A Theory of Walking (Part 2)
A Theory of Walking (Part 2)
by Rudston Steward
nother of my favourite modes of walking is this: walking on a strada bianca in Tuscany.
Yes, there are dirt roads and gravel tracks all over the world, but I am in love above all with the white gravel roads of Tuscany. They are an integral part of this landscape: no Tuscan hike is complete without a stint along a quiet strada bianca, snaking sinuously through stands of holm oaks, around vineyards, between fields, across olive groves.
Each strada bianca—and there are loads of them around here—represents a small victory in the ongoing battle against asphalt: every stretch of gravel is an outpost of sanity, a holdout against the rising tide of tarmac and cement increasingly seeking to subjugate the rural Italian landscape.
Tarred roads are the harbingers of suburbia, the advanced scouting parties whereby the city wages its perpetual war on the countryside, literally steam-rollering nature and biodiversity in the name of so-called progress.
Asphalt is hands-down the most unforgiving surface to walk on: your feet ache, your bones rattle, your head goes numb, every approaching car is a loaded bullet to dodge, the sun reflects off the road like a hangover, you get hot and bothered and sweaty. Walking on a tar road is my idea of hiking hell.
A good strada bianca, on the other hand, is almost voluptuous in its curvature; it has character; it tells a story; it blends into its surrounds so that you sometimes can’t tell where the road ends and the fields begin; you must pick your path along it, onto rocks, around puddles, over leaves; its compact sand absorbs your stride, gives way, crumbles, keeping your feet alert and responsive. On a strada bianca you are in dialogue with the surface of the earth.
A strada bianca is wonderfully changeable, its integrity constantly challenged by random channels of water, errant gusts of wind, lost stampeding boar, stray cats, stray bats, columns of insects, columns of cyclists, tentacles of brambles and tendrils of vine. In short, a strada bianca is alive and kicking—unlike evil asphalt, which is like death laid down and strung out horizontally, mile upon deadly mile...
A GOOD STRADA BIANCA, ON THE OTHER HAND, IS ALMOST VOLUPTUOUS IN ITS CURVATURE; IT HAS CHARACTER; IT TELLS A STORY
Where I live, between the Monte Amiata and the Maremma, some of the oldest routes connecting the mountain to the coast are cart tracks that today live on as strade bianche. Many have disappeared, unused and overgrown, but others survive: their spines are riveted with cobbles, the furrows of donkey’s hooves and the ruts of wagon wheels etched deeply into stone.
Walking these roads takes you forward in space but also backwards in time, connecting you to all who have walked the same road in the past, in the early days usually along the Via Francigena pilgrimage trail to the Abbey of San Salvatore en route to Rome—tramping merchants and farmers and woodsmen and priests. Plus soldiers and brigands, cops and robbers, Fascists and Communists, pimps and prostitutes, all ducking and diving into the Mediterranean macchia over the ages, shrouded in the same delicate strada bianca dust.
By night strade bianche reflect even minimal moonlight, so they are easy to follow home in the dark. The fact that you can’t really see your surroundings amplifies sound: the characteristic crunching noise this gravel makes underfoot becomes sonorous, as if you’re walking on pleasantly gritty ice-cubes, crushing them percussively into the earth with every step.
Last night it was very dark on my walk back home, long after midnight, but the nightingales were out in force, and my crunchy footsteps beat out a rhythm for their songs. I counted them as I walked: one in the hedge behind the barn; one in the field towards Paganico; one in the olives high on the hillside; another down low by the Ombrone River. One seemingly in the middle of the road itself: its song silenced mid-riff as I drew near, then resumed when I’d passed—whether out of respect for a fellow musician or fear I'm not quite sure.
A strange nocturnal conversation: the nightingales, the faintest gleam of moonlight, and my percussive footfall—arranged as if by design upon the luminous musical score of the strada bianca that bound us together. The strada bianca our common ground, leading me home, a pale ribbon of song in the dark Tuscan night, walking on.
A Theory of Walking (Part 1)
A Theory of Walking (Part 1)
by Rudston Steward
here are many modes of walking. One of my favourites is walking in uncertainty: no GPS, no cellphone, no maps.
Navigating in the wild through terrain that is not way-marked requires a kind of sixth sense. A receptive state of mind, neither subconscious nor wholly conscious, which immerses you in your landscape. There are always signs, nature’s myriad little indicators, broadcast about the countryside to guide your passage. But your radar must be tuned in. And our radars are susceptible to rational and emotive interference: we veer off course, misinterpret, get lost. Walking in optimal uncertainty is a fragile and fine art.
It’s been a dry, hot summer in Tuscany, drier and hotter than any I can remember. The farmlands suffered: entire fields of wheat never sprouted; grapes were harvested early; the olive crop is looking grim. And then last week, the rains came: steady, sustained, soothing. In just a few days the countryside turned green, an emerald tide unleashed from the sky, swamping the parched fields with velvet green fuzz.
The Ombrone River reanimated. Normally a major waterway, it had been reduced to an anemic algae-throttled trickle of yellowish sludge by the end of August. But within two days it was flowing freely again, flushing out the flotsam along its flanks. And the animals emerged, as if conjured from the drought-stricken land by the river’s wet whispering.
I wanted to see the river, to celebrate its rebirth. So I walked across the muddy fields to the river’s bank and turned east along it, towards the town of Sasso d’Ombrone — into a riverine wilderness I’d not explored before. There was no path; no GPS, cellphone, or map.
WALKING IN OPTIMAL UNCERTAINTY IS A FRAGILE AND FINE ART
I came upon a badger eating blackberries, on its hind legs, reaching up into the brambles with its snout. Seven cormorants then glided overhead, wings whistling, crests slicked back like glossy caps. A baby boar was sleeping under a bush — it startled upright, then scrambled off, grumbling. A grey heron settled into a tree, flapping its wings like a pair of feathered bellows, while in the shallows below a nutria waded unperturbed. Two roe deer barked, cajoling uphill. And lastly — as if to cap the wild symphony — a turquoise bolt exploded from the bank beneath my feet. It streaked across the water like a bright blue bullet: kingfisher.
I had absolutely no idea where I was, it would be night soon. Set upon by uncertainty I picked my way through brambles and lentisk, up a steep slope. At the top the undergrowth thinned, I entered a forest of holm oak, it shimmered overhead. As darkness fell I emerged onto a gravel track, snaking away luminous white through the pewter woods. The track eventually led to a clearing, and a junction: to the right the moon was rising over the Monte Amiata. To the left: home.
At optimal levels of uncertainty you no longer need a map, you read the landscape instead. You plug into its stealthy signs, hardwired to nature’s myriad little indicators. You become the map, ingesting its contours, enacting its topographical knowledge with your uncertain sure-footed footfall.
Roghudi: flickers of humanity (Aspromonte walk/Day 2)
Roghudi: Flickers of Humanity
[Day 2]
by Rudston Steward
hat endures when a place that’s been lived in for centuries is abandoned, what traces get left behind? Do flickers of humanity linger on, echoing through time, murmuring to passers-by from cracks in the walls? Where do the memories gather or go?
