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…
A Grand Calabrian Canyon (Sila Walk/Day 7)
A Grand Calabrian Canyon [Day 7]
by Rudston Steward
e had hiked for five days straight across the Sila plateau, immersed in its ancient forests. The abrupt change of scenery that came next, on Day 6, was shocking: a showstopping descent into the arid canyons of the Valli Cupe.
I’d never heard of the Valli Cupe before. What an odd name, I thought—the Gloomy Valleys. It sounded ominous, and a bit dull. I steeled myself for disappointment—the splendor of the five walks thus far, ensconced in our canopy of green, was bound to end sooner or later. We’d had a great run.
I fortified myself with multiple rounds of espresso, and took heart from the solid hunk of capocollo (cured pork shoulder) I’d seen our guide Francesco slip into his backpack for our lunch. Then we were off, across Sersale’s piazza, down the main street. On the outskirts of town a track branched off towards Monte Crozze, rounding its flank to a saddle. Views opened up towards the coast: a palette of colours shading from emerald velvet green—the Sila forest above and behind us—to the tuffaceous pink of rocky hillsides sloping away below, and, approaching the sea, a salt-and-pepper patchwork of ochre fields and olive greys. Lengthways, slicing diagonally across our landscape-canvas, ran a series of deep narrow gashes, geomorphic scars sunken into the earth: the gloomy valleys, in the flesh.
We scrambled over a lip and down into a dry stream-bed. It started out as a shallow valley, the upper reaches of its flanks wooded and green, holm oak interspersed with macchia scrub. But as we dropped further the bed got narrower, the walls steeper. The vegetation morphed as we entered a distinct and self-contained biotope. Ferns now clung to the slopes, a fuzz of pale grass dangled in clumps from strata of sand and gravel.
I WAS BEING SUCKED GRADUALLY DOWN A VAST MEGALITHIC CHUTE, PULLED AHEAD BY SOME FATAL ROCKY ATTRACTION.
The sides of the gorge rose almost vertically above us, so that the light reflecting down became murky and refracted. I could hear the patter of my footfall on rock echoing overhead, scurrying upwards. It felt like I was being sucked gradually down a vast megalithic chute, pulled ahead by some fatal rocky attraction.
The final, climactic stretch of canyon narrowed to just a few meters wide, the track now gritty underfoot, with sheer cliff-faces twisting up and away on either side. Sunlight insinuated itself into the gap above, reflecting off the striations of rock and sediment, taking on a mineral radiance as it bounced its way down. At the bottom we basked in its stunning geological glow.
I walked entranced, humbled by the unexpected magnificence of this Grand Calabrian Canyon.
Then we emerged, abruptly. The gorge opened up, cliffs falling away to a gentler gradient, the track widening onto a flat riverbed. We stopped under a eucalyptus tree to devour our capocollo, deftly carved up by Francesco, and continued on, uphill again, through scorching fields towards the town of Cropani.
I didn’t say much the rest of the way. The canyon trance stayed with me, all the way to Cropani and beyond. And I’ve been actively plotting my return to the Valli Cupe ever since - it is one of the most remarkable places I’ve had the good fortune of stumbling upon (or, in this case, of stumbling down, rapt in a geological trance) on my Italian Odyssey thus far.
In the Realm of Conifers (Sila Walk/Day 6)
In the Realm of Conifers [Day 6]
by Rudston Steward
he fifth day of our Sila hike was a one-way street, going downhill fast. From Buturo, 1,539 meters above sea level, we dropped eight hundred meters to the town of Sersale.
On the way down we passed through a succession of distinct forests: bands of different tree species each occupying a specific altitude range. Over the full arc of the day’s walk the Sila appeared not as a single unified empire, but as a multitude of discrete forest dominions stacked vertically, like great green layers in an arboreal wedding cake.
Our guide Carmine was in his element: as we descended he held court on each tree species in turn, illuminating its role in the complex ecosystem of the Sila. We couldn’t have asked for a better fellow traveller: Carmine is the author of a definitive guidebook on Calabrian plants, including the tree species of the Sila (“Ethnobotany: Calabrian plants and popular culture.”) We were walking to his hometown today; we’d be his guests in Sersale tonight, and meet his family.
LIKE GREAT GREEN LAYERS IN AN ARBOREAL WEDDING CAKE.
At the top of the sylvan food-chain is the beech tree (Fagus Sylvatica,) occurring above 1,400m on the upper flanks of the higher peaks. The ash of beech trees, Carmine recounted, is used in the preparation of a traditional local dish called cicerchia alla cenere, where the cicerchie, a local legume, are soaked with beech ash for three days before being cooked.
Below beech comes white fir: the Abete bianca in Italian (Abies Alba), a species prized for its rapid growth rate. “Since the 1950s fourteen north European countries have been using fir seeds from the Sila for reforestation, because our Calabrian variety is resistant to acid rain. Germany, Denmark, France, Norway, all of them,” Carmine tells us.
By mid-morning we entered the heartland of the realm of conifers: the Calabrian pine, Pinus Laricio Poiret. It is the most diffuse species of the upper Sila, the forest’s most symbolic tree, occupying a broad band of terrain above 1000m. These pines were used to build the fleets of the Greek and Roman Empires in antiquity, and their resin employed to seal the ships. “The Sila produces the best pine resin in the world,” Carmine quoted the geographer Strabo with proud satisfaction.
The trail ran alongside a stream, crashing downwards in a series of cascades frothing into pewter-dark pools. We clambered down the steep bank to plunge into the Cascata delle Ninfe (Cascade of Nymphs): an intense and deeply gratifying shock of cold.
