Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  Heading back to Filicudi with Emilio, our boatman, we pass quite close to one of those let’s-go-cruising-round-the-Med yachts, wallowing in the long swells. Several figures on board wave at us, beckoning us to come in close. They turn out to be Russians, and they’re in trouble. Their boat has shed its propeller.

  Lisa grasps the situation much quicker than I do, and takes command with admirable crispness.

  ‘Do any of you speak English?’ she shouts.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Anyone speak Italian?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘OK. I do. I’ll translate.’

  She has a quick consultation with Emilio. He says we’ll have to go back to Pecorini a Mare to get a bigger boat to take them under tow. He’s obviously dealt with this kind of situation before. I just keep my gob shut. In my experience one admiral and one captain are quite enough in any emergency.

  ‘Can you anchor?’ shout Lisa.

  ‘Too deep. It’s over a hundred metres here,’ the Russians shout back.

  Lisa casts an eye over the nearby coastline, which is formidable and rocky. Without motor power, it’s possible they might be driven onto it. Luckily, we work out that the wind and current are taking the stricken yacht away from immediate danger, towards the equally formidable and rocky coastline of Alicudi.

  ‘Right,’ snaps Lisa, ‘we’ll take on a couple of you. Bring a phone so we can keep in touch with you while we go back and get a larger boat.’

  Emilio swoops our boat in under the stern of the stricken yacht, and two of the Russians hop aboard, one of whom speaks serviceable English. We roar off to get a bigger boat.

  ‘O, gosh,’ says Lisa, her face alight with dash and derring-do. ‘This is so Swallows and Amazons. “Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won’t drown”,’ she quotes.

  By the time we return about twenty minutes later in a larger vessel, the yacht’s some way west of where we’d left her, heading for Alicudi. Emilio says something to Lisa. Lisa speaks to the Russian on our boat, a young computer programmer from Moscow. The Russian speaks to his mates on the yacht via his phone. A rope is thrown. Emilio fastens it to the thwarts, and begins to cajole the wallowing yacht into turning round.

  The measure of the challenge is immediately obvious. Our larger boat may have a more powerful motor, but it isn’t that large or that powerful. It’s as if a terrier were trying to tow an elephant. It would be easier if the fellow in charge of the yacht had some idea about seamanship. As it is, the yacht has an alarming tendency to veer off to one side or another, yawing heavily in the long swell.

  Little by little we get her bow round and begin to ease her back to Filicudi. It soon becomes apparent that the towrope is too short. Only Emilio’s expert boatmanship keeps the yacht from careering into our stern. A second rope is thrown. Emilio splices the two together and ties them around the thwarts. This makes things better and safer. Even so, it needs precise speed management, and every now and then the thwart gives a nasty crack when the towrope tightens with a snap.

  Word has obviously got out, because one of the large caiques taking holidaymakers on romantic cruises around the islands heaves into view. A rubber rib scoots over. After a brief discussion it’s decided that the larger boat will take the stricken yacht in tow. This is clearly the sensible thing to do. We head back to Pecorini a Mare with a warm sense that we’ve behaved sensibly, practically and honourably. That doesn’t happen as often as I would like in my life. I still wonder how you lose a propeller?

  Lisa and I celebrate our part in the international sea rescue mission over another dinner at La Sirena. In the course of it, she’s attacked by an earwig, or so she says. It turns her as close to hysterical as I’ve ever seen her. How curious people are, cool in action one moment, reduced to a quivering wreck by a small, harmless insect the next.

  Lisa leaves for Panarea, with her two vast aluminium cases and yet another love-struck boatman at the helm of her water taxi, and life goes back to its easy pace once more. There’s a steady build-up of jellyfish, which means keeping a wary eye open whenever I go into the sea. Someone once told me that the best antidote for jellyfish stings is urine, but it’s a bit difficult to administer to your back, say, if you’re on your own.