Roghudi was a thriving village until 1972, when a series of floods prompted the Calabrian authorities to declare it uninhabitable and move the population to a prefabricated new town on the coast. The old town’s position is dramatic, strung out on a spur that juts into the Amendolea river-bed like the hull of a precipitous ship poised to crash onto the boulders below. The arid flanks of the Aspromonte mountains abut it on all sides, the houses floating like flecks of flotsam adrift in a maelstrom of rock and water, clinging to the slope.
We walk down the main street—a thoroughfare of ruins—past crumpled buildings with blasted windows. Piles of rubble tilt and slump into the corners of rooms dotted with the remnants of forgotten lives: a faded photo, scorched white; empty wine bottles smothered in dust; a tattered scarf sprouting weeds. Small alleyways branch off the main drag, arteries clogged with debris and dreams and ghosts. I venture down a couple but have to turn back. No entry, no exit. At the bottom we emerge on the edge of the steep ridge, the view opens up, magnificent and heartbreaking. The fiumara river-bed is knuckle-white below, streaking away between dark hillsides like a bleached vein of boulders. Its calcified capillaries seem to sap the abandoned town of its collective memory: life draining away downstream, seeping irreversibly into the future.
LIFE DRAINING AWAY DOWNSTREAM, SEEPING IRREVERSIBLY INTO THE FUTURE
A path zigzags down to the river-bed. From below Roghudi looks like an embattled outgrowth of mortar and concrete, slowly being reabsorbed into the crest of the ridge it still straddles. I carry a small part of the town’s sadness with me as we walk on, a sliver of melancholia slipped into my backpack. The stark beauty of the terrain we’re traversing is tempered by a sense of loss, the surrounding landscape feels somehow altered by the ghost town anchored to its river-bed. It’s as if the elements have had to absorb the sadness, all the sadness that had nowhere left to go when the people were evacuated. The hillsides bear silent witness to stories that will no longer be told.
It’s a six-hour hike to Bova, climbing in stages from the river-bed up onto a high ridge. The fiumara’s whiteness gradually fades to a distant grey far below, now striated with sparkling seams of water. We follow a narrow footpath looping up to a saddle, it dips in and out of scrub and broom, the grass is pale and flaxen. Roghudi has disappeared behind us, into the past. The path becomes rocky and bare; where devoid of vegetation the ground emits a carbonaceous smell, as if the topsoil has been singed to crusty charcoal by the sun. From the saddle we drop into the next valley, across a spur. Bova emerges into view below. Beyond it stretches the lucid ribbon of the Ionian Sea, like a sustained blue note.
When we finally get there, the town of Bova is very much alive: one of its patron saints is being celebrated tonight. Over the course of the evening the melancholy in my backpack, carried all the way from Roghudi, starts lifting. As if reanimating: flickers of humanity sparking back to life. The sparks are everywhere—I indulge the fantasy that fragments of Roghudi, washed away in the floods and lost at sea since 1972, are finally making landfall on Bova’s shores.
Flickers in the lusty blast of the band’s trumpets. Flickers in the hushed flurry of the pitter-pattering procession. In the arch of the men’s backs as they heave and angle their Madonna through a church doorway. In the tannic bite of crimson wine.
Flickers in the dreams kept alive and the stories still afloat—stranded here in Bova on the island of the present, in a thrumming Calabrian piazza.
Go tell it on the bitter mountain
Go tell it on the bitter mountain
by Rudston Steward
ew places in Italy have such a spectacularly bad reputation. The very name is forbidding: Aspromonte, the bitter mountain. I’d been warned—don’t go there, under any circumstances. They will kidnap you, feed you to their pigs. The Calabrians are dangerous, a scheming and surly lot, they don’t even speak Italian. Everyone, it seemed, remembered in gory detail some kidnapping carried out by the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta mafia back in the 80s, playing out on the notorious slopes of the rugged Aspromonte.
Have you actually been there, I’d ask? No, but…
Travel is empowering: there is no better way of setting the record straight than going to see a place for yourself. Sometimes it turns out to be exactly as described, stereotypical to the point of self-parody. But sometimes it’s so different you suffer a kind of psychogeographical shock—cognitive travelling dissonance—struggling to reconcile your experience with your preconceptions. Either way, the point is there’s no short cut, no alternative to going there in person—poking about, walking around, following your nose, shooting the breeze with the locals. Walking is the ultimate antidote to so-called fake news: footfall is immune to spin and bullshit.
What I found in the Aspromonte is this: it is one of the most hospitable and generous places in Italy. In the month I spent exploring the region I never managed to pay for a coffee—someone had invariably already done so for me when I went to settle up. There were endless invitations to lunch and dinner after chance encounters with random strangers, who then welcomed me into their homes like a prodigal son. Every few days it seemed a goat was being slaughtered here or a sheep roasted there, drinking and singing ensued and I, a total stranger, was enthusiastically implored to enter the fray.
WALKING IS THE ULTIMATE ANTIDOTE TO SO-CALLED FAKE NEWS: FOOTFALL IS IMMUNE TO SPIN AND BULLSHIT
I discovered also that the Aspromonte Grecanica—the southernmost tip of the toe of Italy, south-east of Reggio Calabria—is a remarkable landscape, unlike anywhere else in Italy. The southern slope of the Aspromonte massif is dry, the vegetation gnarled and feisty, clutching at the precarious topsoil as if readying itself for a lashing from the elements. In summer the pale ochre sand is daubed with brittle-blonde grass, vivid smears of lentisk and scribbles of desiccated broom: an arid north-African palette that seems to have snuck across the Mediterranean undetected from the High Atlas mountains, or from some lost corner of Mauritania perhaps. Heat settles comfortably into the folds of the Aspromonte hillsides like a fat cat into fur, refusing to budge, or stop purring languidly, until sundown.
The Grecanic area is cut through by the fiumara (dry riverbed) of the Amendolea River. From its source on the Montalto, the Aspromonte’s highest peak to the north, an awesome bed of white boulders surges towards the coast, ever wider and whiter as it drops, like a swirling white playing field set between soaring grandstands of cliff and forest. The fiumara is skeleton-white, as if the mountain has expired and collapsed into the valley, its splayed spine of boulders picked clean by the scirocco wind: craggy lifeblood draining away into the Ionian Sea.
I learned that, indeed, the Calabrians here don’t speak Italian—they speak Greek. The smattering of towns clustered around Bova preserves the last vestiges of a Greek community descended directly from the western Byzantine Empire of the 6th Century AD, and harking back to Magna Graecia, the earliest Greek settlements on the Italian peninsula over a thousand years earlier. Theirs is an astonishing cultural history, a tale of the slow erosion of Calabro-Greek identity over thousands of years, countered by the tenacious defence of ancient Greek linguistic roots in this tiny, insular, regional backwater of modern southern Italy.
There was only one thing to do: I had to go see for myself, see more of the Aspromonte Grecanica. I had to poke about, walk around, follow my nose, shoot the breeze—in Greek. So I embarked on a four day hike along the Amendolea fiumara: from the abandoned village of Roghudi, via Bova and Amendolea town, down (and into) to the Ionian Sea. I was not kidnapped. I was not fed to anyone’s pigs; I’ll be writing about the walk and posting it here soon. I’m gonna go tell it on the bitter mountain and set the Calabrian record straight…
The Basilicata Badlands
The Basilicata Badlands
by Rudston Steward
hat draws us to the places we travel to?