A SERIES OF CASCADES FROTHING INTO PEWTER-DARK POOLS.
For the final stretch of the hike we dropped below the conifers into the domain of broad-leaved trees: first castagno, sweet chestnuts, then cerro, Turkey oaks, and finally a dense stand of leccio, holm oaks. We swam again, in the Crocchio River, before walking the last hour down to Sersale. After five days immersed in the high plateau of the Sila the Ionian Sea now stretched out before us, far below.
As we ambled into town, a final hurdle presented itself: Carmine had made a reservation at a restaurant, but then his mother called to invite us to dinner. Carmine could not say no to his mamma, but was loathe to cancel our booking at such short notice. It was the first time in our five days together that he was at a complete loss about how to proceed.
One of our group, Matteo—a formidable walker, companionable conversationalist, unflappable drinker, and resilient long-distance eater—came up with a brilliant suggestion: “Can’t we just eat at your mother’s house first, and then go to the restaurant afterwards for a second meal?” It struck me as the perfect solution, but the rest of the group was less inclined to power through two repasts in quick succession. So Carmine cancelled the restaurant. In Italy, particularly where cooking is concerned, mamma always comes up trumps.
A FORMIDABLE WALKER, COMPANIONABLE CONVERSATIONALIST, UNFLAPPABLE DRINKER, AND RESILIENT LONG-DISTANCE EATER.
And it turned out to be the right decision. Not only were we treated to a delectable Calabrian meal; Carmine’s dad then got out his accordion. Without waiting for the plates to be cleared from the table he simply cleared his throat and tensed his shoulders, clasping his instrument to his chest like a sleeping child. For a moment he sat like that, hunched over in silence with his eyes closed, as if waiting for inspiration from on high. Then he launched into an uptempo version of La Calabrisella, arpeggios and riffs pouring out of him like mirth from a bubbling brook. He sang from the belly, foot stomping, laughing whenever he stopped to catch his breath (click play on the sound file above for a sample). We joined in, clapped hands, and belted out the ensuing choruses in the best Calabrese dialect we could muster.
Later, as we were heading off to bed, Carmine greeted us with another of his trademark Calabrian idioms: “Chi mangia e non si corica, merita la forca!” Liberally translated: “If you don’t nap after eating, you deserve a good beating!”
Within a Forest Dark (Sila Walk/Days 3-5)
Within a Forest Dark [Days 3-5]
by Rudston Steward
he first Canto of Dante’s Inferno contains possibly the best-known lines in Italian literature: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita” (Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / for the straightforward pathway had been lost.)
Some scholars, and most Calabrians, believe that Dante’s “dark forest” was none other than the Sila in Calabria. Dante must have felt compelled, they say, to visit the abbey founded by Joachim of Fiore, the pre-eminent 12th Century theologian and writer. He would no doubt have explored the valleys that surround Joachim’s abbey and the town of San Giovanni in Fiore, must have gotten lost in these impenetrable forests. Dante rewards Joachim with a spot in Paradiso (Canto XII), calling him a prophet; surely this bespeaks the poet’s intimacy with the Calabrian selva oscura of the Sila?
Our Calabrian guide, Carmine, fervently believes the Dante story. And I, over the course of our seven-day Sila hike, in turn came to believe anything and everything Carmine said, for his knowledge of the local terrain was uncannily encyclopedic. An ethno-botanist by training, there was not a single plant we came across that Carmine couldn’t identify and elucidate—its common name, scientific name, nickname in the local dialect, traditional uses and anecdotal cultural history.
Hiking with Carmine was like trying to keep up with a mad-botanist-professor on a thrilling quest for rare (possibly non-existent) Calabrian plant specimens. He thought nothing of subjecting us to a bone-crunching two-hour detour, simply to show us a curiously shaped boulder he’s fond of (“I know it’s around here somewhere…”), or virtually marching us off a cliff to glimpse a rare fern that happened to grow on a ledge there. We careened constantly off-piste, trailing along behind Carmine like wide-eyed lab assistants in the contagious wake of his botanical enthusiasm.
Whenever Carmine got lost—an all too frequent occurrence—he would glare down at his GPS, pleading with it in Calabrese, cajoling. The GPS would beep; he’d look up, grinning, and then set off again at a clip, crashing through undergrowth like a gleeful child on a wild goose chase. He confessed to us that, as Dante put it, the “diritta via era smarrita.”
WE VEERED CONSTANTLY OFF-PISTE, TRAILING ALONG BEHIND CARMINE LIKE WIDE-EYED LAB ASSISTANTS IN THE CONTAGIOUS WAKE OF HIS BOTANICAL ENTHUSIASM.
Over the next three days, led by Carmine, we traversed the high plateau of the Sila.
On our way out of San Giovanni in Fiore (Day 2) we stopped to see Joachim’s abbey and tomb. In a glass cabinet, next to a bust of the prophet, a large manuscript was on display; I noted with foreboding, given that we were about to march off into the forest dark, that the words “forte tumultus” featured prominently in the selected text.
From San Giovanni we cut across a corner of the Sila Grande, a fifteen kilometer march south-west to Lake Ampollino. Its perimeter, when we finally got there, was bedecked with a dense carpet of wild strawberries. I got on my knees to eat them, as if prostrate in sylvan prayer. To reach our hotel for the night we then crossed the lake in plastic pedalò paddle boats that Carmine, in a stroke of logistical genius, had had delivered for us on the lake’s far shore.