  Giuseppe Mascoli turns up on his yacht with his daughter, Heather, and a school friend, and we all have a merry dinner. Come to Panarea, says Giuseppe. Very interesting, Panarea. Very good restaurants. But there’s more to investigate on Filicudi. Besides, I’d rather enjoy the placidity of my life at Pecorini a Mare. I don’t feel that Giuseppe’s approach to life can be reconciled with Dynamic Inertia, so I stay on.

  During the circumnavigation of the island with Lisa and the whiskery Bartolo, I’d been struck by the extent and magnificence of the terraces that stretch across most hillsides in wavering horizontal lines. Even the steepest slopes had once been put to agricultural production. I skim up the eight hairpin bends, and go to explore Filicudi’s hinterland accessible from its few kilometres of road. In odd corners I come across forlorn stands of apricot, peach, almond, pear and olive trees and straggly vines. At one time Filicudi must’ve been a vast orchard, but those days are clearly long gone. Almost all the terraces are abandoned, sad evidence of migration and emigration, settlement and abandonment, forced and otherwise, that have been one of the constant threads of history throughout Italy’s islands.

  A pattern of desertion and re-population has dominated Mediterranean islands for centuries, and left traces of differing cultures in curious places. Lipari was resettled by Sicilians and Spaniards. Migrants from Lipari itself re-colonised Ustica. There was the Catalan connection in Alghero, the Genoese in Stintino and Carloforte, and the Neapolitans in Ponza.

  The case of Filicudi is slightly different. In 1911 the island supported over 1,500 people. By 1961 the number had shrunk to 447. Now the permanent population amounts to 235 according to 2001 figures. In spite of abundant fish and obviously productive growing conditions, the fragmentation of land ownership and the complexities of inheritance, one of the unintended consequences of the adoption of the Code Napoleon in the nineteenth century; the phylloxera that decimated the island’s vines; over-population leading to poverty and starvation; and the desire to escape the constrictions of island life and familial conformity, drove the Filicudari to abandon their homes in waves, some to look for employment on Lipari and Salina, and many more for Australia, to settle in Sidney and Melbourne. ‘Cu nesci, arrinesci’ – he who emigrates, succeeds as the Sicilian saying goes.

  One who succeeded was John Bonica, the anaesthesiologist and founding father of the study of pain management. He was born Giovanni Bonica on Filicudi in 1917 and emigrated to America with his family in 1927. He funded his studies at medical school by wrestling professionally under the names of the Masked Marvel and Johnny ‘Bull’ Walker. His interest in pain management was triggered by the chronic pain he suffered as a result of his earlier profession. He’s probably the only President of the American Society of Anaesthesiology to be inducted into the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame.

  Now Filicudi, like most of the islands, is kept alive by tourism. They may come like the corsairs of old, but it’s an uncomfortable fact that without the income generated by the cruise ships, touring yachts, the day trippers and holidaymakers, without all the ghastly tat and detritus and conformity of modern tourism, life on these islands will die completely. It’s an irony that the very forces that are gradually crushing the individual identity of each island, undermining their traditions and culture, as Federica Tesoriero pointed out, also provides the means of survival for the few people who choose to remain on the island all the year round.

  It’s easy to sentimentalise and romanticise island life as it was, and deplore the tourist barbarians at the gate, but in reality it isn’t so very different from the way in which weekend villagers and second-home owners have given a kind of life to a good many villages in England, after their original occupants – agricultural labourers �
�� had left them as agriculture industrialised, and cities became the focus of employment.

  Of course, I lament the disappearance of the old ways, but it seems little short of a miracle that anyone lives on these islands at all.

  All agreeable idylls end. One last drink at Saloon. One last dinner – sweet, pillowy mussels; tonno alla trapanesi, a pyrotechnic of tuna with wild fennel, mint, parsley, sultanas, pine nuts, white wine and tomato passata; and semifreddo alla mandarla – at La Sirena. One last walk down to the jetty, and one last peer at the stars and the black velvet night sky. The sea glugs and chuckles around the stanchions.

