by Matthew Fort
At first sight, Ustica lacks the drama of the Aeolian Islands, but it has a sweet, understated prettiness. It takes me about forty minutes to ride round it. There’s the only conurbation of any significance, Ustica Porto, but nowhere is far from anywhere else.
A crest of hills runs down the centre of the island, sloping down to a broad plain that ends in cliffs that drop sheer to the periwinkle sea. The highest point of the crest is crowned by a vast, white intelligence listening dome, like a colossal golf ball waiting for Zeus, Jupiter or some other deity to tee off. Around it a mixture of scrub and carefully tended smallholdings, shot with the brilliance of bougainvillea, hibiscus and plumbago, patch the slopes.
The Usticani live modestly, tending their almonds, nectarines, lemons, fig trees and vines, growing tomatoes, melanzane, zucchini, onions, pumpkins and lentils. Visitors are welcomed, accommodated and looked after, but in truth we’re peripheral to the real life of the island and the business of survival, which goes on day in, day out. It seems to have escaped the consequences of mass tourism, indeed, to have largely escaped tourism altogether. I can’t see any large villas, abandoned palazzi of departed aristocrats or hefty mansions of wealthy merchants, no flash holiday homes, tasteful developments or mega-hotels. Every building is modest and practical.
Antonio Gramsci described the clutter of houses above Ustica Porto as ‘a small village of a Saracen type, picturesque and colourful’. Gramsci was the great pre-war leader and leading theorist of the Italian Communist party. He was sentenced to a five-year term on Ustica by a Fascist court. Although he was on the island for only six weeks, he set up a school to teach both locals and fellow exiles, and by all accounts enjoyed his stay.
The house just off the Piazza Umberto he occupied with his colleague and one-time rival, Amadeo Bordiga, has a plaque beside the door. It reads ‘Confinati dalla tirranide fascista vissero in questa casa Antonio Gramsci e Amadeo Bordiga operando per il bene e il progresso dell’umana convivenza. Nel cinquantesimo anniversario della morte di Antonio Gramsci L’Amministrazione Communale Ustica 1987’ (Confined by fascist tyranny Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga lived in this house, working for the good and progress of human society. On the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Antonio Gramsci. The administration of the commune of Ustica 1987).
I wonder how many communist thinkers in the UK are similarly celebrated on, say, the Isle of Man? Or left such a legacy? Everyone on the island I ask about Gramsci speaks of him with respect and affection, irrespective of their political leanings. He isn’t simply the most famous person associated with the island, perhaps the only reason Ustica registers on the wider consciousness at all. He represents something, a point of view, a kind of intellectual force and moral courage that Italians admire, maybe because they see so little of it among their contemporary politicians.
Ustica’s tranquillity would’ve seemed remote from the hurly-burly of political change, and yet, as Gramsci found, there’s much pleasure to be found in the decency and humdrum rhythm of island life.
One morning a large crowd gathers down by the harbour quay. Apparently a van has inadvertently backed off the quay and into the sea, and half the population of the town has turned up to witness its recovery. ‘It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened in Ustica for months,’ says one bystander. A cheer goes up when the vehicle, water pouring out of it, is finally lifted out by a crane.
The Azienda Hibiscus, where I’m staying, is a working farm and winery, the only one on the island. Each morning donkeys greet the dawn with a ragged chorus of hoarse brays. Sometime later, just after seven, I rise and sneak off down the path through the fields that leads to the road that leads to a track that leads to the steps that lead to the sea. The world is mine. Bees and vast mosconi – shiny blue-black beetles – drowse on the faces of sunflowers lining part of the path. The sun’s just beginning to turn the sea to a sheet of beaten gold. The sky is dusty blue and ineffable.
I walk along the road for a few hundred metres and then turn onto the track that skirts the excavated skeleton of a prehistoric village. Grasshoppers burst from my footfall like shrapnel, swallowtail butterflies and painted ladies loop from yellow thistle to yellow thistle. The path ends at the top of some steps carved into the face of a cliff. At the bottom the water is slurping and sloshing in a lazy fashion, mazily refracting the sunlight on the rock outcrops just beneath the surface. A few blood-red sea anemones lie closed; plump, fleshy poufs, along the waterline.
