Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

  One afternoon I sit next to a most graceful old lady on a water bus. She has silvery white hair, a trim blue suit and a walking stick. She tells me how the city’s changed since she grew up in it.

  ‘Foreigners have always come here,’ she says. ‘It’s good that they love Venice.’

  ‘But do they love it too much?’ I ask. ‘Are there too many of us? Is Venice ever quiet?’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘not any more. It used to be, in winter, but not now. People come here all year.’

  ‘What’s that meant for you?’

  ‘The old communities have gone. You find a bit of the old ways in Cannaregio and on the Giudecca. You know, calli where you know your neighbour and meet for a chat in the street. But it’s difficult. Most of the local food shops have gone. You make more money selling jewellery or souvenirs than food.’

  ‘You can always shop at the Rialto Market,’ I say.

  ‘That’s not so easy for me,’ she says. ‘Venice is a wonderful city when you’re young. Not so good when you’re old.’ She gestures to her walking stick.

  I thank her for her company, and get off at San Marco Zaccaria. As I stand there getting my bearings, she suddenly appears at my elbow. Am I sure where I’m going? She wants to make certain. Just up that calle, left at the end and there’s the church I’m looking for, she says. I thank her and watch her make her way gently through the crowds. Old Venice, I think. Graceful even in decline.

  I cross the water to Palladio’s Chiesa di San Giorgio Maggiore, monumental in every sense of the word, and yet elegant and full of natural light. I go to a concert of the music of Vivaldi, Pachelbel and Albinoni, all composers born in or associated with Venice, and hackneyed though the programme is with the players dressed in eighteenth-century finery, there’s a kind of magic in hearing the well-known pieces in the city where they were composed. Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Gabrieli – the history of the music of Venice is as richly textured as every other aspect of this city’s life in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  A day later I take the ferry to Sant’Erasmo. I’ve wanted to visit the island since I discovered that it’s the market garden for the Rialto and many of the city’s restaurants. It’s famous for its purple artichokes and asparagus, both of which are out of season, of course, but I’m sure that there’re other vegetables to take their place.

  It’s a bright, sunny day, with a faint breeze just stirring the waters of the lagoon. From a distance Sant’Erasmo doesn’t exactly look a garden of plenty, but it’s bustling with activity. Quite by accident, my visit coincides with the Sagra Del Mosto, a festival to celebrate must (grape juice). There’s something of a regatta going on as I disembark, mini-gondolas fizzing through the water, propelled by young men and women dressed in blue and white standing fore and aft paddling away with a will, encouraged by a loudspeaker commentary.

  ‘Forza! Forza! Aaah. Vignotta vinci! Sempre Vignotta!’ The crews in a couple of the boats have given up and trail in well after the winners, still encouraged by their enthusiastic families.

  There are several long tables set out in the square by the landing stage, and stalls where food is being prepared. I join a queue buying tickets for the dishes and then another queue to collect them – deep-fried salt cod, a bun with musetto, a boiling sausage for eight euros – and then join a third queue to collect a ticket for barbecued pork ribs, sausage, grilled polenta and fennel salad, another eight euros, that I collect from a fourth stall. It’s all cheery and chatty.

  I sit down at one of the long tables. Presently several families join me – ‘È occupato?’ ‘No.’ ‘Bene. Ragazzi, sedetivi. Grazie signor,’ children milling about, boys playing with model dinosaurs, girls drawing. Someone plonks a bottle of wine on the table. A small boy watches fascinated and unmoving as a small bottle of liquid soap for blowing bubbles falls over and decants its contents over the table and then onto the bench beside him. His mother mops it all up with a napkin without breaking off her conversation with her friend. Another boy knocks over a plastic box spilling crayons and other toys onto the ground. He looks at the empty box for a moment, and then picks it up and, furious, hurls it on top of the spilled toys and stomps off. His little sister stares after him, and then patiently begins picking everything up.