Italy has no Wild West; instead, it has the Strange South. Strangest of all is Basilicata, the little-known region that goes about its business almost unnoticed—undercover, ensconced between the brash chaos of Naples on one side, the bright glamour of Puglia on the other, and the formidable mountains of Calabria to the south.
Few northern Italians know much at all about Basilicata, or even care to know. Even fewer have actually been there (except, perhaps, to the city of Matera). Basilicata is like those unexplored blank spaces at the edges of old seafaring maps, where cartographical knowledge gave way to uncertainty and speculation: a modern-day Italian Terra Nullius, as yet unclaimed by tourism. And like the makers of those old maps, today's travellers to Basilicata often succumb to a selective blindness: in travel much is overlooked if you set out in search of the wrong places.
As the hills-and-mountains of the Basilicata interior drop from the high plateau around Potenza towards the Ionian coast the terrain becomes increasingly arid, traversed by calanchi—peculiar geological formations of eroded clay that form an off-white lunar landscape, dotted with low shrubs and dribbled with surreal clay crenellations. The effect is startling, if a bit unsettling: steep sculpturesque gullies and angular ribbed ridges gouge across valleys and spill over hillsides, stretching away to the horizon. The bizarre calanchi are dotted with towns perched precariously on outcrops of subsiding clay. Many are abandoned, either fully or partially—on my last visit I passed through Craco (fully abandoned), Rabatana di Tursi (mostly) and Aliano (partially).
As you pass through the calanchi, if you care to look, extraordinary details emerge: the faded glory of frescoes in the Romanesque church of Anglona; the glimpse of a monastery floating in a sea of clay wavelets near Rabatana; the murals decorating the house where author Carlo Levi was exiled in Aliano; an ancient door clinging tenaciously to its frame in a crumbled house in Pisticci; a metaphysical play of shadows in the piazza of Aliano at dusk, as otherworldly as a de Chirico painting; crispy red peppers and fried zucchini flowers served up as a surprise antipasto at La Locanda con Gli Occhi; sheep ambling upon the deserted ruins of Craco, quietly bleating—as if the humans who had lived there for all those generations had simply been preparing the turf for their lazy grazing.
I’m not quite sure yet why I’m so drawn to Basilicata’s beguiling badlands. What ultimately draws us to any of the places we travel to? I’m heading back to the Strange South soon to find out—to try to fill in the blank spaces still clouding the unexplored edges of my innermost Italian map.
Citizen Putzu
Citizen Putzu
by Rudston Steward
e have to spike the meat.
It was an invitation, but sounded like a threat. The voice on the phone was grave, as if preparing for a settling of old scores. Had I inadvertently overstepped the boundaries of an obscure Sardinian code of honour, causing offence?
“Meet us tomorrow morning at the bar in Oliena at 7:30am. We’ll drive together from there. We must get the fire going early.” Before I could reply he said, again, “Dobbiamo pungere la carne.” We have to spike the meat. Then he hung up.
Meat is a serious matter in Sardinia. Usually it’s piglet—roast porcheddu. But in the Supramonte mountains, in the central Barbagia region, the specialty is pecora, sheep. The Barbagia is—still—a land of shepherds. And bandits.
I had been invited to a rebotta, an all-day Sardinian feast. There would be roasting: a sheep, half a porcheddu and, for good measure, a side of beef. Plus bucketloads of strong Cannonau wine. An initiation ceremony of sorts: I’d join the ranks, for a day, of the Popolo Sardo, my newfound Sardinian separatist friends.
After introductions over espressos at the bar we set off in convoy: my interlocutor Antoni Putzu and his friend Antonello in a Suzuki jeep up front, my Dacia Duster in the middle, and a gentleman called Chirico bringing up the rear in his battered Fiat Panda. We started towards Dorgali and the coast but soon turned off, south into the Lanaitto valley. Bumpy black tar changed to off-white gravel. The track snaked down a broad vale between two parallel ridges of sloping limestone, the Lamparidanu on one side and the imposing facade of the Massiccio del Corrasi mountains on the other.
The last stretch went off-piste straight up a trail scattered with loose boulders and shale. I was determined to keep pace with the bucking Sardinian broncos ahead—Antoni had warned me, the hint of a challenge in his voice, to lock in the 4-wheel drive. We bounced and skidded our way up the mountain, pulled over at the top and climbed out. A mechanical screech was making its way up the track behind us with revving heaves and avalanches of scattering gravel: Chirico’s Panda. The engine reached a furious apex as it surged up the last incline and bounced into view—in reverse. Chirico got out, beaming. “I got stuck, had to go back down and turn around,” he was proud as a parent on prize day, “but she kicks royal ass in reverse.”
There were two separate parts to the shepherd’s house, a rectangular stone building with a fireplace sunken into the kitchen floor, and a free-standing traditional hut, called su pinnettu, with a roof of juniper trunks stacked vertically in a cone. I stooped through its low doorway and into the somber chamber. The interior: bare earthen floor and fire pit surrounded by an arc of plastic crates for stools. There were no windows or chimney, the darkness compounded by a thick stratum of soot coating the juniper. Spent ash and old leather, soil impregnated with animal fats—the elementary odours of a rudimentary habitation.
Beside the su pinnettu a pergola shaded the terrace, wooden benches were propped against fold-out tables. Sheep pens dropped away into the valley below, a jigsaw puzzle of allotments delimited by snarls of barbed wire fencing and hedges of bramble. On the slope beyond the terrace, set back from the shepherd’s house, the roasting pit: a corrugated iron structure about three meters wide and two deep, open on one side. Facing it a low wooden table on whose surface two slender knives, a cleaver, and a pair of shears were neatly aligned, primed for meaty business.
Antonello and I got the fire going while Antoni and Chirico readied the meat. The piglet proved challenging: the tip of the skewer was inserted into its mouth, and had to pass through the entire body, held vertically, and emerge out the other side—but at precisely the right spot. The skewer’s tortuous progress kept getting interrupted by obstructing bones; Antoni would then bash it repeatedly against the ground, until the weight of the piglet ruptured the obstruction. Thus proceeded the gradual impalement. When the bashing stopped the skewer had, finally, emerged at the right spot; the piglet was perfectly splayed along its length.
Antoni tied the snout to the tip of the skewer with wire. It was 9:26am; his blood-spattered hands poured the first round of Cannonau into plastic cups, filled to the brim. He drained his in a single gulp, smiled and said “Cominciammu.” Let’s get started.
I’d met Antoni when he performed in Oliena with his group of tenores, a traditional Sardinian polyphonic choir composed of four male members. They sing huddled in a circle, each with one arm raised and a finger pressed to his ear to block out the other voices and perfect the harmonizing. Each raised elbow rests on a companion’s shoulder forming a closed ring, so that the performing quartet looks like a chanting conclave of conspirators.
Every town in Sardinia has a distinct traditional costume; Antoni was dressed in Oliena’s: a red, purple and black velvet coat over puffy white shirt and jodhpurs tucked into knee-high black woolen socks, a black skirt sustained by an embroidered belt, and a floppy black hat, called a berritta, which drooped about his shoulders like a deflated chef’s toque. He smiled easily, a flickering boyish grin constantly battling his stubbly beard for control of his face.
