth, what with the Grotta della Maga Circe and a Grotta d’Ulisse, among other imaginatively labelled landmarks.
It’s 6.30 a.m. Flat-roofed houses in powder blue, dusty terracotta, rose pink, and primrose yellow are stacked up the curve of the hill that rises steeply from the quayside. The sky’s an infinite, cloudless lapis lazuli. It’s already warm, the sea flat calm, smooth tongues of water slipping easily on the sand around the edge of the bay. Boats rest placidly at their moorings, light flickering on the underside of the hulls. The air smells of heat and salt. The port’s beginning to stir in
the pearly morning light.
A buzzsaw scooter rasps through the silence; there’s the wuhuhuhuhuh of the early morning aliscafo departing; shouted greetings; a young woman setting up tables outside a bar chats to her neighbour. There’s a sudden flurry of taxis heading for the far end of the port. Another aliscafo arrives – wuhuhuhuhuh. A man checks the boats for hire.
I stop to talk to a fishmonger in his shop by the quay. He’s hacking the cheeks from the head of a substantial monkfish with a curve-ended cleaver. Each time he brings the blade down the whiskery white hair on his head leaps upwards.
‘The best bit of the monkfish, the cheeks,’ he says.
I inspect the boxes of fish laid out on the slab – scorpion fish, sea bass, tiny whiting, prawns.
‘Are there still plenty of fish in the sea around the island?’ I ask.
‘Not as much as there used to be,’ he says. ‘Boats from Procida and Ischia help themselves to our fish, too.’
‘Where did that come from?’ I ask, pointing at the headless, muscular torso of a small swordfish on another slab.
‘You’d better ask them,’ he says, gesturing at a fishing boat tied up to the quay.
Four large swordfish, two or three metres from tail to bill, are laid out on the deck. Their swords rest on the gunwale of the boat. They have huge round eyes, as if they’re surprised by the recent turn of events. I’ve rarely seen swordfish of this size, and never four of them at once. I think they are two males and two females, as swordfish mate for life. If you catch one, you usually catch two, or so the legend goes, because one mate won’t leave the other. They look magnificent and melancholy. I ask if I can take a picture of them. The crew look at me suspiciously. Possibly they think I’m an EU fisheries inspector or a Greenpeace activist. I take a photo anyway.
‘Where did you catch them?’ I ask one of the men standing in the group.
‘A long way out,’ he says.
‘How did you catch them?’
‘On a long line.’
‘Where will you sell them?’
‘In the market.’
Clearly this isn’t a conversation that’s going to flourish.
The town is ticking over now, steps washed, shutters opened, deliveries made to bars and restaurants. A column of boxes containing bottles of tomato passata lurches drunkenly against a wall beside a side door of a trattoria, with a stack of mineral water cases to keep it from toppling over. Cheerful young women are beginning to arrange wraps, bags and summer gear outside shops. A few early strollers saunter along the promenade. There’s even a jogger looking oddly out of place. A young man straddles a scooter. He’s wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘I came. I saw. I crawled’ in English.
A couple of men are taking down the lights and decorations that had been erected for the festivities celebrating the island’s patron saint, San Silverio, one of the Catholic Church’s more put-upon prelates. He’d been propelled to the papacy in AD 536 by Theodahad, King of the Ostrogoths, when the Ostrogoths were a power in Central Italy. Unfortunately, Silverio was the victim of some typically murky, labyrinthine shenanigans. At the instigation of another cleric, Virgilius, he was deposed in AD 537 by the Byzantine general, Belisarius, who Silverio had foolishly given permission to enter Rome. Belisarius sent Silverio into exile in Lycia, now Anatolia, and from Lycia to Palamarola, a tiny lump of rock off Ponza, where he starved to death. Virgilius succeeded Silverio as pope and survived in the job until his death in AD 555. Poor San Silverio, he deserves his annual remembrance.
Ponza Porto has a certain smartness. The buildings are well cared-for and freshly painted. The main street is lined with shops, but there are none of the big brand names I’ve noticed on other islands, no Dolce & Gabbana, Fendi or Max Mara. Nor are there any menus in four languages. Ponza isn’t as down-to-earth as Procida or as chic as Capri. It’s somewhere in between, with a homelier, friendlier feel to it.
I make my way to the Pasticceria Napoletana and order an aragosta (lobster) a kind of super-sized sfogliatella, a cornucopia of flaky pastry filled with crème patissière and whipped cream. It’s monstrously indulgent and impossible to eat tidily. Clots of sweet cream keep oozing out from one end or the other. The front of my shirt is dusted with flakes of pastry. I wash it down with a succession of normale (espressos) from a machine with a hand lever to control the pressure of the water through the coffee, something that only survives in Naples. John joins me. I remark on the Neapolitan connection.
‘Ponza was resettled in the eighteenth century with folk from around Naples,’ says John. ‘From Torre del Greco. That’s why the locals still speak with a Neapolitan accent.’