  The next morning I ride up the eight hairpin bends from Pecorini a Mare and down a whole lot more to Filicudi Porto in time for a cornetto con crema, espresso and spremuta d’arancia for breakfast, and join the few passengers also waiting for the big, car-carrying ferry to Milazzo on mainland Sicily. Filicudi Porto has something of the ‘last service station before the motorway’ about it. It’s stoking hot by the time we board.

  The ferry to Milazzo on the Sicilian mainland is scheduled to take three hours. It takes five, making a leisurely progress from Filicudi to Salina; from Salina to Lipari Porto; from Lipari to Vulcano; and from Vulcano to Milazzo. In theory, the only Aeolian island I haven’t visited is Panarea. Even with my generous timetable I can’t spend time on them all. I want to spend a summer in the islands, not write a guidebook.

  Sicily

  ‘Matthew. Matthew Fort. It is Matthew, isn’t it?’ As I’m checking out a restaurant, Odeon, in Capo d’Orlando, a handsome woman with white hair hails me.

  I’ve ridden from Milazzo to Capo d’Orlando and am looking for somewhere to dine. It’s obvious that the holiday invasion is much further advanced here than it is on Filicudi. The beach is barely visible beneath the mass of multicoloured sunbrellas. The air’s bright with the squeals of children and shouts of encouragement of their parents. Traffic trawls up and down the sea front in an unbroken stream. Shoals of holidaymakers browse on the shop fronts, and most of the trattorias are packed.

  ‘It’s Anna Venturi. Do you remember me?’

  Of course, I remember Anna. Who wouldn’t? She set up one of the first Italian cookery schools in the UK, in Beaconsfield and then in London, way back in the early nineties. Originally from Milan, she taught a generation of neophyte Italian food lovers the principles of Italian cookery. She was, and obviously still is, a woman of formidable energy and drive. She sold the school, she tells me, and now splits her time between London and Capo d’Orlando, where she has a house. Would I like to join her and her husband, Bill?

  And so I sit down to a classic spaghetti con le sarde that prompts a discussion about the nature of Sicilian cooking, the changing food in Italy (for the worse, according to Anna), Italian food in the UK (never very authentic, according to Anna), the developments in modern gastronomy (Anna doesn’t approve of many of them), the pleasure of children and grandchildren, the joys of the prosciutto from the black pigs of the Nebrodi, how she and Bill met and a dozen other topics. Between us we demolish a titanic plate of grilled swordfish, totani and prawns.Around us the Odeon fills up. The warm evening air thrums with cheery conversations.

  Eventually Anna says she and Bill had better be getting home as one of her daughters with several grandchildren will be arriving at any moment. We say goodnight and goodbye. Dinner with them has been an unexpected, unlooked-for blessing.

  The next day is a real belter. I take the coastal road to Palermo, a hundred or so kilometres away. I must have ridden the same route in the other direction in 2006, when exploring Sicily for Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons. Or was it 2007? I’m damned if I can remember, but I keep getting flashbacks – this valley, this bridge, this section by the sea; they seem vaguely familiar. The sun is searing, the heat’s like a hammer as Nicoletta and I buzz through dusty, dirt-scrabble towns, where papers sent billowing by passing traffic are the only signs of life and where the road surface tests nerves and balance; through other towns handsome in form and feature, with confident, four-square nineteenth-century villas with knobs on. God, this must have been a beautiful island 150 years ago. Still is, in many ways.

  Now a bridge over a dried river bed with orchards of oranges, lemons, peaches, olives and figs neat on either bank; and tomatoes, melanzane and zucchini, too. Now beside the sea, russet rock wall to the left, cream-laced water below to the right, drifting to left or right according to the road, sweeping through the corners, in, out, never fast, a steady 40 kph, 50 max, cars stacked up behind me. Sensibly they keep a respectful distance. The drivers can tell I’m not your average Vespista.