Tenores choirs are active in a restricted part of Sardinia, a triangular wedge stretching from Orosei and Arbatax on the eastern coast to Oristano in the west. Traditional local customs have generally been lost in the urban centres of Cagliari to the south and Olbia in the north, but in the wild central Supramonte mountains of the Barbagia region, roughly coterminous with the areas where tenores choirs are active today, archaic traditions still hold sway.
In Antoni’s case the upholding of tradition came bundled with an unwavering conviction that Sardinia was not actually part of Italy. He referred to Italy as the continent or the peninsula but wanted nothing to do with it, convinced that Sardinia’s destiny lay in succession from the mainland. Over grappas at the bar after the concert he declared, with mischievous solemnity, “I will never put on an Italian uniform.”
In time I would come to think of Antoni Putzu as traditional Sardinia incarnate.
“THESE ARE NOT NORMAL FLIES,” HE SAID, LIFTING A CLOTH FROM A CORNER OF THE TABLE
The ideology of Sardinian separatism permeated everything he said and did. As with the Basques, Catalans and Corsicans, Sardinian identity is intimately tied to a language—Sardinian is a close linguistic relative of Latin but contains unique pre-Latin elements (Nuragic and Punic) as well as Catalan. It is indecipherable to Italians, sounding to the uninitiated like an obscure string of guttural incantations, often delivered in a pungent crescendo. Most proclamations are rounded off with the definitive Sardinian turn of phrase, “Eya!,” strictly speaking meaning “yes” but in practice Sardinia’s version of the enigmatic head-wiggles one encounters in India, signifying both yes and no and maybe.
According to Antoni Sardinia’s incorporation into a unified Italy in 1861 was just another round of colonization by exploitative occupying forces, a long list that includes the Piemontese, Aragonese, Pisans, Catalans, Vandals, Arabs, Romans, Carthaginians and Phonoecians. The system of collective land rights upon which Sardinia’s predominantly rural society had been based since time immemorial was summarily overturned by a 1865 law that criminalized communal grazing, sparking a violent uprising of peasants and shepherds. In Nuoro, Oliena’s regional capital, they occupied the town hall and burned all the municipal maps and property titles, so that no-one would know who owned the land or where the borders between properties lay.
“They’ve been repressing and exploiting us ever since,” Antoni’s eyes lit up, “They forced the shepherds to become bandits.” He was smiling, mischievously, solemnly. “Come to dinner at my place tomorrow. I will explain.”
He ushered me past the front door and down a flight of stairs into the basement. “My wife is already asleep, she gets up at 5am to bake the bread. So I wait here in the cellar, usually around midnight my uncle brings the milk. Then I make the cheese before going to bed.”
The table had been set, a cutting board with half a dozen cheeses ranging from milky-white to ochre-grey laid out on the checkered tablecloth beside a carafe of cloudy wine. A slatted wooden table ran the length of the far wall, its surface laden with plump rounds of pecorino in various stages of aging and decomposition, permeating the room with a musty reek. Under the staircase pods of cheese hung over the fireplace to mature. Copper saucepans dangled from the rafters. The doorway opposite led into the small kitchen where Antoni would heat the milk on a gas burner to separate out the whey.
“These are not normal flies,” he said, lifting a cloth from a corner of the table, “They are my helpers. They make the casu marzu.” He grasped a cheese with two hands and held it up for inspection. It was crawling with dozens of tiny black flies. The rind was pockmarked in places by a gooey paste. I looked closer: the paste was moving. Small maggots squirmed in the creamy muck—cheese fly larvae.
“The cheese passes through the maggots digestive tracts, their acids break down the cheese fat.” He reached over to the table, broke off a piece of pane carasau flatbread, spread a dollop of the paste on its corner, offered it up to me. It was wriggling, minimally. The taste was formidably sharp, almost pickled, as if the cheese had been soaked in a decoction of lactic acid and wasabi. It hovered about my palate and clung to the back of my tongue long after I’d swallowed—a lingering organoleptic shock.
“Casu Marzu is illegal under EU food hygiene rules. But it’s a part of our culture, always has been. So of course we ignore the EU. Those bastards force us to live in a state of perpetual illegality.”
The shepherds of the Barbagia have always considered the justice meted out by the state to be the instrument of an occupying power, be it Italy, Aragon, or their string of predecessors. They ignore its laws, and instead abide by the unwritten rules of the Codice Barbaricina, a code of honour that still serves as a parallel—unofficial and autochthonous—system of justice and set of social norms. It is in part tacitly approved by the local populace, who choose to settle their disputes themselves according to the vicious dictates of the Codice rather than enlist the help of meddling, hostile, “foreign” Italian law enforcement agencies.
Much of the Codice Barbaricino deals with various forms of abigeato, the theft of livestock, and its just retribution. It is a system based on revenge, enacted directly by the offended party on the perpetrators of the offence. Vengeance sanctioned by an unwritten code of honour, underwritten by the Barbagia community that silently upholds it.
Antoni was smearing more paste onto a parallelogram of pane carasau. “Traditionally they distinguish between two kinds of theft, theft out of need, if you’re hungry or have no money, and theft intentionally meant as an offence, an insult. The first is considered ok in many cases, since the thief has nothing personal against the individual he steals from. But according to the Code he cannot steal from his own or neighbouring village; he must go and steal at least three villages away.” He observed the squirming tidbit awhile before placing it in his mouth. “The second kind of theft is an intentional slight, it shows a lack of respect for the victim. It must be vindicated.” He bit down on the morsel, making a crunching squishy sound.
“There is a local saying, Nehe o no nehe, prange berbehe. Guilty or not, it’s always the sheep that cry. If you want to send someone a warning around here you either steal or kill his sheep. A horse is more serious, sometimes if things escalate they cut off a horse’s head. Worse still is sgarettamento, when they cut a horse’s foot. The lame horse will have to be put down, it’s game over, but this forces the owner to kill the horse himself.”
Every rebotta has a designated meat roaster. Zio Fester arrived at the sheepfold and immediately sprang to action in the roasting pit, adjusting the angle of the spits, rearranging the position of the porcheddu, shifting coals around with the shovel. He wore a black v-neck t-shirt and blue jeans, his rotund face encircling pale fleshy cheeks and pudgy lips that chewed voluptuously on the stump of a cigar. His sculpturesque pot belly and bald pate, indeed, bore a striking resemblance to a member of the Addams family.
Zio Fester was soon holding court in his soap-box roasting pit, a charismatic raconteur, turning the spits with one hand while draining cups of wine with the other. Anecdotes poured forth from the corner of his mouth like jocular poetry, a stream of guttural Sardo-incantations delivered in pungent crescendo.
By noon over twenty people had made their way to the rebotta; according to Fester the meat wouldn’t be ready for another couple of hours, so Antoni suggested we go for a walk.
“Come and see our caves.”