I slip on my flippers and mask, adjust my snorkel and slip into a liquid medium not much different in temperature from my blood, where colours and textures and tone are fresh and strange. It isn’t a silent world, but full of clicks and scratches. Everything sways in this shallow water – weed, long tentacles of pink-grey anemones, fish, me, suspended, floating over hills, valleys, woods, gardens, outcrops, cliffs.
A nimbus of small fish – baby grey mullet? – glitter just below the quicksilver surface. A pack of larger specimens fossick over a rock below, twisting and turning like beagles. A plump fish the size of a pudding plate in a tight-fitting jersey of yellow-green with narrow horizontal blue stripes eases away between the weeds. Another in vertical emerald green, paradise blue and buttercup yellow stripes, a gaudy parrot of a fish, seems undisturbed by my presence. I drift further from the shore. Suddenly the solid topography dissolves. The shafts of sunlight dim, diffuse into blue and then vanish into blackness that is mysterious, silent, a bit frightening. Not for me to investigate and find – what? Grendel? The Kraken? Some other monster? I’m content with my curious, chattering, beautiful, light-flooded shallow sea world.
Until I spot a medusa, a jellyfish, candy-floss pink, pulsating and sinister, a short fringe of tentacles waving below; and then another and another. It’s time to go, time for breakfast.
Red seems to belong elsewhere, or possibly to the future. It’s a restaurant with a bar brilliantly situated overlooking a strikingly lovely, craggy bay at Punta Faro. It has the hallmarks of contemporary Scandinavian design, all wood and wire cables, ‘environmentally aware’, ruthlessly contemporary. On one hand, it’s quite shocking, on the other I can’t help but admire the astuteness of the execution. It’s commercial in a way that nothing else I’ve seen on Ustica is, a great place to come for cocktails or, like me, for dinner, and watch the sun go down into the sea. The voice of Astrid Gilberto once again, with Gilberto Gil this time, blends with the calls of children and their parents.
The food I’ve eaten on Ustica has been decent enough, although little has been memorable, bar one dish of voluptuous, rank and rich, slippery, oily, creamy, velvety spaghetti con ricci – spaghetti with sea urchin roe. It tasted as if it was a distillation of marine life, meaty, with mineral traces and notes of iodine and seaweed, an intricate soup of flavours that permeated every crevice and corner of my mouth.
The food at Red isn’t quite in the same league, but it’s far better than I expected in such a place – gamberetti usticesi, fat prawns with cherry tomatoes, small pulpy balloons, with onions and the tang of vinegar; and then zuppetta di lenticchie usticesi con totani, an intense, taste-bud-drubbing mouthful that combines the earthy gravity of the lentils with the opulence of the squid. I feel full, almost overwhelmed, by the time I dab my chin with my napkin, run a finger round the plate to scoop up the last of the sauce. It’s dark, and the stars are high in the heavens as I mount Nicoletta and head back to the Azienda Hibiscus.
I ask Margharita Longo, the proprietress of the Azienda Hibiscus, about the lentils I’d eaten at Red. Do Ustica’s lentils differ from those of Ventotene, also highly prized? With disappointing, if admirable, pragmatism, she replies that there’s no difference because the Ustica lentils are descended from those brought by settlers from Ventotene.
She shows me round the azienda. It looks more like the higgledy-piggledy barn of a working farm, complete with a poster supporting Antonio Gramsci and the Communist Party of Italy. She and her husband grow vegetables, like other Usticani, b
ut, explains Signora Longo, it’s also the island’s only winery. We taste the wines. The mainstream ones are good, a fine standard as Francesco Carfagna would say, especially the Grotta dell’Oro, made from zibibbo grapes. The Zhabib, a vino passito made from the same variety, is another matter altogether.
A very long time ago, my mother used to buy particular dried apricots at Christmas. I think they came from Australia. They were enormous and fleshy and squidgy and gooey. They had been sweetened so that the sharpness of the original fruit was tempered by a fudge-like richness that sent wave after wave of apricot flavour surging through my mouth. Or so my memory says, because it’s many years since I saw one, let alone ate it.