Onwards (Day 3) into the majestic primary forests of Mount Gariglione and the Tacina Valley—the wild green heart of the Sila Piccola. In keeping with the hike’s Dantesque overtones, we passed through an area called the Valley of Purgatory—a labyrinth of crepuscular trails winding through monumental beech trees. Carmine’s tracks turned schizophrenic: every so often he’d saunter entropically out of sight, only to return moments later with a porcino mushroom held triumphantly in hand.
There’s nowhere to stay up in the Gariglione, so Carmine pulled some strings and arranged to have an old mountain refuge, the Rifugio Latteria, opened up for us for the night—with catering. The chefs prepared our porcini, one of five dinner courses; an astonishing meal to partake of in such a remote setting. Then they drove off in their jeep, leaving us huddled around our bonfire, well-fed, exhausted and content.
SOFTER AND MORE GUTTURAL, FRAYING INTO A POLYPHONIC CANINE LAMENT.
Just before midnight we heard the wolves. Their howls at first soared in unison, melancholy sirens bayed into the night sky, and then tapered back down to earth, softer and more guttural, fraying into a polyphonic canine lament.
Carmine gazed into the dark and said: “They are not far off.”
Having route-marched us over fifty-five kilometers in the first three days, Carmine then took it easy; only a half-day’s walking the next day (Day 4). We set out from the refuge at 9am. Mid-morning we came upon a dead squirrel, neatly laid out across the path—a sacrifice, perhaps, to the shady spectres of the Sila’s selva oscura. We had reached our destination, the Locanda Pecora Nera B&B in the village of Buturo, by lunchtime.
Somehow, without any of us noticing, Carmine had sniffed out another mound of porcini for our supper.
Tomorrow we will start dropping down from the plateau. It will take a further three days to extract ourselves from this magnificent dark forest, and walk all the way down to the Ionian Sea.
The Vale of Acheronthia (Sila Walk/Day 2)
The Vale of Acheronthia [Day 2]
by Rudston Steward
he Calabrian Sila is one of Italy’s most extensive forests, a swathe of green spanning 150,000 hectares across the provinces of Cosenza, Crotone and Catanzaro.
La Sila, as Italians call it, has fascinated me since my childhood in Rome, when a classmate returned from a summer holiday in Calabria with tall tales of gnarly pine trees older than Jesus Christ, impenetrable forests with maze-like mountain trails, and the rabid howling of wolves by night. The Sila became a quasi-mythical territory in my adolescent imagination; I was reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit at the time, and identified it with Mirkwood in Middle-Earth, where Bilbo Baggins slays the giant spider and hangs out with the elves. Our family never actually set foot in Calabria back then, so there was no reality-check, no reason, ever, to dispel my fantasies.
Things stayed that way for over thirty years—until I was invited, earlier this year, to join a 7-day hike across the plateau of the Sila Piccola (the southernmost of the Sila’s three regions) and then down to the Ionian Sea. I jumped at the chance (overcoming my long-held conviction that to venture into the Sila without an invisibility-enabled magic ring on hand was to offer myself up foolishly to the Calabrian forest ghouls that would, inevitably, come a-knocking).
TALL TALES OF GNARLY PINE TREES OLDER THAN JESUS CHRIST, IMPENETRABLE FORESTS WITH MAZE-LIKE MOUNTAIN TRAILS, AND THE RABID HOWLING OF WOLVES BY NIGHT.
We started our hike at the ruins of Acheronthia, a town abandoned in 1844 after a dramatic series of events that read like a systematic catalog of loss: from its flourishing apex as a Byzantine kastron (fortified citadel) with a population of over two thousand, it was plunged into irreversible decline by an outbreak of the plague in 1528; minor earthquakes throughout the 17th Century and then a major quake in 1783 inflicted increasingly severe damage; by 1843 only three hundred inhabitants remained. Chronic malaria-bearing water shortages then dealt the final blow. In 1844 emergency plans were drawn up for a completely new town (modern Cerenzia) in a more salubrious valley nearby, and the population was gradually relocated. By 1862 old Acheronthia had been completely abandoned.
Not much is left of the crumbling old citadel today. The eerie quiet of abandonment clings to the site—the sad stillness of truncated lives, forgotten narratives, a sense of place interrupted—and is augmented by the dramatic setting: old Acheronthia sits on a flat-topped oval mound, like a massive plinth, its sides rising near-vertically above the surrounding valley. Looking west from this raised plinth we could see the long day’s walk that lay ahead: up over the bare hills towards Castelsilano, and then further up weaving through forests and farmland to our first overnight stop, the town of San Giovanni in Fiore, about twenty kilometers away.
By the end of June the Calabrian sun has extinguished the last vestiges of spring, extracted all moisture from the land like precious drops of nectar squeezed from pulp. We crossed a dry river bed, scrambled and crunched up a gravel path, picked our way across a desiccated hillside pock-marked with rampant thistles. As we climbed the view opened up behind us, back towards the Ionian coast north of Crotone: strips of shimmer-grey olive groves interspersed with dun-barren fields. On the steeper slopes a scruffy tapestry of oaks stretched like worn green fabric over the cracked carapace of the earth.
ON THE STEEPER SLOPES A SCRUFFY TAPESTRY OF OAKS STRETCHED LIKE WORN GREEN FABRIC OVER THE CRACKED CARAPACE OF THE EARTH.
It was well after 2pm when we trudged into Castelsilano, our projected lunch stop. Absolutely no trace of human life: the siesta was in full swing. The bar we’d pinned our hopes of sustenance on was shut; we slumped as one against a wall, stumped and starving. What now?