STALACTITIC PLUMES CASCADED IN DELICATE DRIBBLES TOWARDS THE CALCAREOUS PROTUBERANCES BELOW
Six of us piled into two jeeps, drove back down the hill and then along the gravel track, deeper into the Lanaitto valley. Where the track ended we ditched the cars and continued on foot. The path contoured over limestone, angling gradually down into a gorge through stands of cork trees and holm oaks. At the bottom we followed a dry stream-bed that curled between monumental boulders until we reached an overhang concealing a dark breach.
Antoni stepped into the low antechamber and pulled a torch from his backpack.
“This one’s called the Conchiddu du ricattau.” Kidnappers cave. The chamber was narrow and high, we walked upright. “They say that in the 1950s a group of bandits from Oliena hid someone they’d kidnapped here.” The passage widened into a hall perhaps thirty meters high. Stalactitic plumes cascaded in delicate dribbles towards the calcareous protuberances below, lumpen and squat. The cave’s inner recesses smelled of ominous bat shit.
Despite the undeniable beauty of the cave it was not somewhere I’d want to be tied up for months on end and held for ransom. When we got back outside I asked Antoni whether they still kidnapped people around here.
“Ask Marco,” he said, pointing to the guy walking behind me, “He is the bandits’ lawyer.”
Kidnapping has always been part of the Sardinian mindset. The first documented instance occurred in 1477 near Podesta in the province of Nuoro; one of the most notorious led to the killing of the chief magistrate of Bono’s six year old daughter in 1933. After a brief post-World War II lull, kidnappings reached their peak in the late 1970s (ten cases in 1978, seventeen in 1979). The Anonima Sequestri (Anonymous Kidnappers), a nebulous collective ostensibly carrying out kidnappings at the time, was thought to have ties with subversive political organizations and “terrorist” groups then operating in mainland Italy.
The most recent known kidnapping took place on 19 September 2006. Titti Pinna, from the town of Bonorva, was abducted and hidden in a secret pit, five feet deep, in a sheepfold near the town of Sedilo for eight months, chained to the ground. He escaped on 28 May 2007; it’s still not known whether the Pinna family paid a ransom to secure his release. Two men were convicted of the kidnapping in December 2015 and sentenced to twenty-eight and twenty-five years respectively. One of them, Antonio Faedda, had been defended in court by Marco, the guy walking behind me. The conviction was being appealed; another round of hearings was underway.
“I’m claustrophobic,” Marco said.
We had reached the second cave, further along the stream-bed, set back from the path up a small escarpment. From the antechamber a low tunnel curved off into the dark, at first high enough to crouch and waddle along, but soon requiring short stints on all fours.
Marco was ahead of me, I could hear his breath getting choppy and wheezy.
“I think I will die in here.”
The tunnel ended abruptly, opening into a gargantuan chamber. I stood, looked up. It was disorienting: we’d emerged in an underground chasm, riddled with stunning sculpted pinnacles of rock draped in filigreed stalactites. A small aperture in the vault, about eighty meters up, leaked a halo of natural light into the dark. Its faint glow petered out well before reaching us on the cave’s floor below. Standing there in the dark abyss, staring up at the suspended pod of light, it felt like conspiring geological forces had placed an omniscient eye in the sky—to keep watch over us glowering troglodytes below.
The main axis of the cave extended beyond the reach of Antoni’s torch. “It goes on for almost two kilometers,” he said, “but you need professional gear.” One side of the cave had partially collapsed; the torch revealed a towering mound of karstic rubble. “You can climb up there and repel down the other side. We call it the Bocca dell’Inferno.” The Gateway to Hell.
“Look here,” he was illuminating a pile of bones at his feet. “When they discovered the cave they found four human skeletons, probably been tied up and dropped through the hole up top.”
Marco’s asthma was subsiding. He said, “It feels like we’ve stepped into Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth.” He was scanning the walls of the cave trying to make out if anything was lurking there: “I don’t like alibedde.”
Alibedde, that’s what they call bats in Bonorva, Marco’s home town: ali (wings) + pelle (skin). Skinny winged creatures.
Antoni laughed, shaking his head. “In Oliena we call them zuzureri.” Bonorva and Oliena are less than an hour’s drive apart, but have totally different Sardinian vocabularies.
“On the continent we simply call them pipistrelli,” I said. It was one of the first Italian words I’d been taught upon arrival in Rome as an eight year-old boy in 1982.
We stood there in the dark, listening for bats, craning our necks towards the omniscient eye in the sky, its pod of light. The Center of the Earth. A Gateway to Hell. The Tiscali Cave. Where was I? What was this strange Sardinian place, full of alibedde and zuzureri, not to mention pipistrelli?
Later, as I crawled back through the tunnel on all fours, back out to the Valle di Lanaitto—where Zio Fester and the rest of the Popolo Sardo were no doubt busily carving up our sheep, beef and porcheddu, all roasted to perfection—it occurred to me that I’d never felt further from Italy while, strictly speaking, still in Italy.
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I, Caligula
I, Caligula
by Rudston Steward
t’s not every day you get to meet a direct descendant of a Roman Emperor. He did not introduce himself as such, naturally, but something about the way he held court, the glint in his eyes, the rambling discourses on the innate decadence of empires, gave it away. We were in the presence of a bona fide heir to the legacy of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, that redoubtable quintuple of strongman-generals and murderer-lunatics running from Augustus through Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius to, with pyrotechnical finality, Nero. A paranoid imperial pedigree, awesome and hideous—floating amongst us on the island of Ischia, in the flesh.
The setting was appropriate; the Bay of Naples and its islands were the playground and pleasure shores of the Imperial Roman world at the peak of its powers. As my Cadogan guidebook put it: “In the 1st century BC, everyone who was anyone in Rome had a villa on the bay.” To the south-east we could see Capri, where Tiberius spent the last ten years of his reign, devoted entirely to demented orgies and devising elaborate new forms of torture for his guests, before tossing them off the cliff below his palace (you can visit the spot, known as the “Tiberius Hop”). He was succeeded by his fiendish great-nephew and adoptive son Caligula, the only eligible relative left alive after Tiberius had killed off everyone else .
We walked down the steep stairs to Sorgeto, a rocky beach flanked on both sides by sheer volcanic escarpments forming a perfectly secluded bay. At the bottom a piping hot thermal spring flows from a grotto into the sea, trickling over the rocks on the shore and spouting from underwater fissures. Boulders are arranged in lines as a buffer against the waves, creating pools where cool sea water mingles with the hot volcanic juices seeping out of the earth. The effect is bewitching: you float, ebbing and flowing, suspended between briskly invigorating marine wavelets and spurts of scorching acquatic magma.
A PARANOID IMPERIAL PEDIGREE, AWESOME AND HIDEOUS—FLOATING AMONGST US ON THE ISLAND OF ISCHIA, IN THE FLESH.
We’d come to Ischia seeking respite from the tide of dark tidings that had reached us from the wider world, depressing news deflating the high of our travellers’ buzz. November 9: the election of a strongman-idiot as the President of the USA. November 11: news of the death of Leonard Cohen—twilight of my poetic gods and idols. In the short space of two days our world had become a meaner, more violent, unbearably less poetic place. Did it signal the apocalyptic return of paranoid imperial legacies, of hideously murderous generals?