The Zhabib has the same exquisite sweetness, elegance, refinement and voluptuousness as those apricots. Half the grapes are dried in the sun, and half are left undried, Signora Longo tells me. The fresh acidity of the one calms the honeyed concentration of the other. Its silky opulence fuses peach, almond, fig, apricot and light. It fills me with fresh nostalgia.
Sicily (again)
As I come off the ferry from Ustica to Palermo, the heavens open in a tempest of King Lear intensity. Thunder booms. Lightning snaps. Water cascades. I’m utterly soaked within seconds.
Under normal conditions Palermo is second only to Naples as a test of nerve, will and the instinct to survive for the Vespa rider. These are not normal conditions. Streets have turned to rivers. Crossroads have become lakes. I can scarcely see. Traffic looms through the watery haze. Decisions have to be made instantly and followed through with nerveless courage. In the midst of this storm I discover reserves of concentration, discipline and balance that I thought I’d lost forty years ago. I find the route to Castellamare del Golfo more by roulette than reason. The storm follows me for some way down the highway. Eventually I escape its clutches, and by the time I get to Castellamare del Golfo, I’m quite dry but knackered.
I stay the night with Anders Schønnemann, a photographer friend, and his family on holiday there. Their kindness and good humour restore my pleasure in the world. The next day I head on to Trapani to catch the ferry to Favignana, the largest of the three Egadi islands that lie just off Trapani at the western end of Sicily.
Favignana
Once upon a time Favignana was the capital of the Southern Italian tuna industry. Now the holiday industry has taken its place, with holiday activities, holiday homes, holiday villages, holiday jollity of every shape and hue. There are holiday bikes and holiday scooters and holiday yachts and holiday motorboats, everything and anything that brings amusement, cheer and entertainment, to be hired or rented or bought.
The winding roads are cluttered by jolly folk in twos and fours and sixes on cycles moving in stately formation, and on scooters buzzing like the space fighters in Star Wars, to and from the town or to and from one of the beaches or coves. The beaches are crowded with sunbrellas and sunbeds and sun worshippers. The sea’s festooned with sails and dotted with kayaks, streaked with motorboats and cruisers. People are there to have a Good Time and a Good Time they will have. ‘È un paradiso,’ says one beaming cyclist to me, his shaven head pink with sunburn, a handkerchief wrapped around his neck.
It’s the world of the short trouser – long shorts, mid shorts, short shorts, hot and inappropriate shorts; shorts plain, shorts decorated with Snow White’s seven dwarfs, shorts fun and shorts funky, with a lot of smooth, gleaming brown arms and legs. And everyone sports a rucksack, tote, shoulder bag or pouch.
The locals are veterans of holiday campaigns. They know exactly how to handle us without losing their self-respect. There’s a cheerful normality about the service they give, something the English have never learned because we can’t separate service from servility. We see nothing noble about bringing someone a cup of tea or a plate of food. Yet it can, like all things, be well done or badly done, carried out with grace and pride or with surly incompetence. The second is easy, the first difficult. The Favignanesi look after all-comers with efficiency and charm.
Il Villaggio L’Oasi is typical of holidaymaking Favignana. It’s difficult to know how to classify it. It’s not really a village, and it certainly isn’t an oasis. It feels like a holiday settlement in the form of a maze. The road to the parking area is bumpy and dusty. To one side there’s a children’s playground, sad and desolate. It’d be a brave child who used the slide or climbing frame, and clearly there aren’t many brave children at L’Oasi. There’s also a model train for taking people from L’Oasi to the town parked in another dusty patch to one side of the track at the end of which there’s a dusty parking space lined with dusty bicycles and scooters.
A glass-fronted wooden cabin, a kind of holiday customs post or passport control, guards the entrance. It’s manned by two delightful, efficient and bouncy young women: Giusy, who has short-cropped hair, a charming smile and a black front tooth; and Anna, who has a rather disconcerting habit of ending every sentence she speaks with a wink.
‘Where can I fill up my Vespa with petrol?’
‘Left out of the gate. Left at the crossroads and then straight on about 500 metres.’ (Wink).
‘Can I have some shirts washed?’
‘Of course. Three euros an item.’ (Wink).
‘When will they be ready?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’ (Wink).
They’re both very efficient and deal with all manner of oddity and mischief with brusque good humour. I get the feeling that there aren’t many forms of human behaviour they haven’t come across.