A window creaked open overhead. A dark-haired woman leaned out, taking a long hard look at the mad bunch that had plodded across her piazza—in the heat of the day, when all sensible folks take a nap—and plonked itself down on her doorstep.
“Can I help you?”
We explained our hungry predicament, and she softened. Appalled, no doubt, by the unfathomable prospect of anyone ever having to forego their lunch. She sprang into action, marshalling the joint forces of local solidarity and hospitality. A flurry of phone calls pinpointed the whereabouts of the proprietor (who was, of course, having a “pennichella”—a snooze). To our astonishment the gentleman agreed to drag himself out of bed and come to our rescue. He appeared within minutes looking fresh as a Calabrian daisy, keys in hand, sporting designer glasses and a matching black 76 Glory polo shirt.
Unlocking the door he proclaimed—passionately, like a general rallying the troops for one last heroic stand—“Ora accendo la piastra!” Let me turn on the grill.
Spurred on by our voracious appetites, our barista-hero served up multiple rounds of the house special, panini con salciccia. Grilled sausage sandwiches—equal parts delectable dribbly pork fat and charred crispy crust. These provided just enough fuel to propel our tired frames and pulp-squeezed metabolisms through the arduous afternoon’s hike: four hours over increasingly forested terrain, up and down and along and steeply up again. All the way, finally, to San Giovanni in Fiore—the oldest and largest town of the Sila, perched 1,119 meters above sea level, high above the Vale of Acheronthia.
We had reached the gateway to the impenetrable forests and maze-like trails of the Sila Grande. Gnarly pine trees were lying in wait for us up ahead, tomorrow and beyond; up ahead where the rabid wolves howl by night.
To Land’s Eastern End (Salento Walk/Day 4)
To Land's Eastern End [Day 4]
by Rudston Steward
e awoke to an easterly breeze, cool and lilting. I could smell the sea: Giurdignano is only 6km from the coast at Otranto. Today we would complete our Coast-to-Coast walk; today we’d be emissaries, arriving on foot from Gallipoli in the west, from the distant Ionian shores, to pay homage to the Adriatic Sea of the east.
We’d come bearing gifts, small invisible gifts encountered on our way across the Salentine isthmus: an olive leaf gathered, an insight honed, an experience grasped, layers of sweat and Puglian dust, new friendships forged. At Otranto we would finally dive into the Adriatic—a ritual bath of sorts, complementing our plunge into the Ionian two days earlier—and symbolically offer up these gifts to the sea. An invisible parcel, foot-delivered in person, surrendered to the Gods of the Open Road.
It’s easy to get carried away by symbolism and history around here: the mosaic pavement of Otranto’s cathedral is one of the great symbolic artworks of medieval Italy, a product of the singular historic era of Norman rule. The composition, laid out by a monk called Pantaleone between 1163 and 1165, covers the entire floor plan, and is based on a “Tree of Life” whose trunk rests on the backs of two elephants, its branches filled by an array of interconnected creatures, figures, and arcane images that unfurl all the way up the nave and into the transepts and apse. There are twelve circles depicting the astrological signs and agricultural tasks of each month, a series of Latin and Arabic inscriptions, a mermaid-dragon, a fantastical reindeer, heaven and hell, assorted mythological beasts and scenes from the scriptures, inscrutable pictographs, Alexander the Great, the Kings Solomon and Arthur. It’s as if Pantaleone were trying to encompass in a single design not only all of creation, but also the tropes and fancies hovering backstage on the fringes of the collective Medieval unconscious.
NOT ONLY ALL OF CREATION, BUT ALSO THE TROPES AND FANCIES HOVERING BACKSTAGE ON THE FRINGES OF THE COLLECTIVE MEDIEVAL UNCONSCIOUS.
The mosaic is a supreme expression of the syncretic and multicultural society that flourished in Southern Italy under the Norman kings in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. King Roger II, crowned in 1130, was “one of the finest rulers of the Middle Ages…He refused to join the the Second Crusade because religious toleration was fundamental to his rule…Fluent in Greek and Arabic, he presided over the most intellectual and cosmopolitan court in Europe” (David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy). The Norman influence ended with the death of Emperor Frederick II in 1250, and with it died also the idea of uniting Italy under a single ruler—a concept that wouldn’t resurface until the unification of modern Italy six centuries later. For over 600 years the idea of “Italy” as a single entity simply evaporated from the popular imagination.
Otranto is thus a useful vantage point from which to look back over Italy’s past and consider how it set the scene for the infuriatingly fragmented and deadlocked Italian politics of the present. Gilmour’s summary is apt: “On the battlements of the Castle of Otranto you feel you are in the Balkans, and in a sense you are: you can see the mountains of Greece and Albania across the water; you are closer to Istanbul and the Ukraine than you are to Aosta; the Black Sea is nearer than the west coast of Sardinia. When Apulia joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, the new state’s capital was Turin, a city so far away that Otranto is today closer to seventeen foreign capitals than it is to Turin.”
It took us just under two hours to walk from Giurdignano to Otranto, initially along a narrow tarmac lane snaking its way across the last traces of the Amazonia of Olives. We crested a rise, the coast appearing in a sinuous line before and below us like the flank of a recumbent mermaid-dragon. After days spent walking uninterruptedly on the flat, summiting this meagre hillock-with-a-view felt like we’d scaled a crest of the Alps. The track looped over a low escarpment and dropped into the valley of the Idro River, and then we trailed along its bamboo’d banks, past the cave-church of Sant’Angelo, under the elevated highway, all the way on into Otranto and the Adriatic.