  The queues at the stalls selling the food tickets grow ever longer, the crowds round the food stalls, themselves, grow ever thicker, the benches along the tables become ever more closely packed. No one seems to mind. The banter between the food servers and their customers is good natured and familiar. The lagoon is a piece of silk the colour of lichen. Beyond it, in the far distance, I can see the Alps, some of the peaks white with snow.

  I wander off, and find another set of stalls behind the church selling jams, honeys, vegetables grown on the island, things made by the schoolkids. There’s an angular metal structure like a gantry with rubber harnesses and trampolines. Children in the harnesses are bouncing up and down, five, eight metres into the air shrieking with fright and delight.

  It all has very much the same jaunty, communal feeling as a village fête in England. Perhaps the view is more spectacular, and the food is unquestionably better and people lack that peculiar English social diffidence, but the day out, people congregating, sharing, blessed by yearly habit – ‘something people do’, as Philip Larkin put it in ‘Show Saturday’ – that’s just the same.

  The houses soon come to an end and the road runs straight to the further edge of the island, there turning into a series of paths snaking between pools, flighting ponds, streamlets. Between the watercourses and their surrounding ruffs of reeds, alder, birch and scrub, are patches of vegetables, tiny aubergines, fennel, cabbages, leeks and chillies in neat rows. It’s odd to grow chillies here. They’re part of the cooking in Calabria and the south, not of the north. Then I remember seeing bouquets of chillies, as brilliant as sparklers, in the Rialto Market, and tourists buying them as edible or decorative mementoes, just another Venetian trading product.

  I pass several fields of the celebrated Violetto di Sant’Erasmo, the purple artichokes of Sant’ Erasmo, one of the island’s most cherished products and treasured nationally even in a country where artichoke-worship is pretty much universal. Sadly, the season for these fresh vegetable delights is long past. They’re at their best from April to June, but the distinctive coronets of feathery grey-green fronds stretch in lines the length of the fields, giving promise of next year’s harvest. Once they would’ve been fertilised with crushed crab and other shells to counterbalance the natural acidity of the island’s soil. Only a few, mostly elderly, growers still keep to the old ways.

  The Violetti are quite small and spiny when they’re picked, and have a tender crunchiness and a distinctive, meaty flavour. The most treasured are castraure, which are the very first buds of the artichoke that are cut off in a certain way to ‘castrate’ the plant, hence the name. They are so tender they can be eaten raw with just a sprinkle of olive oil and lemon. In their heyday, the Violetti were greatly favoured by Venice’s Jews, a reminder of the culinary debt Italy owes to its once vibrant Jewish communities.

  When I get back to the church, the ranks of festival-goers have thinned. There’re still plenty of people eating and talking, but the initial energy has dissipated. Sant’ Erasmo has that post-celebration torpor; and so do I.

  My adventure is almost at an end. Tomorrow I leave for England, hearth and home. I feel restless and sad, anxious and expectant. Time has caught up with me. I have meetings fixed back in London, arrangements made, friends and family to see. The old, familiar pattern is reasserting itself, and I’m not entirely unhappy about it.

  I come out of the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Salute. It was built to celebrate escape from the clutches of the Black Death, and is all very splendid but a bit overwrought for my taste. The evening sun lights up the Grand Canal churned by a constant traffic of water buses, water taxis, water vans, water trucks. Water restless, rippling; waves gurgling, splas
hing against the quays and walkways, gives the city an edgy energy. I can just make out the voice of a singing gondolier over the noise of water traffic. Someone’s having the full Venice experience.

  The light is just beginning to go as I make my way along the Fondamenta delle Zattere. Palladio’s masterly Chiesa della Redentore in the Giudecca, also built to celebrate yet another deliverance from yet another outbreak of the plague, glimmers across the choppy, silver-white-silver-blue expanse. It has a certain familiarity, maybe because its white façade was inspired by one of my favourite buildings in Italy, the Pantheon in Rome; or maybe because I’ve seen a thousand photographs of it.

  I pass a fisherman on the quay, holding his rod, as unmoving as a heron; waiters laying tables; a man with three long-haired dachshunds on leads chatting to a terrier walker; several couples pushing buggies; the odd jogger (obviously not Venetian); other evening strollers. The buildings across the water in the Giudecca are growing dim. A subtle quietness is settling over the scene. Shadows begin to gather in the narrower calli and canals, darkness filling the spaces.