A single boat was anchored in Sorgeto’s bay; a man dove off the back and swam in slowly to shore. He clambered over the rocks and plopped himself down in the pool closest to the grotto, where the water is hottest. The rest of us adjusted, making room for one more, a brief entropic reshuffling of positions resolving into a new thermal order.
He was big-boned and fleshy, moving with a low center of gravity, as if hiding a discreet cache of weapons in the flaps of his belly, careful not to drop them in public. His hair was short, his cranium a globe of fuzzy velvet. He had a broad mouth and terse, purple lips. For a long while he sat with eyes closed, soaking it up, and then he said, to no-one in particular, “Caligula era perfettissimo.” Caligula was supremely perfect.
It struck me as an odd description of an emperor generally regarded as an insane tyrant, who in the first extravagant year of his reign squandered 3 billion sesterces—the vast fortune stockpiled by Tiberius— instigating financial crisis and famine. I replied that some of Caligula’s traits were, in my opinion, less-than-imperfect.
HE CLOSED HIS EYES AGAIN, AS IF RECITING A FAVOURITE POEM, “I AM REARING A VIPER FOR THE ROMAN PEOPLE, HE WILL BE THE RUIN OF ALL MEN."
The man was unfazed by my retort, no doubt used to speaking over the protestations of the plebs. Droplets of moisture dribbled down his cheeks, teetered on his puckered chin and plummeted onto his chest. He made fanning gestures with his hands beneath the surface, spreading the hot water around to avoid getting burnt. “Devi ventilare,” he said. You have to ventilate. “Last year a friend of mine got second degree burns. I had to drag him to my boat and rush to the hospital in Pozzuoli.”
He was clearly a regular. It occurred to me that he had been coming to Sorgeto for ages—perhaps ever since the hey-dey of the Roman Empire.
“Caligula was a great architect. It was no big deal back then to execute people for no reason. And anyways, Tiberius was to blame.” He turned to face me, smiling. “ You know what Tiberius said of Caligula to the Roman Senate?” I shook my head. He closed his eyes again, as if reciting a favourite poem, “I am rearing a viper for the Roman people, he will be the ruin of all men.” He was lowering himself into the steam. “And so it came to be. Perfettissimo.”
Later I asked what he thought of the strongman-idiot recently elected to the White House.
“He is small-fry, he is nothing. Sooner or later we’ll have our own empire back, a proper empire. Like our Roman forebears.” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm, “Right here in the Bay of Naples.” He was no longer smiling. “C’e l’abbiamo nel sangue.”
We have it in our blood.
A piece of the continent
A piece of the continent
by Rudston Steward
he heavy clunk and clatter of chains announces our arrival. 5:47am—we’re mooring. The ferry’s drawbridge releases, tracing an arc towards the pier. Dawn spills into the hold where half a dozen of us huddle, suddenly awash in the sepia-sour smells of seaweed and shore. Engines thrust and churn, a salty gurgle of surf; mooring lines strain against their bollards. Our vessel groans, then steadies and settles. The drawbridge smacks onto concrete, one hundred and sixty-three kilometers south of Sicily, a clanging landfall.
“Avanti.” A man in a blue anorak gestures frantically towards the shore. “Prego, AVANTI!” I walk along the ramp and step onto the pier. Terra firma: a pocket of clammy island air. The blue anorak turns to light a cigarette, shoves hands in pockets and shouts after us, almost an afterthought: “Isola di Linosa.”
It’s early April, off-season. Only seven passengers disembark, and I’m the sole non-resident; the rest get picked up promptly and driven back to town. I stroll away from the pier, along a tarmac track contouring the base of a volcanic mound that towers over the harbour. Its flanks are a patchwork of loose grey scoria and russet pumice, devoid of vegetation. Where the land flattens out to my right, towards town, plots are demarcated by low dry-stone walls, cindery volcanic blocks amassed in clumps.
The sun is low and distant, a spectral orange glow that brightens gradually with the lifting haze. As I walk the breeze changes direction: first sticky-treacle cistus, then juniper, then the bitter tang of lentisk. The track snakes through the outskirts of town and feeds into the main road, Via Vittorio Alfieri. I walk the length of it, bottom to top: a string of low rectangular houses, ochre, white and pink; the Bar Dammuso, a post office and an alimentari—all shut; two bright blue signs promoting the Linosa Diving Center, pointing in opposite directions. There’s no-one around.
The only signs of life are ornithological. A Golden Oriole plummets into a fig tree, flashing vivid bronze as it vanishes under foliage. House Martins loop and glide overhead, arabesques on the wing. A juvenile cuckoo suns itself in an Aleppo pine, silent and conspicuous, as if it hasn’t yet learned that cuckoos ought to be heard not seen.
Where Via Vittorio Alfieri reaches its terminus a footpath continues uphill towards Monte Vulcano, Linosa’s apex (a modest 195m above sea level). I give in to the compulsion that invariably takes hold of me when I disembark on a small island: the urge to climb without delay to its highest point. On the way up, as a bird’s-eye view starts to stretch out below me, I indulge the fantasy that I’ve landed on an island untouched by humans. An unspoilt wilderness, the untrammeled domain of orioles, martins and cuckoos. Linosa: a twenty-first century Galapagos of the Mediterranean.
25 April 1845
Captain Bernabo Maria Sanvisente lands on Linosa, charged with colonizing it on behalf of Ferdinand II, Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies. The king has bestowed upon him the title of Governor along with thirty conscripted pioneers, mostly from Agrigento and the neighbouring Sicilian island of Pantelleria, to do so. Amongst them is doctor Pasquale Bonadonna, Linosa’s first mayor, and an unnamed priest who, in Sanvisente’s words, would “cure the colonists’ souls.”
The Governor takes charge of an island that has been uninhabited for over two thousand years, ever since the Romans last used it as a base in the Punic Wars (their wells, a hundred and fifty of them, still dot the landscape). Linosa has been temporarily occupied by assorted pirates and fishermen and smugglers since Roman times, but there have been no long-lasting settlements for a couple of millennia.
It proves an extremely challenging reality. Linosa is more isolated and conditions more extreme than Sanvisente expected, principally due to the lack of fresh water. The first official census in 1862 lists the island’s body politic at barely eighty souls—hardly a thriving metropolis. And the trend has continued. Over the next hundred and fifty-four years Linosa’s population has expanded at a plodding pace: the official tally today is a mere four hundred and thirty-three residents.
I do not cross paths with a single Linosa resident on my way up the slopes of Monte Vulcano. Which is a pity, as I was hoping to ask someone about their lineage, whether their ancestors were amongst the original thirty settlers. After how many generations did they start thinking of themselves as autochthonous Linosani as opposed to émigré Agrigentini or Pantellerini? And did they start developing peculiarities of speech or habit, endemic Linosan traits akin to the evolutionary mutations observed by Darwin amongst the assorted finches of the Galapagos Islands when he visited them on the HMS Beagle?
As I climb higher the circumference of the island in its entirety emerges into view. The shoreline is a rough-cut rhombus floating on the dark, unpolished sea. The town recedes gradually below me, as if the human element is draining away, seeping down into the depths of the earth—all that pioneering and colonizing effort subsumed by eons of stacked volcanic strata.