We arrived at the beach, unloaded our backpacks. Walked into the waves. Made our symbolic offerings to the sea. The water was of an uncanny temperature, it made flesh tingle and mind buzz.
THE WATER WAS OF AN UNCANNY TEMPERATURE, IT MADE FLESH TINGLE AND MIND BUZZ.
In the afternoon we walked on from Otranto to Porto Badisco. The Salento coast south of Otranto is a succession of low cliffs and ridges, capped by plateaux of grassland and thistly scrub. Geologically speaking it is karstic terrain, dotted with eroded limestone fissures and features. From Otranto’s port the path contoured around a headland, hugging the windswept coastline. We swished through blond grass and crunched over crumbling yellow limestone, past the crooked shell of a stone watch tower, the Torre del Serpe (Tower of the Snake.) And then inland, over the outlandishly vermillion crags and eroded folds of an abandoned bauxite mine. Mining ceased in 1976, and the pit has since filled with dark, emerald-fluorescent water, a decidedly psychedelic-looking pond—one that Pantaleone would no doubt have worked into the grand scheme of his cosmic mosaic.
The path climbed gradually from the bauxite mine up a wooded escarpment, thick with the vaguely aseptic scent of eucalyptus. At the top we emerged onto a tar road running along a barbed-wire fence. Large yellow signs loudly announced a “Zona Militare.” Smaller signs, quieter and more ominous, showed images of snipers taking aim at intruders. The road ran south-east straight along a cliff, and then made a sharp 90 degree turn and headed back inland, south-west. At the elbow a footpath continued on, a long zigzag sloping towards the sea. We followed the footpath down and around, and as we descended the lighthouse of Punta Palascìa emerged into view: Capo d’Otranto. The easternmost point of Italy.
We walked down to the lighthouse, to Land’s Eastern End. Across the sea the granite-grey peaks of the Ceraunian Mountains in Albania glimmered like monolithic tesserae. Further south, the Greek Island of Othoni was clearly visible, a smudge of purple shadow above the blue sheen of the sea, hovering like an exhalation.
Capo d’Otranto marks the point at which the southern Adriatic and northern Ionian Seas meet. As we walked on south from the lighthouse, along the coast down to Porto Badisco, we were technically once again walking along to the shores of the Ionian Sea. Our Puglian pilgrimage had come full circle, like a medieval serpent biting its own symbolic tail: from the Ionian at Gallipoli, to the Adriatic at Otranto, and now back to the Ionian at Porto Badisco. One isthmus, three seas: Salento coast-to-coast-to-coast.
The Amazonia of Olives (Salento Walk/Day 3)
The Amazonia of Olives [Day 3]
by Rudston Steward
t 9 am the sun was a fierce disk propped low in the sky, foreboding-yellow. We set out down the B&B’s driveway and within minutes were among the olives.
For the next eleven hours our trail would weave in and out of an apparently endless succession of groves, occupying every available inch of land separating one town from the next. Scorrano, Sanarica, Giuggianello, Giurdignano: an accretion of urban centres strung out in a ragged east-northeastern line across the Salento interior. Off-white isles of stone and stucco floating in a vast sea of dappled olive-green. We walked the line all day, tacking back and forth like wayward foot-sailors to keep our bearing, as if navigating an invisible Puglian waterway coursing erratically towards Otranto and the Adriatic.
There are about 60 million olive trees in Puglia. The region is Italy’s largest olive oil producer by far, accounting for 40% of the national output—a figure which dwarfs, for example, the roughly 3% produced in Tuscany. Traditionally associated with lower-grade oil, Puglian farmers are increasingly producing high-quality extra-virgin olive oils, mostly from the Ogliarola, Coratina, and Cellina varieties. Ogliarola olives predominate in the Salento—over 50,000 hectares in Lecce province alone. The trees are large, up to fifteen or twenty meters high, yielding a fruity, lime-golden oil, bittersweet and fragrant as an almond blossom.
For three hours straight we walked between and beside and under and around and over olive trees. We saw no-one else, not a car passed. It was as if we’d stumbled into a strange orderly wilderness. Somewhere remote and wild, but one that, counterintuitively, had naturally evolved in neat monocultural rows and plots: tidy demarcations of vegetation surging across the plains of Puglia. Some groves were kept free of undergrowth and grass, the soil tilled and cleared, the olives pruned with topiary precision. Others were unkempt: brambles hooked into trunks and scrambled up onto the boughs, grass climbed to shoulder-height inhibiting our passage, the trees left unpruned, shambolic with unchecked growth.
OFF-WHITE ISLES OF STONE AND STUCCO FLOATING IN A VAST SEA OF DAPPLED OLIVE-GREEN.
Walking for long uninterrupted spells through forests can be hypnotic. The Amazonia of Olives we were traversing was no exception: I settled in, my stride became languid and shady, thoughts shimmered away like windswept foliage. My footfall tapped out a rootsy rhythm; gradually I walked myself into a deep arboreal trance.
I tried for a while to count the myriad trees, to estimate how many we’d pass today, what fraction of the sixty million. Soon I lost track and gave up. It was too distracting: every individual tree seemed intent on engaging me in conversation as I walked on by. These olives steadfastly refused to sit down and be counted, to be reduced to statistics.
Around noon we emerged onto a main road and turned along it towards Scorrano. The Salento is a dense network of smallish towns and hamlets, some little more than half a dozen houses huddled around a dusty piazza. Scorrano is larger. We passed under a vaulted archway into the old city center, its whitewashed palazzi towering over flagstone alleys spanned by taut laundry lines. Garments flapped brightly overhead like bunting.