  People are filing into Santa Maria del Rosario, elegant with Tintorettos, Tiepolos, Riccis and Torrettis. Pink slowly suffuses the evening light. Along the Zattere al Ponte Longo, past the Sotoportego Fioravante. Now gold ribs the pink, settling on the chimneys of the chemical plants at Mestre beyond the fringes of Venice, another world. No matter how cynical I try to be about the city, about the way it commercialises its past, trades on its history, I can’t resist its beauty and its charm and the richness of its existence.

  It’s almost dark by the time I turn away from the Canale della Giudecca, cross the Campo San Basegio and make my way along the Calle Nuova. The lights of bars, shops and trattorias are sharp and bright. Velvety darkness cloaks the buildings. How seductive and mysterious the city has become, a world of shadows and blackness broken here and there by the anonymous brilliance of a hotel foyer, the amber halo of a street light, a lambent ribbon across the rippling surface of water. A passing water taxi leaves a molten scar that heals and vanishes in an instant; more blackness, shadowy shapes, blank façades, doors and windows until the light of a lamp or chandelier through an uncurtained window illuminates a ceiling of sumptuous flamboyance, creamy plasterwork, gleaming gilt, plump, rosy-faced cherubs balanced easily on airy clouds; glimpsed, passed, and then darkness again.

  I sit on the Ponte de l’Avogaria at the head of the calle leading to the flat. My journey is done. It’s been an extraordinary odyssey, rich in people, places, experience and food, beyond anything I had imagined. How lucky I’ve been, I think. True, my summer in the islands has been split over two summers, but that, in itself, has only added to the texture of the whole. Perhaps Tom was right after all. I’ve lived a time of rare privilege, a time without a care in the world, except, perhaps, where my next meal was to come from, where I was to lay my head. It makes me realise just how my life before this journey had been hemmed in by humdrum realities, regimented by dates and diaries, dominated by responsibilities. How refreshing it’s been to escape from all of that.

  ‘Many flowering islands lie/In the waters of Agony’, wrote Percy Shelley about Italy’s islands. Well, I had visited many flowering islands, but experienced precious little Agony. All the flowering islands have given me pleasure, food to eat and food for thought. I warmed to some more than others, but everywhere I’ve found beauty, curiosity, idiosyncrasy, oddity. Everywhere I’ve found delight and content. Looking back, I can conjure image after image, landscape after landscape, person after person, the photographs of memory – pigs lying in the sun and the beekeeper on Gorgona; Stefano Farkas looking out over his vines, telling me ‘one thing’; Giglio and Francesco and Gabriella Carfagna bickering over fish stew and Lois with her head thrown back in laughter and the wayward vines of Altura; the quizzical cave rabbits on Ischia and the human zoo on Capri; easy-paced meals and rambling conversations with John Irving on Ponza; Iddu and the superstitious rationalists of Stromboli; Kiki on Salina and Lisa on Alicudi; golden days and golden wine on Ustica; the diverting absurdities of the Villaggio L’Oasi on Favignana; the humanity of Lampedusans; even the shimmering waters and the resinous perfume of the pines on San Domino.

  I remember the sea of ever-mutating blue (I’ve been obsessed with trying to render its colours and nature in exact words; and failed), the fossicking fish, languid anemones, hazy sunlight filtering down to pastures of posidonia, the shy octopus, the tremulous pink jellyfish. And climbing out of the sea, to rest on black volcanic rock or crunchy tufa or lumpy pebbles, to feel the sun warm my skin and soak into my bones, to doze, dream and slip back into the water again.