From the summit the island’s other peaks, Monte Nero and Monte Rosso, become visible. With Monte Vulcano they form a lopsided ring of volcanic cones surrounding a sunken caldera: the Fossa del Cappellano. I sit down to rest.
A pair of Eleonora’s Falcons soon wheels overhead, keen wingtips strumming the air. They fly by horizontally, flashing their dark sideburns, then angle abruptly down into the caldera. I follow their flitting progress until finally they soar out to sea and out of sight. On the southern horizon my gaze snags on a pale beige smudge: the low limestone cliffs of Lampedusa, the southernmost extremity of Italy, forty-two kilometers to the south.
When I get back down to town the main drag shows signs of life, human stirrings. Three men clad in orange municipal jackets over khaki jumpsuits are sweeping the street, their course an irregular zigzag back and forth and back again across the flagstones, pin-pointing errant bits of debris. As I approach the team leader leans up on his broom, calling out.
“D’ya know why we’re working today, a Sunday, our day off?” He has the rapid-fire delivery of a town crier and continues before I can venture a guess. “Yesterday we were on strike. Against the Municipality of Lampedusa. Buncha damn crooks. Haven’t paid us for seven months. We wanna keep Linosa clean. Even if nobody pay us. If we don’t sweep, who will?”
I express support and admiration for their cause. A sympathizer—his eyes light up. He leans in and whispers conspiratorially, a newfound companion-in-arms, “Our problem’s Lampedusa. Always has been. They keep Linosa down, ya know? Don’t give a shit about us!”
I continue on down the road. The bar is now open, I have a cappuccino and the last pastry on offer. I’m still hungry; I need to make plans for an early lunch.
“What time does the alimentari open?”
The barista looks up wistfully. “Not today. Sunday.”
“Hmm. Where else can I buy food?”
She shakes her head. “Nowhere. Everything’s closed.”
“How about a restaurant?”
“There are two, one hasn’t opened for the season yet, the other’s closed on Sundays.” She is grinding her teeth in empathetic dismay.
“Ah. Bad news.”
She agrees, shaking her head more vigorously, bad news indeed, terrible news. I may go hungry on my very first day in Linosa—she feels personally responsible. Tears are starting to well up. She won’t stand for it, she says, this failure of Linosan hospitality.
“Keep an eye on the bar.” She rushes out before I can reply. A minute later, out of breath, she returns clutching half a packet of linguini and a jar of frozen pasta sauce. “This will tide you over till tonight.”
Such unsolicited kindness—I thank her, my gastronomic saviour. She won’t accept any cash; when I try to insist her voice cranks up to banshee pitch, “Non mi offendere!” Don’t insult me.
I promise to return in the evening for a drink. But now I must find the room I booked, cook the linguini without delay, and take a nap. The sleepless night on the ferry is catching up with me fast.
The ferry that deposited me in Linosa continued on its route to Lampedusa: the principal gateway for illegal immigration from Africa and the Middle East into Europe. The number of attempted crossings from Libya to Lampedusa, at the mercy of ruthless human traffickers and their sinking ships, has risen vertiginously since the Arab Spring in 2011. It has turned the southern Mediterranean sea passage into the most deadly migrant route in the world.
Later today, on its return journey to Porto Empedocle in Sicily, my ferry will transport a group of migrants—individuals lucky enough to make landfall, get processed by Lampedusa’s temporary immigration holding facility, and sent to the mainland. From Sicily they will be transferred to towns and cities scattered across the Italian peninsula. Many will drop off the radar and try to make their way further north still, seeking to get into purportedly job-rich northern Europe.
A part of the ferry, aft on Deck 7, is set aside for transporting migrants to Sicily. They are kept segregated from the general public, escorted by a squad of Carabinieri, military police. One of the Carabinieri tells me, matter-of-factly, “It will be mostly Senegalese today. Last week we had Eritrea and Somalia and Mali. And a boy from Sudan whose entire family had drowned.”
Linosa never makes the headlines, despite its proximity to Lampedusa. Together they comprise the Pelagie archipelago, but the ongoing migrant crisis bypasses Linosa altogether; it is a distinctly Lampedusan tragedy.
On the ground, Linosa is a black volcanic extrusion, fertile and sparsely populated—a tranquil haven for wildlife and a refuge for travellers seeking to get as far off the beaten track as you possibly can in Italy. Lampedusa, by contrast, is a long, thin, flat, eroded slab of white limestone with barely a tree left on it. Its population is over fifteen times that of Linosa; its social fabric increasingly strained by the stresses of being on the frontline of Europe’s refugee catastrophe.
Below ground the two islands are literally continents apart. Linosa sits on the edge of the Eurasian plate, the last cone in a great volcanic chain that stretches through Etna and Vesuvius all the way to the Pontine islands south of Rome. Lampedusa, geologically speaking, is part of Africa. It is moving north at a rate of about a centimeter a year, sliding under Eurasia—traumatic continental drift playing out in deep time.
In the Pelagie archipelago geology is a harbinger of contemporary politics: the tectonic divide has become a modern political chasm, keeping desperate African migrants segregated from distant European shores.
On the ferry I read a famous poem by John Donne, I stared for hours at the oily sea, I could not sleep. It was published in England in 1624, but sounds like a requiem for the southern Mediterranean, circa 2016: “Every man / is a piece of the continent, a part of the main / if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe / is the less.”
I wake from my long nap; the late-afternoon light is limpid and warm, the island awash in its rose-tinted distillate. I make my way back to the Bar Dammuso for a drink, as promised. A seagull cackles derisively overhead, as if to ask, a piece of which continent? The barista seems relieved that I’m still amongst the living.
The man at the counter introduces himself as Gerlando, asks me what I’m drinking. He slides a bottle of Moretti beer over to me and says “Welcome to Linosa.” Interlocutors have presumably been few and far between at the bar this afternoon.
He has a long face punctuated, from top to bottom, by a felt peaked cap, black horn-rimmed glasses, and a strawberry-blond goatee. His complexion is flushed; his compact frame propped on the chair like a ruddy toadstool. Gerlando makes gnomic conversation, delivering aphoristic utterances between exhalations from his electronic cigarette, a disembodied voice speaking from behind a vast cloud of vanilla-scented vapour. When you least expect it he unleashes a high-pitched laugh, as if something very amusing has pulled a falsetto trigger in his throat.
“I’ve been running a scooter-rental business here for twenty-seven years. But I want to switch to electric bicycles. So much better for Linosa. No noise. This place must remain tranquillo.”
He puffs on his device, releases a cumulonimbus smokescreen.
“A few years back they arrested me for bringing petrol from Lampedusa. There was no gas station here, it got brought over two or three times a year. I ran out and went to get my own supplies, for the scooters, eighty liters in the boot of my car. The cops said I might use the petrol to make a bomb. Motherfuckers! They prosecuted me for terrorism—attentato allo Stato.” An attack on the state of Italy.
His terrorist past triggers a falsetto ricochet. Another drag.
“For ages no-one could figure out what was wrong with me. They tried everything, even injections to the knee until I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. It took years for them to pick up I had a brain tumor. It’s stable. Not getting any bigger. Not going away.”