  I stop for lunch at Cefalù, not smart Cefalù, but roadside, pit-stop Cefalù, a caff, all plastic, veneer-thin smartness, but jolly and buzzy, with a startling display of pastries and puds. First, a beer, a very cold bottle of Birra Messina, brewed on the island. Is there a better drink when you’re properly hot and sweaty and tired and dehydrated? The shock of coldness, the prickle of fizz bursting around the tongue, throat, against the roof of my mouth, the light, persistent bitterness, the touch of malt for body. Nectar, a life-saver, on the button. Gone. Even here I get a lunch I never get at the equivalent in the UK – pasta with meat sauce; caponata; coffee and strawberry ice cream. Nothing special, but properly flavoured and properly done, all for fourteen euros. I’m primed, ready to go again.

  The first time I came into Palermo, I followed the road from the hills to the south, via Monreale, dropping down into the commercial, grungier part of the city. This time I come from the east, through the rings of urban dross you get with all Italian towns or cities, no matter how beautiful, but then into the nineteenth-century city along the seafront, the surviving gardens, palazzi and villas, with elegance, luxury and space; a celebration of money and the opulence it can buy, statements of faith that the future will never change within the Conca d’Oro, the Golden Conch. How utterly captivating it must have been before war, criminality, redevelopment and the twentieth century generally trashed its pristine loveliness. Maybe this beauty was based on exploitation, power and corruption, but exploitation, power and corruption are still part of city life without the concomitant aesthetic standards.

  Within the shell of the Conca d’Oro, there’s a sense of a city unfavoured by the people who run it, whether the official or unofficial government, unloved and decaying. Vast graffiti paintings deface some of the buildings. Some are of octopi and turtle, which symbolise the Mafia. Other areas are dominated by graffiti of the Ultràs, the violent supporters of Palermo football club and a minor political force. But there’s one graffito quite unlike all the others: a delicate, lifelike painting of a young woman bending over as if washing her hair. The top of her head is missing, exposing her brain. ‘Wash your mind tonight,’ read the words above it. It’s more disturbing than all the others.

  I wander around to see if I can find the night market between the via Archimede and the via Ettore Ximenes, where I’d once eaten mackerel and chicory grilled over a vast barbecue by Michele with the stump of a Toscano cigar clamped firmly in his teeth, and watched the circus of Palermitan night life and smoke from the barbecue rising up past the surrounding houses into the night sky.

  I find the area looking a bit threadbare and devoid of life. There’s no sign of the fishmongers or grocers I remember so clearly. Miraculously, though, I come across Michele, as ebullient as ever, the stump of a Toscano still clamped firmly in his teeth.

  ‘It’s all changed a bit,’ I say.

  ‘A bit,’ he says. ‘It’s quiet because it’s Sunday.’

  ‘Are the fish shops still here, and the fruit and veg shops?’

  ‘Some,’ he says, with a slight downturn of the mouth.

  ‘I remember the mackerel and the chicory you grilled for me on the big barbecue, and the wine your boy fetched from the enoteca.’

  ‘The enoteca’s still here,’ he says. ‘And we still have a barbecue.’ He gestures to a small grill about the size of a domestic one, where a
young man is grilling meat on skewers. ‘And I have this spaghetteria. Would you like spaghetti alle vongole? Or with cozze?’

  I say I’m not hungry just yet and continue my wandering. Maybe Sunday evening isn’t the best time for nostalgia.

  Ustica

  Ustica is something like six hours from London, if you get your timing right. A three-hour flight to Palermo, two or three hours by ferry depending on whether you take the zippy aliscafo or the larger, plodding, car-bearing ferries. Add on a bit of time here and there, call it nine hours to be on the safe side. Or a world, or even a planet, away.

  Ustica has seen its fair share of settlement, emigration and resettlement over the centuries. The depredations of the Turkish corsairs kept anyone from staying there for very long until the eighteenth century, when ninety migrants from even more impoverished Lipari settled there.

  Ustica has very little fresh water, but very fertile soil. With ingenuity and hard work the settlers flourished to the point that the island could no longer support the numbers, and between the early nineteenth century and the early twentieth century successive waves of Usticani headed for America, for the South and New Orleans in particular. An Italian battalion, including a good many Usticani, fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Today something like 30,000 people in New Orleans trace their origins to Ustica, while the island’s population stands at around 1,300.