The Aeolian Islands apparently rose from the sea after a series of prehistoric volcanic eruptions and no doubt got artfully rearranged by the wind god Aeolus for whom they are named. For close to fifteen years, my husband Joe and I have been letting the warm breezes jostle us across these distinct land masses, seven of which are habitable: Lipari, Salina, Vulcano, Panarea, Stromboli, Alicudi and Filicudi. Beyond a wealth of sun-soaked beaches, we’ve explored archaeological sites and climbed volcanoes. We even spent time house hunting (fortunately to no avail, since our home-owning dreams were cut short just as the economic tailspin began its seemingly irreversible downspiral).
Fanned out across the Tyrrhenian Sea, between Calabria on mainland Italy and Milazzo, Sicily, the Aeolian Islands embody a mythic spirit and fragmented vestiges of ancient civilizations, including the Greeks, Romans and Arabs. Yet each one emits a unique history, character and ambience.
We’ve always made Lipari, the largest of the islands, our base. And though it has the most commercialized sheen, with two ports (Marina Lunga and Marina Corta) teeming with ferries and excursion boats, and a lively main drag (Corso Vittorio Emanuele), it maintains a certain unpretentious lived-in sensibility (at least during the off-season). For our first visit, we stayed at Hotel Villa Augustus, a British colonial-style relic with a mahogany-and-brocade drawing-room lobby and a delightfully extroverted owner. It’s a short walk from Marina Lunga and always billowing with purple bougainvillea.
Over the years, however, we’ve settled on a crumbling belle époque B&B, Pensione Neri, with its distressed cranberry walls and ballooning rust-specked white balconies that resemble the puffy frocks of medieval troubadours. It stands across from a downward-sloped necropolis of erratically positioned tombs guarded by ring-neck doves. The proprietors have a soft spot for stray animals, and we’ve enjoyed continental breakfasts on the patio with an inquisitive white rabbit named Nuvola (Cloud) and a sleepy yellow-Lab mix called Lemon.
While it’s natural to pair an island vacation with an endless beach idle, Joe and I also relish climbing out of our chaise lounges to get at least a manageable history fix. Lipari offers such a satisfying balance. The island is presided over by a massive archaeological park within an elevated expanse of fortified Spanish walls built over Greek foundations. Here the architectural layering, so common to diverse occupiers, visibly crisscrosses major swaths of conquest. This area serves as a substantive chronological concentration of those eras…even offering insight into the islands’ geological birth.
A wide stone staircase leads up to Lipari’s ruined castle, which is attached to the Baroque Cathedral of St. Bartholomew (the island’s patron saint) and rows of crumbling buildings that house ancient artifacts. On the surrounding burnished grass, empty sarcophagi rest with their lids half-open as if the dead can come and go at will. The sea frames this somewhat lopsided graveyard, which also overlooks a reconstructed elliptical Greek theater.
We entered through a heavy gate of Norman origins and followed a darkened tunnel to arrive at a Roman fortification, where a travertine statue of a male slave kneels in back-bending agony. The angle of the sun through severe openings in the fortress cast fierce rays in the shape of spears onto this pained soul – as if the sculpture were being impaled by cosmic forces. This castle has been continuously inhabited for 6,000 years. Every conqueror – Greek, Roman, Norman and Spanish – has left a mark. The Normans built this structure out of stones taken from the Greek tower dating to the Fourth Century BC.
The Aeolian Archaeology Museum sent us on an orderly path of historical revelation. We felt like we were in the midst of an ongoing archaeological dig. Geology figures so prominently in Aeolian life that two buildings focus on vulcanology. These dramatic exhibits show how volcanic activity extracted Lipari’s prized natural resources (obsidian, pumice and sulfur). The Paleontology area displays the preserved remains of a tortoise believed to have crept along the rocky shores about 120,000 years ago.
One section is dedicated to the earliest civilizations sustained by Lipari’s wealth of obsidian and pumice from the Middle Neolithic period, and progresses through the Greeks and Romans. Just outside these neatly catalogued shelves of pottery, votive lamps, funerary urns and curly-maned animal statues, a cobalt-blue sky engulfed the Fifth Century AD Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, whose inflated domes were clearly of the Byzantine tradition.