  My mind drifts back once more to that first summer, in Cervia, almost sixty years ago, where this romance has its origins, to those sunlit, carefree days, to the riotous familial laughter of many summers in Licenza, to my early explorations of Sicily and Salina, and trips to Tuscany and Lombardy and Piedmont, to Calabria, Campania, Basilicata and Le Marche. I look back over all the people with whom I’ve shared those times: my parents, my brothers and sister, my wife, my uncle and aunt, my nephews and nieces, and friends beyond counting, and, above all, my daughter. They weave a brocade of extraordinary variety, splendour and happiness. I’m no Apollonian bard, but I have travelled in realms of gold, to homes and prisons, to refuges and forts, places to escape from, and places to escape to, realities and dreams.

  When I set out, the islands had a romantic allure. They were largely unknown to me, each separate and unique. I saw them as individual bodies. They seemed accessible and approachable, and, indeed, so they proved to be. But as I got to know them better, delved more deeply into their history and character, I realised that they weren’t really discrete entities. The life on them spilled over, to other islands, countries and continents, and vice versa. I might have gone looking for some simple, mythical, paradisiacal past, but what I’ve found is far more complex, dynamic and fascinating.

  Every island has been touched by appropriation, piracy, political control, poverty, migration and now tourism, but each has developed a different narrative out of these experiences. So many of the comings and goings of Greeks, Romans, Turks, Saracens, French and Spanish are still remembered keenly, and celebrated on the islands; great events in circumscribed lives. Yet each island has been different, a separate room, a chamber, perhaps furnished with many of the same elements, but still utterly distinct one from the other. Perhaps each island represents a different aspect of ‘Il Continente’, of Italy as a whole – pragmatic, romantic, practical, delusional, playful, serious, tough and generous.

  There’s no doubt that Italy and its islands are changing, and will change much, much more. A great deal has been eroded or lost – communities, the historical connections they embodied, communal memories, social lore, knowledge of land and what it produces – but much also remains if you look for it. I feel that this is a part of the world I could go on exploring until I die, and never come to the end. The fascination will always be there.

  And yet, much as I feel pleasure and astonishment at what I’ve been doing for so many months, I know it’s time to go home. I miss the familiarity of home, the comfort of family and friends. The leaves of the woods on the hills either side of the valley in which I live will be turning yellow, brown, gold, withering around their edges, falling. The fields will be shrouded in mist in the early mornings. It’s the time of apples and pears, medlars and quinces, for mushroom hunting and blackberry picking. I wonder if there’s anything left in my vegetable beds, whether the tomatoes are still ripening, how my quince tree is faring. Suddenly I long for a pub, a pint, a packet of pork scratchings, a fire, companionable conversation in my own language.

  I feel drawn back to Britain, the island from which I started out. Perhaps that’s what binds island dwellers together, something that people who live on vast masses of land can’t share or understand. Like sheep, we’re hefted to a specific landscape. This particular piece of earth, rock, magma reaches out
into us. That’s why so many people born on the islands return to them after periods, even generations, in some other country.

  Like all personal enterprises, realising them, and coming to the end of them, is the hardest part. I have a sense of sadness and loss. I’ve accomplished what I dreamed of for so many years. And...?

  According to Robert Fox, the Mediterranean was known as the Inner Sea by early Arab and Jewish cartographers, and I feel it is just that, in a personal as well as in geographical and historical senses. I have discovered ‘not only the exterior world, but also that which lies within us,’ as Stefan Zweig admonished.

  I call to mind an entry I made in my notebooks when I was on Ischia: ‘Some times I have wished that I was making the journey younger, that I had made it when I was twenty-seven or thirty-seven rather than sixty-seven. Now I’m profoundly glad, not that I didn’t do it then, but that I’m doing it now. Each ripple on the sea, each flicker of sunlight sparks another memory, another sense of sweetness, of pleasure, of gladness for the past, and an exquisite sense of the present.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  None of this would have been possible without the generosity, first of all, of those who subscribed to the book through the good offices, literal and figurative, of Unbound. They – you – have shown remarkable faith and patience, for which I will always be grateful. Secondly I had five sponsors – Pizza Express, Fortnum & Mason, Lavazza, HS1 and Sacla UK – whose backing was a kindly act of faith and meant I was spared financial anxieties, particularly during the several months when I was completely incapacitated.