Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey Read online

  Matthew Fort’s food writing career began in 1986 with a column in the Financial Times Saturday Review. Between 1989 and 2006 he was Food & Drink Editor of the Guardian.

  He was Glenfiddich Food Writer of the Year and Restaurateurs’ Writer of the Year in 1991, Glenfiddich Restaurant Writer of the Year in 1992 and Glenfiddich Cookery Writer of the Year in 2005. In 1998 he published Rhubarb & Black Pudding, a book about the Michelin-starred chef, Paul Heathcote. His second book, Eating Up Italy, was the Guild of Food Writers’ Book of the Year in 2005. Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons, a food portrait of Sicily, won the Premio Sicilia Madre Mediterranea in 2009.

  On television he co-presented Market Kitchen with Tom Parker Bowles and he is currently a judge on The Great British Menu. He lives in Gloucestershire.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Rhubarb & Black Pudding

  Eating Up Italy

  Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons

  For Lois

  my beloved daughter

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

  This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

  Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

  If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type island5 in the promo code box when you check out.

  Thank you for your support,

  Dan, Justin and John

  Founders, Unbound

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Prologue

  1 THE WINE-DARK SEA

  Livorno – Gorgona – Elba – Pianosa – Giglio – Giannutri

  2 A RICH AND LOVELY SEA-GIRT LAND

  Sardinia – Tavolara – Maddalena – Caprera – Asinara – Sant’Antiocco – San Pietro

  3 SPORT OF THE GODS

  Ischia

  4 ODYSSEUS REFLECTS

  5 RETURN TO THE ISLANDS

  Ischia – Procida – Capri – Ponza – Ventotene – Stromboli

  6 SUN-BRIGHT GODDESSES

  Salina – Filicudi – Alicudi – Sicily – Ustica – Favignana – Marettimo

  7 SWEET BANQUET OF THE MIND

  Sicily – Pantelleria – Lampedusa – San Domino – San Nicola

  8 ON ARRIVAL IN ITHACA

  Venice

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Supporters

  Copyright

  PREFACE

  I fell in love with Italy through ice cream.

  I first came to Italy in 1956 on a family holiday in Cervia, a resort town on the Adriatic coast. I was eleven. It was the only holiday we had on which my mother and father were both present, as well as my three brothers, James, Johnny and Tom. Our sister, Elizabeth, had not yet been born. My father, an MP, had to return early to take part in the parliamentary debate on the Suez Crisis. Not that such epic events impinged on my world view at the time. That was bounded by the here and now and the edible, and I was easily caught in the thrall of Italy.

  Sunny, colourful, vibrant, different, it was far removed from the drab monochrome of post-war Britain. The warmth, the dappled shade, the resinous smell of pines, the spice-perfumed dust, the clear, amethyst waters and expanses of sand like caster sugar had a brilliance and shimmer that life at home never produced. There was a sense of excitement from simply staying in a grand hotel, the Mare e Pineta, with its pools, restaurants, terraces, gardens and a kind of ineffable allure. It was said that the owner had been part of the Italian underground during the war, and had been honoured for smuggling British pilots out of the country, which added dash to glamour for an imagination schooled on Biggles, Rider Haggard and Jack London.

  Above all, there was the food. Each Thursday buffet lunches were laid out like gastronomic gardens. They were on a scale and of a dazzling variety of which we had never dreamed. Even sixty years on, I can still remember the undulating tablescape of lobsters, crabs, prawns, scampi, cold salmon, mussels, rare roast beef, cold chickens, salamis, hams, curious vegetable mixtures, salads, fruits of every variety laid out with casual abandon around a huge ice swan. It was a continent of temptation on which we feasted with a wild sense of pleasure.

  Some evenings my father would take us to a particular café in town ‘for a treat’, ice creams. The centre of the town was marked by a small dusty area on which grew a stand of dusty umbrella pine trees to one of which was nailed a sign that read Divieto di Caccia (Hunting Forbidden). Even at the time, this struck me as extraordinarily optimistic.

  Our ice cream palace of choice was a small café, the name of which has long vanished from my memory. Already the ice creams I had eaten in Italy had had the same effect on me as reading Chapman’s Homer had had on John Keats – ‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken’. They opened my senses to a universe of pleasure at which Wall’s bricks and Lyons soft ice cream had not even hinted, even if covered liberally with golden syrup or maple syrup.

  One evening we arrived to find the proprietor in the act of making ice cream. No ice cream ready and waiting! I couldn’t imagine such a disaster. I was outraged by the thought, ready to be inconsolable. Then disappointment was replaced by curiosity, and curiosity by fascination, as I watched the cream being poured into the freezing tub and the paddle churning it as it thickened. The gelataio added banana flavouring, and suddenly this mysterious, smooth, velvety substance smelt more of banana than any banana I had ever smelt and, as that first lick of cool, downy softness ran melting over my warm tongue, I fell in love. Any people who could lavish so much passion and care over ice cream must be a people worth treasuring.