Lunchtime in Salento: everything was closed, including all the churches. Scorrano boasts a disproportionate number of churches for its size, attesting to its wealthy past under the Bourbon kings of Naples. We strolled past the curlicued Baroque facade of the Church of St Francis of Assisi, noted its fine stonework, paused in its shadow to apply another layer of suncream. Our reflections flashed from the window of a hair salon called “Cuts for Kings”—were they hoping to spearhead a revival of the Bourbon golden age? We continued on out of town, east-northeast.
We now had to cross the SS275, a major road. Highways and railways are to modern long-range walkers what rivers were to medieval pilgrims: major obstacles that must be forded at specific places. They sometimes require long detours in order to arrive at the designated bridge or strategic crossing point. Rather than embark on a lengthy slog to the nearest overpass we decided to wait for a lull in the traffic and then hightail it over the highway. I threw caution to the wind, picked my gap and sprinted across, squeezing between two converging streams of rapidly oncoming traffic. Blaspheming and cursing my overstuffed backpack at every step. I resolved to make the long slog next time round, to ford the river at the bridge like a proper law-abiding god-fearing Puglian pilgrim.
THE SUN HAD REACHED ITS CAUSTIC APEX, INTENT ON MELTING THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON INTO AN IMPRESSIONISTIC HAZE FROM ON HIGH.
The sun had reached its caustic apex, intent on melting the rest of the afternoon into an impressionistic haze from on high.
A car passed us on the road, pulled over and backed up. The driver got out, slicked-back grey hair and chic sunglasses, reached into his boot conspiratorially, and summarily handed Nadia an armful of medlars. “We’ve just picked them from the tree on our plot.” The medlar leaves crinkled and rustled like a papyrus crisp packet. He got back in the car, waving as he implored us to eat: “Mangiate, mangiate!”
We stopped for our picnic beneath an exceptionally gnarled and ancient olive, its hollowed-out trunk so large you could climb right into it and disappear. Later we stretched out and slept in its resuscitative shade, under a cascade of liquid chirping—a flock of European Bee-Eaters was gyrating high above the canopy, unseen.
We reached Sanarica in dire need of an espresso, asked a man in the piazza where the closest open bar was. He laughed, pointed south, and said “Three kilometers out of town.” We thanked him, saying we’d skip the six kilometer roundtrip, given that we were on foot. He would have none of it, laughing louder this time. “I am Enzo. Enzo will help.” He would drive us to the bar and back again, he said, so that we could pick up the walking trail exactly where we’d left off. “You will not buy a coffee in my town. You are guests. Enzo will buy you a coffee.”
Enzo knew everyone at the bar. We were introduced as “these crazy folks walking to Otranto.” Among his acquaintances were a skinny fellow with one tooth and a floppy hat, and a towering hulk in a white wife-beater and thin golden chain, his jaw wide as a shovel. His unflinching eyes were austere, even when his mouth had relaxed into a smile, and everyone in the bar seemed wary of him. They addressed him with subtle deference. It occurred to me, later, that we’d probably been rubbing shoulders with a local mafia boss.
AMONG HIS ACQUAINTANCES WERE A SKINNY FELLOW WITH ONE TOOTH AND A FLOPPY HAT, AND A TOWERING HULK IN A WHITE WIFE-BEATER AND THIN GOLDEN CHAIN, HIS JAW WIDE AS A SHOVEL.
The last leg of the day’s walk, from Giuggianello to Giurdignano, took us through the most remarkable olive groves yet. The heat had relented. Cool evening light bathed the terrain in a furtive glow, its palette ranging from emerald to ochre-green to pale mossy grey. The sun dipped towards the horizon, casting its last horizontal rays, a flickering orange pointilism flecking the fronds.
We came upon a low stone tower of sorts, like a small ziggurat, with a rounded dome covered in grass. In the increasingly crepuscular light it looked like a miniature Mayan step-pyramid that had somehow ended up here on the edge of a field, in the Amazonia of Olives. I climbed up onto it, trying to figure out what it was, searching in vain for obscure Nahuatl inscriptions. Then I climbed back down and we walked on, east-northeast. Twenty-six kilometers down, four to go.
The Salento is dotted with megalithic structures of all kinds, menhirs and dolmens and cairns. Just before Giurdignano we passed one of these, a rectangular standing stone 2.5 meters high, called the Menhir of Saint Paul. Below the menhir was a small Byzantine crypt dedicated to Paul, the saint associated with tarantism. It was popularly believed (and probably still is in some parts of the Salento) that the bite of the local wolf spider (Lycosa Tarantula) caused a hysterical condition that could be cured only by long stints of frenzied dancing. Thus, the theory goes, the musical form of the Tarantella was born: in essence, a frenetic and curative musical exorcism.
In the crypt there is a faded fresco of St Paul. Beside him is the tarantula’s web. A warning of sorts: like all forests, the Amazonia of Olives has its dangers, it harbours mythical Puglian beasts. We walked on into Giurdignano, pricked up our ears for the strains of a Tarantella, hoping to exorcize our near-hysterical hunger and dance ourselves back into a cool, olive-dappled Amazonian trance.
Mondo Bizzarro (Salento Walk/Day 2)
Mondo Bizzarro [Day 2]
by Rudston Steward
ew things are more cartographically tempting than an isthmus: a narrow strip of land with the sea on either side of it. Whenever I map-read my gaze is inevitably drawn to such land bridges, wondering how best they might be traversed. The idea of hiking coast-to-coast and thereby linking up two seas, two distinct maritime cultures, is irresistible. Every isthmus is a walking safari just waiting to happen.
