The sun is setting. Stromboli is quiet. Some of the biggest bees I have ever
seen are swarming on the roof above me. The apricots are ripening — and they
taste sublime. The caper bushes are flowering. A thing that looks like a
locust has just crashed into the wall. Oh, and a bee has landed on my
laptop, perchance to read, or just to be.
I had promised myself a last island-hurrah, with time to write and reflect a
little, in the remotest part of Italy I could find. Stromboli: the word
rolls off the tongue beautifully. Stromboli. Of course, it might have been
my growing obsession with Italian neorealism that made me want to come here.
Okay, it was. The great Italian director Roberto Rossellini had made a film
on the island in 1949 with Ingrid Bergman: the neorealist classic Stromboli,
billed by the American press as “Flaming volcano! Flaming emotions!” By day,
Bergman acted. By night, she found time to make infamous lurve with the
maestro.
Bergman played a Lithuanian refugee called Karin, who thought that the only
way she could leave the refugee camp on the mainland was to marry the first
Italian fisherman who paid her any attention, little thinking that he might
come from an obscure, constantly erupting volcano in the middle of the
Mediterranean. When she arrives, she utters the immortal line, “Is it always
active?”, and shudders when she learns that it is.
Stromboli: gently steaming and spitting fire. While the town of Stromboli has
happily sloughed off its poverty and entered the mucky world of tourism, on
the other side of the island is the minuscule community of Ginostra,
altogether less sure of itself. Some 30-strong in the winter, its population
positively explodes in the summer as people are drawn by its rather
notorious remoteness. There is no electricity, but there is peace and quiet.
But is all well in this Italian version of the end of the world? Without
wishing to be a serial killjoy, I should add that ferries and hydrofoils now
drop by every day, disgorging their passengers onto a waiting dinghy that
speeds them into what is claimed to be the smallest harbour in the world.
Unless, that is, there is a raging storm, or even just a swell, in which
case you will have to get off at Stromboli, wait and pray — or walk around
the volcano. However, the sea is mostly benign in the summer, so per- severe
and you’ll get there, inshallah.
So you arrive, to be greeted by a mule and its human minder. Walk up the long
winding path to Ginostra, past the other mules lugging crates of this and
that. I asked one of the mule minders for directions to where I was staying.
He scowled, pointed and grunted. I grunted back. It’s a fine thing,
remoteness.
My room looked out onto the sea, across to the distant hump of Panarea.
Inside, all was perfectly white, cool and breezy. But the soil, the ground
and almost everything else was a dark, ominous black. Volcanic cinders
littered the paths and massive volcanic rocks were scattered along the
coastline. The port is roughly hewn from these gigantic, jet-black volcanic
boulders, which are covered in the most astonishingly lurid sponges and sea
anemones. June was uncomfortably hot, even for the Ginostresi, and there was
much fanning and moaning in spite of the blessed shade. But it seemed
fitting to be so steamy at the foot of Stromboli. You might think the
awesome presence of a volcano would make everyone twitch and jump, but after
a while you too will forget all about the boiling mass of magma beneath you.
LIFE WAS never easy in Ginostra. There are no roads, no cars, no buses, no
water. Lovely. In the old days, clothes were washed in the sea; winter rain
was all they had in the way of water, and it was cannily stored in
thick-walled wells. In the war, Ginostra was left to its own devices, and
people can still remember the awful, endless, merciless hunger. In the
1960s, things began to change. A group of Germans arrived from Stromboli
after the local priest found their radical ways a little too much to bear.
Ginostra was more welcoming, and thus began the village’s golden age, when
the inwardly fearful Gino-stresi joined the world of free love and exotic,
strange people.
The arcane purity of Ginostra is still in the living memory of the older
inhabitants. What did they think about the outside world? Talk to Assunta, I
was told. She knows it all. So off to meet Assunta Lo Schiavo, who lived 50
metres up the hill. She didn’t seem too keen, but the one thing you learn
quickly is just to plough on regardless.
“Buona sera, signora! Buona sera, Signora Assunta!” She
beckoned me to sit down, shuffled on her seat, drew breath and began ...
A FEW generations ago, more than 800 people lived in Ginostra, surviving, if
not thriving. With its church, its young and its old, Ginostra was a fully
formed community that lived off the sea and the fertile, volcanic soil.
Capers, olives and vines flourished on the rich but arid volcanic soils and
gave the islanders the means to survive.
Come spring and early summer, caper-picking used to keep everyone busy for
weeks on end. Capperi don’t ripen all at once, so the little ones, capperini,
were kept to one side and packed separately. Covered with sea salt and left
to mature for five weeks or so, the capers gradually turned from a fresh to
a darker green. Boats would sometimes stop by from the mainland and exchange
potatoes and onions for capers, for this was a community that bartered
rather than bought and sold. But, today, caper-picking seems to have lost
its attraction. So has picking olives. And so, indeed, has absolutely
everything apart from worshipping at the altar of tourism.
Assunta used to cook for those pioneer tourists, exercising her Ginostresa
cunning to work a few culinary miracles when necessary. Rabbits were once
caught in their hundreds, but even they have had a cataclysmic time of it
since a deadly virus infected the local population and killed most of them
off.
THE LOCAL marine rabbit turns out to be the totano, or flying squid (Ommastrephes
sagittatus), easy prey for even the dumbest of fishermen. Assunta’s
granddaughter told me how they had seen one the day before that was almost
as tall as she was.