  Since that magical baptism, I returned to Italy as often as time, money, work and domestic responsibilities allowed, to Rome, Milan, Lake Bracciano, to Lucca, Pisa and Parma, to the Monte Lucretili and Naples. I spent summer holidays, principally on the mainland, but also visiting the islands – Elba, Sicily, Salina, Sardinia and Capri.

  While filled with pleasure and discovery, these visits left me unsatisfied, my passion unquenched. Two weeks, three weeks, even a month, never quite seemed long enough. Just as Italy had soaked into my core, just as I’d adjusted to its rhythms and joys, it was time to go back home, to education, work, responsibility and humdrum reality.

  But somewhere along the line the seed of passing an entire summer lotus-eating among Italy’s islands was sown. There was the sheer romance of spending almost unlimited time playing in the clear, azure waters; eating and drinking in small, charming ports; chatting away to wizened, taciturn fishermen; turning golden brown in the sun. I dreamed of it in the quiet hours of
the night, fantasised about it during meetings, pondered it when I should have been doing more productive things. But I never got round to actually doing it. Years drifted by. Summers came and went. The dream remained.

  In 1999, I took three months off to ride a Vespa from Melito di Porto Salvo in Calabria, the southernmost town in Italy, to Turin in the north, to write Eating Up Italy. In 2008 I made a similar journey across and around Sicily and wrote Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons. Exhilarating and full of delights as the journeys were, perhaps because of them, the notion of spending a whole summer in the islands still floated in my imagination.

  There’s something particular and fascinating about islands; about the very notion of islands. There they are scattered like crumbs across a vast blue tablecloth. It’s easy to hold each in the mind’s eye and in the imagination. Each is a discrete entity, identifiable and comprehensible and filled with possibility, each a world in itself, and yet connected by history, trade, inter-migration and by sea.

  I’ve lived on an island all my life. Clearly where we come from shapes our sense of who we are and our relation with the rest of the world. But how? Is the mentality of islanders different from that of mainland dwellers, and if so, why? And in what way? Perhaps I could understand my own island better through exploring others, especially these islands swathed in myth and legend as well as historical witness. Could there be monsters lurking among them? Or sirens? Can any of the Aeolian Islands really be Aeolia of the Odyssey? Or Sicily the land of the Cyclopes? Would I find today’s descendants of Homer’s Lotus-eaters? Are there connections between past and present that a passing stranger could see?

  And what of food? Someone had once said to me that Italians speak and eat in dialect, and that seems to me to be one of the keys to the country. Italy’s food is rich in its diversity, and has always helped define Italians’ sense of identity. Previous trips to Italy had been stuffed, you might say, with edible delights, each of the season and place, valley, village, even house. But would this be equally true of the islands? There was bound to be plenty of fish, I assumed, but did the dishes vary from island to island? Had the pressures of mass tourism and globalisation begun to erode the essential purity of individual cooking cultures?

  The more I ruminated, the more enticing the idea seemed to be. Anyone in their right mind would want to spend six months or so loafing around the Mediterranean, I felt. Of course they would. On the other hand, I was about to be sixty-seven, in theory moving towards the quiet evening of my life, a time when a more responsible person might deem it foolish to set off on their own to travel through terrae incognitae mounted on a Vespa. But neither did I like the idea of sitting in a rocking chair in a home for toothless old food writers thinking, ‘If only I’d had the bottle, if only I’d got organised… if only… if only.’ Regret is a pointless emotion.

  Everyone to whom I spoke about it said the same thing, expressed the same enthusiasm, the same wish. Six months moving in a leisurely fashion among some of the most beautiful and fascinating islands in the Mediterranean? Yes, please. Can I come, too? Can I join you? Even for a little bit? The lure of escape was irresistible.

  But I knew – and, in their heart of hearts, they knew –that they would never do anything so foolhardy, so indulgent. They were too sensible. They had jobs, businesses, children, mortgages, responsibilities. So, I reasoned, I would go on their behalf. It wasn’t that I didn’t have responsibilities, it’s just that they didn’t seem quite so important. Of course, it was foolhardy, irresponsible, indulgent, but it wasn’t trivial.

  ‘Take the Adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! ’Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new,’ the Sea Rat says to Ratty in The Wind in the Willows.

  Finally I heeded the call.

  PROLOGUE

  JUNE 2014

  England

  My brother, Tom, picked me up from Gatwick Airport to take me home to Gloucestershire.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what’s happened,’ he said. ‘Do you know, Matty, I think this might be for the best.’

  ‘How do you figure that out?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the trouble with your other books is that they’re too bloody cheerful. Nothing ever seems to go wrong. It has gone wrong this time, and treated properly, I think it could make for a much better book. You know, dark to temper the light, contrast, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I said.