He inhales, more billowing fumes. “You know, I introduced electronic cigarettes to Linosa? I was the first. Now they’re everywhere. I should smoke less, probably.”
A girl walks into the bar, takes a bottle of beer from the fridge, walks out again. Gerlando follow her with his eyes. When she’s gone he laughs and says, “Girls from Linosa are a great big pain in the butt. A royal finger in the ass!”
28 June 1845
Two months after Captain Sanvisente makes landfall on Linosa, Charles Darwin publishes the second edition of The Voyage of the Beagle. Six crucial years have passed since the first edition of 1839 and in the interim Darwin has been tentatively formulating his idea of species mutation through natural selection. The revisions to the 1845 edition contain the conceptual seeds that will flourish into the intellectual and scientific revolution of On The Origin of Species.
Darwin draws the pivotal evidence from his analysis of finch and mockingbird samples collected in the Galapagos: “Seeing the gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends…It is the circumstance that several of the islands possess their own species of the tortoise, mocking-thrush, finches, and numerous plants, these species having the same general habits, occupying analogous situations, and obviously filling the same place in the natural economy of this archipelago, that strikes me with wonder.”
It’s unlikely that Captain Sanvisente read the second edition of The Voyage of the Beagle during his tenure as Governor of Linosa and Lampedusa. Which is a pity, because he may have noticed striking parallels between the Galapagos and Pelagie archipelagos. He too may have been struck by enlightened Darwinian wonder at the natural world, and let it inform the way he governed for the next nine years.
Over time the islands might have evolved into an archipelago subject to a different natural economy, becoming modified for different ends: a haven for an evolved human species, where everyone makes landfall without the risk of drowning.
My second compulsion on small islands, after climbing to their highest point, is to circumambulate them.
I set out mid-morning, out of town up Via Vittorio Alfieri, cutting across the flank of Monte Vulcano and down to the eastern shore. A road leads anti-clockwise around the perimeter of the island. The wind is whipping up a pepper-spray of surf; a school of terns squabbles and yelps offshore in protest. Where the road turns inland on the northern shore I continue along a footpath, picking my way across a hillside of black lava.
There are no trees or shrubs, only a smattering of low scrub. Pale yellow grasses, blood-orange lichens, lime-green euphorbias cling to fissures in the lava: splotches of colour dribbled onto an igneous black canvas. A blue-grey mantle of cloud floats on high, uneven and striated. Where the sporadic sunlight filters through it imbues the terrain below with a mauve tinge, the landscape flushed by a mildly hallucinogenic bloom.
A black lizard scurries across my path, a subspecies of the Filfola Lizard endemic to Linosa. I wonder, is it a long-lost genetic cousin of the iguanas that rove the Galapagos? The path becomes rougher as it winds around the island’s north-west corner, the ground increasingly uneven. Jagged blocks of lava twist towards the sea; I clamber over boulders bristling with diamantine igneous shards.
A pair of Cory’s Shearwaters floats off the point, cresting and dipping on the swell like frantic buoys. The birds spend most of the year out at sea in the Atlantic Ocean, returning to this promontory to lay their eggs in the lava. Linosa hosts Europe’s largest colony; a conservation project has been established to protect their breeding grounds and eliminate the Black Rats that gobble up their eggs. The Linosani are skeptical of the €915,000 spent on the program, half of it financed by the European Commission. When I asked Gerlando about it, he laughed and said: “Shearwaters are a royal EU finger in the ass!”
Turning south-east, back towards town, I opt to climb to the top of Monte Nero and drop down the other side rather than take the tarmac road looping around its base. I scramble and crunch up a scree slope: particulate black pumice seeps into my shoes at every sinking step. The ascent feels like wading uphill through pellets of volcanic quicksand.
On the summit the black sand semicircle of Cala Pozzolana becomes visible below, one of the few remaining beaches in Italy where Loggerhead Sea Turtles come to lay their eggs. Do any of Linosa’s Loggerheads intermingle with the Green Sea Turtles that migrate across the Pacific from the Galapagos?
As I start making my way downhill, back to town, I am stopped short by a familiar sound overhead: the liquid chirp of European Bee-eaters. A large flock, about forty strong. They gyrate and swoop, fanning out then looping back again, compact, as if turning round a giant spindle in the sky. It’s an advance party, unusually early: most bee-eaters make the spring crossing from Africa later, towards the end of April, and then take refuge in southern Europe until mid-September. Their wings flash turquoise and yellow, catching the sun as they spin, drawing steadily north.
I know the bee-eaters’ call intimately from my childhood in South Africa; they are a common species where I grew up. In evolutionary terms we are seasonal migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, both the bee-eaters and I—perennially in search of a piece of two continents.
Like them, I will head north soon. Back to Sicily, exempt from making desperate sea crossings in sinking ships. Back to Italy, unfettered by the bureaucratic constraints facing those who will travel with me, aft on Deck 7 . Back to Europe—awash with traumatic continental drift, circa 2016.
Pelagic Mission: Caprera
Pelagic Mission: Caprera
by Rudston Steward
ctober is the Mediterranean’s best-kept secret—my favorite swimming month bar none.
The La Maddalena archipelago in northern Sardinia is one of Italy’s most spectacular seascapes: hillsides of granite drip and bulge into cerulean bays, rampant vegetation spills onto coves daubed with secretive white sand. It’s also one of Italy’s most expensive summer playgrounds.
From late July to early September the coast squirms. Bays fill up with yachts slotted cheek-by-jowl like so many glistening sheep bobbing at anchor-pasture. And, given La Maddalena’s proximity to the Costa Smeralda—along with Amalfi and Portofino the most overpriced strip of seafront in the land—prices are exorbitant.
But not in October. Now the season has come to an end: accommodation is discounted, the fish is fresher, the booze cheaper, the conversations franker. The weather is superb: warm-to-hot days, skies clear as a clean conscience, water temperature near floating-point perfection. The beaches uncrowded, almost mystically quiet.
October is a month-long blissed-out happy hour for secluded beach-heads.
At the outset of my 9-month Italian Odyssey I embarked on a Pelagic Mission: to swim my way around the Italian peninsula from April through December. I’ve been keeping tally of the beaches swum thus far. In La Maddalena last week, six and a half months in, I hit a milestone: my 50th beach. Cala Napoletana, on the island of Caprera.
Cala Napoletana just happens to be within sight of the farm where Giuseppe Garibaldi lived out his last years after the unification of Italy in 1861. It felt somehow appropriate, vainly, that my Grand Italian Swimming Milestone played out in the shadow of a Great Italian Hero.
After his epic Risorgimento battleground feats, Garibaldi wanted nothing other than to settle into a simple agrarian life with his family, on this granite outcrop of an island, close by the limpid Mediterranean sea. It occurred to me, as I strolled down to the beach, that the Father of the Fatherland must have walked to Cala Napoletana many times along this same path, perhaps treading exactly where I too now trod. I was walking in History’s heroic footsteps.
Garibaldi was a wise man. He would have headed to Cala Napoletana often in October for a swim—when the hard-fought battles of summer had been won, and the beach-heads of Caprera no longer needed defending from the enemy forces threatening to land, glistening and bobbing constantly at anchor-pasture in the bay.