Beyond the passport control, the maze begins, a marvellous labyrinth created in one of the abandoned tufa quarries that pockmark the island. Odd bits of glittery pottery add random splashes of colour to serpentine, concrete-grey paths that merge into other paths that divide into other paths, up, down, this way and that, between short terraces of holiday cabins or cottages, painted white, with blue shutters. The paths themselves are shaded by a thick canopy of oleander, olive, vines, pomegranate and plumbago, among which statues and pots, that might have been lifted as a job lot from some cheap garden centre, stand in incidental order. The pots have plants in them, some of which are dead. There are also many cacti and geraniums and uplifting messages incised on pieces of wood that hang from the branches of the trees. One of them reads:
PUNTA LUNGA
SERENO È IL TUO VISO RIVOLTO VERSO IL MARE. PUNTA LUNGA TU TI FAI CHIAMARE, IL VENTO DI SCIROCCO SI FA SENTIRE SUONANDO MUSICA PER VOI IN CASA DOVETE UDIRE, IL MARE BALLA E ANCHE LE BARCHETTE TUTTI CANTANO IN CORO PER TE O PORTICCIOLO. DI COLPO TI RISVEGLI AD ASCOLTARE TU CHE GELOSO SEI DEL TUO MARE. SEI BELLO E SEDUCENTE DA GUARDARE, POI LA SERA TI TRASFORMI COME PER INCANTO E DIVENTI UNA STELLA IN MEZZO AL MARE.
L’ARTE NON DORME RINO LI CAUSI 2008
Roughly translated this means:
Punta Lunga (Long Cape)
Serene is your face as it turns to the sea,
‘Punta lunga’ is what you like to be called.
The scirocco wind makes itself felt,
Playing music for you.
You have to hear it in your home.
The sea is dancing and the boats are, too.
Everyone is singing in chorus for you, oh little harbour.
Suddenly you wake to listen,
You, who are jealous of your sea.
You are beautiful and alluring to look at,
Then at night you are transformed as if by magic,
And become a star in the middle of the sea.
It turns out to be a poem from Art Doesn’t Sleep by Rino Li Causi. It seems a touch cheesy to me, but there’s a cheerful random quality to it all.
My cabin is a bit on the cramped side. To open the door properly, I have to move the bed towards the clothes cupboard and away from the reading light. If I want to get at the clothes cupboard or read in bed, I have to move the bed back, and then it isn’t possible to open the door properly. The bed is draped in a mosquito net of virulent orange. It’s almost impossible to get in and out of bed, let alone sit
up and read, without getting tangled up in the net.
The bathroom is surprisingly large and the shower powerful. From time to time the water system shrieks like a wounded animal, and between those times it gurgles not unlike my lower intestine after a particularly demanding meal. Finally the loo seat and cover are made of transparent plastic set with tacks with brightly coloured heads, like Smarties only with sharp points attached. Of course, I can’t feel the sharp points, but the idea of sharp points is not a good one to associate with loo seats.
Whatever my misgivings might be, there are plenty of people who come to L’Oasi for their holidays and who are evidently having a Very Good Time Indeed. They come in all shapes and sizes – couples, families with 2.4 children, three generations of families, mothers and daughters, but not, I think, fathers and sons or single men apart from me. I may be wrong about the single men. It’s difficult to tell.
The Florio family obviously enjoyed enjoying themselves. Here they are in black-and-white photos, lounging around for the camera at their palatial mansion on Favignana, in immaculate suiting and moustaches of various styles, and ankle-length crinolines with carefully constructed hair, looking cheerful and rich. Here one Florio ruffles the hair of another. And here they are in natty swimming costumes, diving off their steam yacht into the sea. Once the Florios were Sicilian royalty, the richest family on the island, one of the richest in Europe.
At one time or another, they were winemakers, shipping line owners, newspaper proprietors, art patrons, motor racing enthusiasts, tuna canners and, above all, colossally wealthy, wealthy beyond counting, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. These days their name survives on a brand of marsala, the Targa Florio (if anyone remembers that once famous car race any more), and the tonnare, those palaces of industry dedicated to tuna-canning, that they set up in Sicily and on Favignana.