Look at a map and you’ll note that southern Italy is a land of temptation, a territory of isthmuses-writ-large. Below Naples the iconic Italian boot splits into the heel of Puglia, the raised arch of Basilicata, and the curving toe of Calabria (poised to drop-kick Sicily deep into the Algerian hinterland). Southern Italian coastlines are lapped by the Tyrrhenian Sea to the west, the Ionian Sea in the middle, and the Adriatic Sea to the east. This affords the mouth-watering prospect of a Grand Walking Tour: going coast-to-coast-to-coast across two regional isthmuses and three Mediterranean seas.
At the end of May we walked across the Salento isthmus in Puglia, three days from Gallipoli on the Ionian Sea to Otranto on the Adriatic. A cross-section of the heel of the boot of Italy.
Day 1 was surprising. We discovered that the Salento’s Ionian coast is a very odd place, a scrappy landscape dotted with architectural oddities and eccentric individuals. A veritable mondo bizzarro.
EVERY ISTHMUS IS A WALKING SAFARI JUST WAITING TO HAPPEN.
We set out early from Gallipoli. The contrast between the charm of the old city center, with its warren of narrow lanes and soaring Baroque cathedral, and the choking urban mess that surrounds it, is jarring. A man is being dragged along the Lungomare Galilei waterfront by his over-eager dog, past an interminable string of boarded-up fast-food shacks. It is not clear whether the shacks will open for lunch, or ever again. Opposite Paninomania, purveyor of seaside kebabs and crepes, a couple power-walks up a flight of stairs, curtly punching the air with their dumbbells.
We swim—a ritual salutation to the Ionian Sea we are about to leave behind—and then cut inland, onto a bridge over the highway, through a fence and diagonally across a field. Gradually the Ionian sprawl starts to subside in our wake.
The terrain is flat, a dusty plain of allotments criss-crossed by dirt roads flanked by stone walls and wire fencing. Every so often a house rises up from the plain with kitsch grandiloquence, towering fantasies of obscure design incongruously plonked down among the scraggly fields and olives. Many are unfinished, half-built faux-turrets climbing over driveways to nowhere, concrete archways whose matching courtyards remain unbuilt. It feels like we’re strolling through an architectural battlefield abruptly abandoned in the dead of night. A skirmish in which, evidently, both sides lost.
Some of the lanes have been used as rubbish dumps, augmenting the forlorn post-apocalyptic feel of the countryside. Clumps of rusty machinery and piles of rubber tyres lie strewn along the roadside at irregular intervals, like a trail of noxious breadcrumbs scattered by an eco-vandal. Was he hoping to retrace his steps in due course, out of this maze of pollution back to a more pristine, uncontaminated landscape?
After a picnic break in the shade of an olive grove just outside Matino we decide to stop for an espresso on our way through town. Knowing you can always count on a decent coffee is one of the great pleasures of walking in rural Italy. Even the smallest town on the periphery of nowhere has a lone bar to assuage your caffeine-withdrawal-fears.
The only open bar that lies on our chosen route through Matino is the Greenwood Resto-Pub. Special of the day: pasta with mussels (€6). We order a caffe shakerato and an espresso and walk through to the patio in the back, overlooking a stand of umbrella pines. There are wooden platforms built around every trunk, about 10 feet up in the air, and a series of ropes and suspended walkways linking one tree to the next. An elevated obstacle course of sorts, or displaced adventure park, strung up in the pines. It hasn’t seen much use of late, and it’s not clear precisely how it ended up in this bar’s back yard. Or why.
The coffees are served to us by Laura. She is keen to chat, asks us where we’re going, where we’re from. Her eyes are constantly amused, as if privy to an ocular inside joke, and she smiles easily, flashing slim white teeth between fulsome, tidy lips. Laura shows us her designer watches—one on each wrist—and lets us inspect her latest-generation electric cigarette devices. She has two, one black and one white, made by a company called “Smok.” Held in hand they are surprisingly heavy, compact and weighty as weapons. Laura clasps the black one in her fist, inhales theatrically, and spouts a cascade of dense white smoke from proudly pursed lips. It settles slowly on our table-top, enveloping the coffee cups like a bright, cherry-scented fog. She looks up, well satisfied, and says, “See that? Two thousand watts of pure smoking power!”
We pay up, say farewell to Laura. On the radio the Ramones are belting out “I just wanna walk right outta this world, I just wanna walk right outta this world.” An oddly appropriate soundtrack to today’s walk. The song is called Poisoned Heart—from the Ramones’ twelfth album, Mondo Bizzarro.
WE'RE STROLLING THROUGH AN ARCHITECTURAL BATTLEFIELD ABRUPTLY ABANDONED IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT. A SKIRMISH IN WHICH, EVIDENTLY, BOTH SIDES LOST.
On the outskirts of Matino a white sheepdog starts following us. He stays with us for a few hours, through olive grove after olive grove, across the plateau east of Matino, ignoring our attempts to shoo him back home. About a kilometer short of our destination the dog suddenly veers off the road, perpendicularly through the olives, and is gone. As if summoned by a covert canine call, indistinguishable to our human ears. Maybe he too wants to walk right outta his bizarre doggone world.
We are heading for a B&B called Casale Sombrino near the town of Supersano, the only accommodation option on offer tonight. The last two hours of the walk are flat and hot, straight narrow roads through singed grasslands, beige fields and stone walls crumbling with fatigue.