Stromboli rises steeply from the sea with the acuteness of a teenager’s
pimple, so you can find fish that are usually caught well off the coast with
relative ease. One of the weirder finds is the spatola — we call it
the scabbard fish. This curious fish is halftapeworm, half-conger eel, with
a beautiful, svelte silver skin and a fearsome set of teeth.
In Ginostra, both totano and spatola are served with pasta, totano
more successfully because it combines well with a thick tomato sugo.
It’s a rare treat to see their little tentacles reaching through the sauce
and trying to strangle the pasta.
Once, the sea was thick with a creature even more remark-able and intriguing: tartarughe,
turtles; tartuchi in dialect.
Loggerhead turtles once swam freely around the islands, free, that is, to be
fished, trapped and caught whenever possible, for their arrival coincided
with the leanest months on the island — January and February — and got
Ginostresi juices flowing.
Assunta became positively wild when I mentioned turtle. “Madonna,
ch’era buona!” she said. On clear winter days, just after a
storm, turtles in their hundreds would flop languidly on the sea’s surface.
You can imagine the excitement. “I tartuchi! I tartuchi!”,
and off people would rush, down to the sea.
Gaetano Merlino is one of Ginostra’s most successful fishermen. He told me
what life was like back in the 1960s, when he was young and fishing
tartarughe was almost more thrilling than the electrifying prospect of
German girls keen on free love. “I am a very natural man, a very funny
person,” Gaetano kept telling me one blistering afternoon, as I
listened to his life story. There was a man — “I think he really loved me,”
he said — who despite his crippled hands knew how to fish for turtles.
Gaetano would row them both out to sea, as stealthily as he could. Slipping
silently up behind one, Gaetano would warily grab its back flippers and
overturn the beast, leaving it to thrash ineffectively.
At the gloomiest part of every winter, this glut of turtle would arrive. Never
sold, it was handed around the village, bartered for this and that. Every
woman knew how to prepare and cook a turtle.
You can imagine the ladies of Ginostra scampering back to their kitchens with
their turtles, chopping and bashing, the smell of turtle hanging heavily in
the air.
I told Assunta, almost embarrassed, that I had not yet tasted the vino
cotto that appears in the island’s cooking so often, even added to
turtle. One evening, as the sun was setting gloriously, Assunta invited me
for a drink, and brought out a bottle to taste. It was as dark as gravy
browning, with the unctuousness of molasses, plus a little grapiness. I
showed her a book I had found with a recipe for sfinci di fichi d’India.
She swore this recipe was hers, but agreed to let me reproduce it so long as
I gave her due acknowledgment. This I was happy to do, I said, as I took my
leave of her and the island.
SFINCI ARE another of those things that Sicilians, and in particular Aeolians,
get sentimental about. In the wrong hands they are leaden, but well made
they are excellent. As you might expect, there are a thousand variations on
the basic principle, which is this: sfinci are fried pastries
combining flour, lard and something else. So, you find sfinci i cucuzza,
for example, made with the flesh of yellow pumpkins. In Ginostra, where they
have to be extra resourceful, sfinci are made with the flesh of
prickly pears. This recipe was given to me by Assunta from Ginostra on pain
of volcanic death if I failed to credit her. It serves four.
3kg prickly pears
30g fresh yeast
50ml warm mineral water
White sugar
Salt
500g white flour
Oil for deep frying
Peel the prickly pears carefully, then pass the flesh through a sieve. Mix the
yeast in a large bowl with a little warm mineral water. Add a sprinkling of
sugar and leave for 10 minutes. Add a touch of salt and the sieved prickly
pears, then slowly add the flour, working it with your hands until you
obtain a thick, stretchy dough. Leave to rise for an hour in a warm place.
Heat the oil for frying. Pull off a chunk of mix, roll it into a ball and,
using a slotted spoon, put it into the hot oil. Fry the sfinci one at a
time, sprinkling each with sugar when done, and serving immediately.
YOU READ that Ginostra has no electricity. Once again, this isn’t entirely
true. Generators whirr and cause more than a little neighbourly friction.
Not everyone has one, but they have arrived, and somehow I feel there will
be no turning back. It is one of the many issues that divide the little
community. Are they to have light bulbs and televisions blaring like
everywhere else? Or do they hang on to that rare purity, real and
undeniable, and become a living social fossil? As I was told by one of my
wise story-tellers, Ginostra is neither fish nor fowl.
Extracted from Al Dente: The Adventures of a Gastronome in Italy (Bantam
Press £12.99). To buy the book for the reduced price of £10.39, excluding p&p,
call The Sunday Times Books Direct on 0870 165 8585
Tour operators: Italia nel Mondo (020 7828 9171,
www.thesicilianexperience.co.uk) can tailor-make trips to the island from
£670pp for a week, including charter flights from Heathrow or Manchester to
Catania, B&B accommodation in the four-star La Sirenetta Hotel in
Stromboli town, transfers and the ferry crossing from the Sicilian port of
Messina.
Or try Italiatour (01883 621900, www.italiatour.co.uk; 01 671 7821 in
Ireland), Magic of Italy (0870 888 0220, www.magictravelgroup.co.uk) or
Ramblers Holidays (01707 331133, www.ramblersholidays.co.uk). Ginostra and
Stromboli town are linked twice daily by ferries or ad hoc by local fishing
boat; the trip takes about 30 minutes.
