Fresh air, the crisp smell of salt water, and the swooning fragrance of copious gardens engulf Sicily’s Aeolian Islands. But one of the seven islands that make up this bracing archipelago emits a less-inviting odor: Vulcano. Depending on which way the wind blows, the unmistakable scent of sulfur wafts across the main harbor and the surreal area around the island’s fumarole, or gas-spouting mud baths. Sometimes the grimace-inducing smell reaches the inactive Gran Cratere volcano. Yet travelers continue to arrive in droves to submerge themselves in a pond of miraculous sulfur-laced mud.
My husband Joe and I, though now-seasoned veterans of the Aeolian Islands as a whole, first set foot on this desolate and pungent patch in the late 1990s. We’ve returned on more than one occasion to experience the other natural wonders of Vulcano. But following is an account of my first impressions of a place I had initially discovered through magazine photographs of naked bathers slathering themselves with a yellowish-green muck. That image sparked weird notions of a remote Mars-like place where Flash Gordon may have encountered the Clay People. One scorching day, Joe and I took an excursion from Lipari to this island’s gurgling pond, a.k.a. il laghetto di fanghi, and main claim to fame.
Vulcano, whose name means volcano, is a stark volcanic island. The Greeks and Romans dubbed it Hot Land and dedicated it to the god of fire. Once a sacred place, where the ancient dead were buried in rocky tombs to be close to the god Vulcan, this mysterious mass of scorched earth seemed to have been abandoned by the gods of the Underworld.
We could almost feel the churning of those lost souls below the sea as our boat rocked across the Valley of the Monsters – a series of twisted lava rocks jutting out of the water. For an instant, I imagined our boat being swallowed by a tentacled blob. Perhaps a Cyclops would set his hungry eye upon us. But we seemed to be protected by the falcon-shaped rocks and others naturally hewn into the sharp profiles of helmeted Spartan warriors. Our captain guided the small craft into a cavern called Grotta di Cavallo (Horse’s Grotto), named for its equine formation. Reddish-pink beds of coral illuminated the dark, echoing chamber. The boat bobbed drunkenly through this ominous hollow, where I imagined I heard the cries of less-fortunate mariners trickling down the stalactites.
The approach to Vulcano makes travelers aware of their mortality. An existential no-man’s land, the island is devoid of color and vegetation. A scorching haze hovered above the black cliffs. We had reached the antipodal equivalent of Siberia. Visible craters hiccupped puffs of smoke every few seconds, while a solitary white lighthouse stood stoically against a gaping ebony cavity. We arrived on a stifling day. So the acrid smell of sulfur bowled us over. Winding roads led to gnarled trees beckoning with pitchfork-pronged fingernails – not too far from a variety of “burning bushes,” which Charlton Heston could have easily knelt before in The Ten Commandments.
Our boat arrived in a marina close to the famous mud baths. On our way to the therapeutic springs, we passed two sunburned men – sweat streaming down their backs – breaking rocks with heavy picks. Between laborious swings, they would down a few bottles of Coke then toss the empties atop a dusty pile wedged between a deeply fissured chunk of travertine. Whenever a bottle landed on top, they would shout out a hefty “wehh!” The walk to the baths is not particularly momentous, and what I expected to be a large elegant pool turned out to be a wide puddle of mud. Bathers of all ages and shapes frolicked in what looked like thick bubbling sewage (and did not smell much better). Nearby, a more forceful Jacuzzi of fumarole actually burned holes in bathers’ swimsuits. Our puddle was not so hazardous, but it still had its down side.
Joe offered to test the waters. He waded slowly into the heaving green slop and said it felt like being submerged in dough heated to several hundred degrees. I reluctantly dipped a toe in. But I was so overcome by the thought of smelling like sulfur, I did not take the plunge – opting instead to observe the civilized mayhem around me.
An elderly English woman, looking like Maggie Smith in a hat swathed in mosquito netting, approached me with a stopwatch. She asked if I could keep an eye on her things and let her know as soon as 15 minutes passed. I obliged and, as she sank into the sludge (occasionally waving to me), I took in what appeared to be an Italian version of an Al Jolson convention.
Men, whose bodies and faces were covered with mud, casually conversed with each other on the rocks. One of them could have been H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man. Besides his bright red bathing trunks, he wore sunglasses, a fedora and mud while puffing on a cigarette. A pregnant woman lay prone in the shallow pond, her muck-encrusted belly protruding like another cliff formation. Children painted each other’s tiny limbs. Women removed their tops and rubbed the magical goo on their breasts. One pretty young girl, who carried a clipboard, pranced around in a dainty crocheted beach cover-up and gold hoop earrings – her face adorned with a fango mask reminiscent of Wilma when she unexpectedly answered the door for Stony Curtis in The Flintstones.
After acclimating to the soupy cauldron, Joe too became transformed. He could be found slopping huge clumps of the green concoction on his face and chest. I became so enthralled with the bizarre scene around me that I forgot to alert the English doyenne. I was wondering why someone kept wildly waving her arms at me amid the ritualistic body painting. Oh my! She was supposed to come out ten minutes ago! I signaled back, but it took her a while to drag her now-mummified carcass out of the water. She lumbered over to the rinsing pool, now in greater need of a loofah than a shower.
After half an hour, Joe found that the combination of humidity, scorching sun and a gaseous-smelling heated pool left him lightheaded, to say the least. It was time to rinse off the seaweed-colored sediment that crackled across his bare skin. Many bathers headed down to the black-sand beach to clean up in the ocean. Joe joined them. As more bathers rinsed off, the clear water suddenly turned green, and patches of mud splattered onto the surrounding inner tubes and vinyl rafts. Inevitably, amid all the splashing, Joe got the dreaded fango in his eyes. Repeatedly blinking, he exited the cloudy water in pain and complained of an unbearable acidic stinging. It took some time, and a granita di limone and fragola gelato later, for the discomfort to pass. Meanwhile we explored this broiling wasteland, where more dead trees pointed their twisted claws at us and black flowers crumbled into burnished shards (like those coiling black firecracker “snakes” I used to light on the Fourth of July).
From Vulcano, we planned to return to Lipari where we would immediately board a hydrofoil to Palermo. This made it impossible to take a shower. We were going to meet our Sicilian friends there and realized how bad we smelled of sulfur. I also felt as sweaty as those two Coke-lobbing stonemasons.
Our friends greeted us at Palermo’s sprawling port, and they were gracious enough not to indicate that we reeked of perspiration and the innards of a volcano. The jocular family patriarch, however, made it a point to repeatedly call Joe a “pezzo di fango” (literally, a piece of mud, which has even less appealing connotations) as they dragged us around town for a never-ending evening of meals and sightseeing. We probably showered around midnight.
But sulfur is a pesky odor. No matter how many times Joe scrubbed his shorts and T-shirt, the rancid smell clung to the fibers. The sulfur snaked its way into our suitcases, on the airplane and, later, into our washing machine in Chicago. So Joe decided to throw out any clothes that smelled of Vulcano. He tossed them in a bag that soon got buried under something or other. Months passed until the familiar scent resurfaced. I followed my nose to the bag of sulfur-scented garments and realized that we were the proud keepers of an Italian geological phenomenon.
Some people have a piece of the Berlin Wall. We have our pezzo di fango.
END
Next up: Part Two – Vulcano beyond the mud baths
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