It’s a stretch scorched by the Xylella fastidiosa disease plagueing southern Puglia, an insect-borne bacteria threatening to decimate the entire region’s olive groves. No-one as yet knows how to combat it; last year an EU ordinance to cut down thousands of ancient trees resulted in dramatic footage of Puglian farmers facing down bulldozers to stop their olives from being uprooted. We walk past a number of groves with “Zona Avvelenata” warning signs strung up from the fences—Poisoned Area.
Just before reaching the B&B the road tilts briefly upwards. After traipsing along the flat for so long our calves are finally called into quickening action; the uphill change of pace and gradient is welcome. At the top of the hill a huge television lies abandoned in the road, a final broken monument to this degraded landscape. A last iconic vestige of the mondo bizzarro.
Then we are on the crest of the rise, below us Casale Sombrino’s attractive buildings and orderly estate are spread out along the flank of the hill. Beyond, stretching eastwards and down towards the distant Adriatic, the landscape is altered: greener, lusher, the olives groves better-kept. The belltowers of scattered village churches fleck the horizon. Tomorrow we will leave the weird world of the Ionian coast and make our way into the olive-green heart of the Salento interior.
On top of the mythical world (Salina Walk/Day 5)
On top of the mythical world
[Day 5]
by Rudston Steward
he Aeolian Islands are liminal terrain. They inhabit the murky threshold where myth overlaps with history, reality coalesces into fantasy.
The historians of antiquity invariably identified this Sicilian archipelago with the “floating island” of Aeolia described by Homer in Book X of the Odyssey. The home of Aeolus, lord and keeper of the winds. Mythical Scylla and Charybdis were thought to be the Strait of Messina separating Sicily from mainland Italy (indeed, the modern Italian town of Scilla today faces Stromboli from the Calabrian coast). It was here on this archipelago, they concluded, that the gracious host Aeolus presented Odysseus with the four winds, to speed his homeward journey (with deplorable, if unintended, consequences).
Aeolus himself is a nebulous figure. Multiple versions of his lineage have been handed down to us, confused and conflated. He is at times said to be human, the son of a certain Hippotes, at others divine, sometimes descended directly from the god Poseidon (whose name in antiquity was Poseidon Hippios). In Homer Aeolus falls somewhere in between, more than a mere mortal but not a god as such. In later accounts, Aeolus is identified as a 12th Century BC Greek king who escapes the ravages of the Trojan War, sails to the archipelago via Apulia to resettle his people, and in time endows the islands with his name.
As I set out from Malfa, on the third and last day of my circumambulation of Salina, I ponder the above and wonder whether I should make some sort of offering to Aeolus today. Something symbolic to appease and thank him for the spectacular walk I’m completing. After all, I’m on my way up to the highest point of his archipelago; I should petition for favorable winds at the top.
WE HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO LIAISE WITH THE ANCIENT DEITIES. THE SERVERS CONNECTING US TO THE GODS OF WIND AND THUNDER AND RISING SEA-LEVELS ARE DOWN, AND NOT COMING ONLINE AGAIN ANYTIME SOON.
At the summit, almost 970m above sea level, it can get pretty nasty if a cold tramontana wind from the north starts howling. I need to keep the keeper of winds on my side.
But what would an appropriate offering be in this day and age? We have forgotten how to liaise with the ancient deities. The servers connecting us to the gods of wind and thunder and rising sea-levels are down, and not coming online again anytime soon. Odysseus would no doubt have slaughtered a few lambs, sheep fat would be sizzling in the honorific bonfires. But there are no handy ovines tucked away in my backpack this morning, so I stroll out of Malfa town, past the public library, up and away through the terraces, empty handed.
Soon I am laboring up the steep gradient of Monte Rivi’s northern slope. Idle musing about sacrificial Homeric lambs is soon swept from my mind by the determination with which the track wiggles under pines and squirms up and around knots of sweet chestnut trees. It is making me sweat. There is no wind; sweltering calm reigns.
Towards the top, the approach angles along a drivable track. A series of shallow folds progress up to the lip of Monte Fossa delle Felci’s wooded crater. The soporific final ascent lulls me into a quasi-mesmeric state. Not even the premonition of a breeze troubles the immaculate boughs of the trees. The mountaintop is being held in an eerie vacuum. Like the stifling silence of the lambs before flint sparks the kindling.
LIKE THE STIFLING SILENCE OF THE LAMBS BEFORE THE FLINT SPARKS THE KINDLING.
Now there is something sleeping in the middle of the road, just before the summit. Perhaps a small dog. As I approach it neither gets up nor raises its head. There is no breath of air that might stir it. I walk towards it, I’m close enough now and I see it is not lying in the road: it is dead. Not a dog. A rabbit.
A neat offering perfectly laid out in the dirt.
For whom, by whom? How did it die, or rather who killed it and placed it on my path? I can’t help but feel responsible somehow, as if the rabbit is compensation for the oblation I failed to make before setting out this morning.
Standing on the archipelago’s highest point my altimeter reads 967m. To the east is the Calabrian coast, narrowing towards Scilla and Charybdis. To the south lies the Sicilian shore, with distant Etna a gargantuan smoke-stack for Hephaestus’ forges. To the west lie the islands of Alicudi and Filicudi—which the ancients called Ericusa and Phoenicusa. To the north there is only open sea, from where throaty gusts of tramontana wind are just now mounting a furious assault. Lambasting the top of the Aeolian world.
Much later, when I’d scrambled all the way down the volcano’s crumbling eastern flank to Santa Marina, dived into the Tyrrhenian Sea, and eaten an exonerative pistachio granita from Alfredo’s bar in Lingua for good measure, I kept asking myself: was the rabbit really there?