Now that John’s pointed it out, it seems obvious. The men serving me speak with distinctive Neapolitan accents, with that sibilant, front-of-mouth enunciation that turns s to schs and vowels barked, rounded and elongated – ‘sch-fogli-a-tello’, ‘norm-a-le’. It seems the islands are full of historical echoes, accents, dialects and dishes cropping up far away from their place of origin, tracing patterns of internal migration, as Tabarchin does on San Pietro.
People come to Ponza for the sea. If you’re not interested in being on it, in it or under it, there’s not much point in coming to Ponza. Oh, there’s a Botanic Garden, the Etruscan, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Phoenician remains (pretty vestigial in my view), light shopping and some decent eating. There may even be some vibrant night life, although I never came across it. But there are no Norman churches or baroque flourishes or Greek theatres. It’s just down to the sea again, to the not-so-lonely sea, to swim, snorkel, dive, mess about in boats, soak in the sun, snooze under a flawless sky and empty your mind. There’s a lot to be said in favour of emptying your mind.
In the interests of being on the sea, John and I decide to join a voyage of discovery around the island. It’s such a touristic thing to do, but why not? We are tourists.
It’s a mark of John’s genius how he immediately sets about befriending our fellow trippers. Our captain is Giancarlo, who later incurs John’s displeasure by turning out to have Berlusconian political opinions. There’s Giuseppe and Aurora with their baby, Massimiliano, who proves a constant and happy distraction to everyone on board, and their friends Marco and Marianna. Quite what the relationship between Marco and Marianna is, we never quite work out. He’s protective of her, but not in any way uxorious.They all come from Naples and are on the plump-to-overweight side. John takes a great fancy to Marianna and she to him.
‘She reminds me of the girls in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.’
Then there’s lithe, tanned-to-teak Rosella and Domenico from Foggia. Domenico turns out to be a senior warder in a prison, a rather unlikely profession, I can’t help feeling, for so cheerful and narcissistic a fellow.
John’s only failure is with a handsome, self-absorbed young couple. They keep themselves to themselves although he manages to establish that the man comes from Torre del Greco and she from Sapri on the coast of Basilicata.
Giancarlo rattles off the sights as we slide out of the harbour – the Grotto di Pilato, where the Romans created a vivarium in which to keep fish, eels in particular, until needed; the Punta Fiena; the Chiaia di Luna, where a great curtain of blond tufa drops sheer to a beach; the Grotta della Maga Circe; the Capo Bianco Faraglione di Lucia Rosa.
‘Who was Lucia Rosa?’
‘An early feminist,’ says John. ‘She threw herself into the sea just here. Just here. She wanted to marry a poor farmer rather than the wealthy man her family had chosen for her.’
‘Seems a bit extreme.’
From the sea, Ponza reminds me of certain of the Shetland Islands, bathed in sunshine. Rugged cliffs rise sheer from the choppy sea, bays are scooped out between headlands, a thin layer of khaki vegetation cover the slopes between.
Not that any of the landscape seems to excite much interest among our fellow trippers, except as a backdrop for an endless series of selfies. I wonder what happens to this monumental catalogue of self? Where do the
selfie snaps all go? Are they stored for all eternity in some colossal, labyrinthine, parallel filing cabinet in cyberspace? Maybe this is what dark matter is made of. And why do people take them all the time? What’s the point? A form of social narcissism? An iteration of self? A proof of existence? Or are they just aide memoires? But if so, what memoires, if all you’re doing is photographing yourself? I’m baffled.
We swim. We natter. Aurora keeps Massimiliano tranquillised with a stream of sweets. We cross to craggy Palmarola where St Silverio starved to death. The only habitation is a fine bar serving drinks and snacks. I munch a plate of crunchy/soft, very fresh fried anchovies, superior fish fingers, and sip a glass of crinkly, green white wine, before heading off again, turning up the west side of Ponza. We swim in the natural pool by the Cala Ferla; pass Le Forna where houses tumble down a steep slope to a tiny harbour; round the end of the island, passing under the lea of a tiny lump of rock, Gavi. Giancarlo points out the remains of a Roman staircase carved into the rockface at the Cala Inferno before crossing the heart-shaped Cala del Core and heading past Frontone and back to the harbour.
We all kiss and wave goodbye and go our separate ways. It’s been a cheery, chatty, affable outing, with something of ‘All Aboard the Skylark’ about it, and something unmistakably, socially Italian. It’s a curious process. For a few hours you’re a part of someone else’s life, a peculiar intimacy. You exchange messages, form temporary relationships that are as real as they are transitory. Then the circumstances that thrust you all together come to an end, and you part, with a mixture of relief and regret.
Aqua Pazza, Ponza’s Michelin-starred restaurant, looks out over the harbour. It’s evening and the lights on the boats and the town flicker over the black, oilskin water.
John and I start with a plate of shaved squid with marinated artichokes, a sophisticated combination that might have been even better had the artichokes been cut as thinly as the squid.