  The country was enjoying one of those perfect spells of still summer weather when everything seems to have been touched by a fine dust of gold, made all the more perfect because you know it’s not going to last. But then, nothing seemed to last any more.

  Swapping the bright clarity of the warm South for the lush green of the Gloucestershire countryside had not been exactly how I had thought I’d be spending the summer. I had anticipated all manner of stomach ailments, infections, strokes and domestic disasters that would force me to return home, but I had never foreseen something so improbable, painful or so final as a snapped Achilles tendon. I knew they didn’t grow back overnight. I knew that it would be three months at least before I would be fit enough to travel again. With the best of fortune I wouldn’t be able to be on the move properly until early September, too late to be able to visit the remaining islands in a way consistent with how things had gone so far. That meant – well, what did it mean? Plan A was scuppered, but there never had been a Plan B.

  It had all started so brilliantly.

  1

  THE WINE-DARK SEA

  MAY 2014

  Livorno – Gorgona – Elba – Pianosa – Giglio – Giannutri

  Livorno

  Livorno, or Leghorn as my grandparents and great-grandparents knew it, and how it’s still known on Google maps, is on the Tuscan coast. It’s mid-May, warm and sunny. The air’s flush with salt, iodine and diesel. Sleek yachts, toothpick masts swaying, halyards tick-ticking; glossy cruisers heavy with money and gross taste; and scuffed, battered fishing boats in white and blue pack the interlocking harbours like sardines in a tin. Beyond, brood four gargantuan cruise ships, their presence as alien as space stations from another galaxy.

  It’s a long time since Livorno’s days of glory as a porto franco, a free port, under the Medicis. It had become one of the most dynamic trade centres of the Mediterranean after Jewish traders settled here following their expulsion from Spain and Portugal around 1583. The British Levant Company established a trading house in the seventeenth century, trading cloth, bloaters from Yarmouth and wheat from Kings Lynn. Livorno’s decline, which began during the Napoleonic wars, was completed after the Unification of Italy, when it lost its status as a free port. Its position still gave it a strategic importance in the Mediterranean, that cost it dearly in the Second World War. In 1944, a report by the US Army Corps of Engineers described Livorno as ‘the most thoroughly demolished port in the Mediterranean’.

  But the cruise ships are bringing back business, industry, money, prosperity. Once Livorno’s wealth depended on youthful energy, entrepreneurial dynamism, and martial pragmatism. Now its survival depends on catering to the quieter needs of silver surfers.

  As I ramble along the harbour fronts, canal-side quays and scuffed streets, I find it increasingly delightful. It doesn’t have the obvious and trumpeted charms of Pisa, Florence, or Siena, no painstakingly preserved and achingly beautiful antique city centre, or World Heritage site. Instead it has a certain scruffy-cur charm, energy and character, a strong sense of its own identity and worth and place in the world.

  According to my friend, John Irving, who’s lived in Italy for over forty years, the character of the Livornesi is ‘vulgar, rowdy, fiercely leftist, violently anti-Pisan… but soft inside. I have always seen them as a sort of race apart, with their very distinctive accent, cuisine etc. A bit like Neapolitans born in Tuscany by accident.’ The city even has its own satirical magazine, Il Vernacoliere, printed in the Liv
ornese dialect, a Livornese Private Eye, as funny and cheerfully irreverent, but more vulgar and political.

  And so Livorno reveals its modest, but real, treasures little by little – fishermen selling their early morning catch from marble slabs on the promenade; a children’s guitar orchestra performing in one corner of the imposing Fortezza Nuova, a monument to the trading power of the city and of the Medici family who built it in the sixteenth century; the Quartiere Venezia, which is Venetian in the same way that Bourton-on-the-Water is the Venice of the Cotswolds. Canals curve at random through the middle of the city, with quays and waterways cluttered with fishing boats, rowing boats, yachts, yawls, dinghies, cruise ships and gin palaces, rusty old freighters and natty new speed boats, boats of every size, shape and colour, engines phut-phutting, flags twitching.

  Above all there’s the neo-classical Mercato Centrale, where pushing, shoving, peering, poking, sniffing, waving, chatting market shoppers haggle over green candle zucchini with their flame flowers; fat, waxy, canoe-shaped pea pods; salted anchovies arranged in herringbone patterns in their tins; red and purple cherries, cherries the shade of ivory blushing faintly here and there, all shiny and perfect; rabbits looking queerly naked without their skins; clusters of purple-skinned onions, their withered stalks plaited together; and tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes – perfectly spherical, lumpy, bumpy, shaped like plums; tomatoes the size of crab apples; tomatoes the size of oranges; green striped tomatoes, blush pink tomatoes, tomatoes as scarlet as the Pope’s socks – tomatoes for every dish, for every occasion, for every day.

  All these delights are treated with a matter-of-fact briskness by the Livornesi, as if they have something better to be getting on with than blowing their own trumpet. Their existence doesn’t depend on past glories, but on present opportunities.