Matthew is writing another of his lively, erudite books on Italy, Summer in the Islands (Unbound), and as we set sail yet again, this time for Alicudi, the smallest, most remote island of the group, our boatman Bartolo explained that the young people of the Aeolians have exchanged brutal labour in the fields for the chance of a better life elsewhere. I asked where they had gone. “Sydney,” he replied with great certainty. It takes a certain sort of man to carry off an ensemble of filthy grey bathing shorts and Moroccan cap accessorised with pink plastic jelly shoes and home-inked tattoos. I wasn’t about to argue.
Alicudi retains a population of 200, and after walking down the single street in the only village there wasn’t much to do except have lunch. We ate a pale, frothy parmigiana of zucchini and chopped egg, an octopus salad and a vivid pistachio granita, and headed back to Filicudi. On the way, Bartolo showed us a real pirate’s cave, a hidden cavern with a huge, shadowy stone beach. He described a local version of the mattanza, the famous Sicilian tuna haul, where nets used to be stretched across the cave’s mouth to trap the barracuda who swarmed there at night. Banned now, he added resentfully, due to environmental regulations. With its cashpoint and heartbreaking museum, Filicudi felt like the acme of metropolitan sophistication on our return. Bartolo resumed his primary occupation, sitting on the dock waiting for something to happen. Matthew and I dined at La Sirena, reckoned to be the best restaurant in the islands, trying creamy spaghetti alle mandorle, tartar of sea urchin, a wonderful salad of ferrous tuna with red onion and raisins and tiny swordfish involtini stuffed with pistachio.
Looking over a view which could have been a still from Il Postino, I thought of Marina and Dado, and the perennial tourists’ paradox. We want places like this to continue to exist for our pleasure, yet we know our presence destroys them. We want picturesque Bartolos to haul glistening mussels from the waves, yet back in our cook-chill, shrink-wrapped convenience world, we’re not really prepared to pay the price to make such activities economically viable, while resenting the desires for the very things we have which are causing communities like Bartolo’s to collapse. We nod approvingly at sustainable fishing without thinking much about the fishermen it’s supposed to sustain. Sneering at concrete and satellite dishes feels unnervingly Marie Antoinettish, a spoilt greed for unpasteurised milk splashing into porcelain buckets. Discussing it with Matthew, he recalled Norman Lewis’s book Voices from the Old Sea, a sparsely matter-of-fact prose elegy to Spanish culture centring on a lost village named Benidorm. What to do? Tread lightly, sip the wine, look across the white-walled gardens still busy with limes, breathe the lavender and the wild anis, be grateful that places like Palagruza and Filicudi still, just about, exist.