We took a leisurely stroll through the Bronze Age, ancient Greek necropoli, and crusty amphorae, the latter collected from countless Aeolian shipwrecks. There also was evidence of an Egyptian and early Sicilian presence. Here one can observe how Christianity gradually swallowed up pagan belief systems. For instance, a vase featuring a Madonna and Child was bordered by high priestesses offering an animal sacrifice to the gods. Those same priestesses later turn up as angels on pottery illustrating Bible scenes.
And that fact brought us neatly to the towering Cathedral of St. Bartholomew – at the summit of the thick staircase (similar to Rome’s Chiesa di Trinita dei Monti at the top of the Spanish Steps). According to Aeolian lore, the martyred saint was buried in Asia where he was worshiped until a pagan uprising led to his body being placed in a heavy casket and thrown into the sea. Somehow his casket washed up on Lipari’s shores. The locals reburied St. Bartholomew and built a church around his grave.
The church represents a bold crossover of styles (a common motif throughout Italy). Its bell tower was heavily damaged during a 16th century Turkish pirate raid (another common motif, especially on Italy’s southern islands). Rebuilding combined Gothic and Baroque elements, with the more ornate aesthetic dominating. Most striking is the elaborate ceiling fresco. On one panel, an Amazonian sibyl drives a spike into the head of grimacing warrior. A blood-splattered crucifix is suspended above the altar guarded by a black-hooded Madonna. Joe and I left the artistic carnage behind us and, instead, walked outside among the stoic colonnaded remains of a 12th century Norman cloister.
But being on an island, we were soon lured back to the sea. From the peak of a Spanish fortress, we gazed out at fishing boats bobbing in Marina Corta. The sunlight seemed to snatch their colors – tangerine orange, coral pink, teal green – and scatter them across the calm horizon. After winding back down to the ubiquitous Corso Vittorio Emanuele, we stopped in a bakery whose pastries resembled the honey-saturated, phyllo-dough texture of baklava. We bought a bag of thick biscotti chock full of currants, pinenuts and nutmeg. We later dunked them in the island’s beloved malvasia wine.
Because Joe and I have spent so much time on Lipari and its volcanic compatriots, it’s difficult to chronicle our most memorable meals and encounters with the locals. But some certainly stand out.
More recently, during our dabblings in island real estate – after a particularly disappointing look at some tightly packed concrete condos in an overcrowded neighborhood we view as an ex-pat wasteland – we stopped at an unobtrusive pizza al taglio (usually the best kind) named Qui, Quo, Qua near Marina Corta. In our usual name-altering fashion, Joe and I now refer to it as Pizzeria Queequeg. But the most startling draw was the owner, a gray-haired, gray-bearded man who looked exactly like Giuseppe Garibaldi. He appeared quite honored that we thought he resembled Italy’s Hero of Two Worlds and, over some of the most flavorful tomato-cheese pizza and meat-and-pea-filled arancini, Bartolo (as he was called) recounted uncannily how his father once had strong ties to Argentina – a country very familiar to the poncho-wearing Garibaldi. Even more intriguing was the fact that Bartolo and his kind Brescia-born wife Franca were fervent members of the Bha’i faith and have traveled to various Bha’i temples around the world – the photographs sharing wall space with Franca’s delicately crocheted linens.
On another occasion, at the outdoor seating area of Ristorante Flor del Canela, we were served fresh seafood delicacies -- against an unexpected zydeco soundtrack -- by a bleached-blonde Anita Ekberg lookalike and a man with a gray beard and ponytail (and a puffy-white shirt to boot!) whom we rechristened Mick Fleetwood. Joe chose a spicy pasta with tomatoes, calamari and shrimp. I so enjoyed my linguine with mussels and clams that I kept splashing my blouse with olive oil as I rolled my fork around the wiggly pasta. We ended with a classic Aeolian salad: tuna, potatoes, black olives, tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and capers the size of grapes.
During our relaxing meal, surrounded by couples and families, I had an unexpected freeze-frame moment. Now, it may have been the effects of sun, vino bianco and all those capers. But, for a split second, I felt as though life shifted into slow motion. A black-and-white springer spaniel, in the middle of the Corso, got caught in a melee of motorbikes, toddlers and heavily tanned people with their arms entwined. Then our malvasia dessert wine arrived, and everything returned to a normal tempo.
Then there are the simple pleasures of grabbing a few slices of mushroom-black olive pizza at a sparse carryout on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. One time, Joe and I held our tasty snack between pieces of Italy’s notorious non-absorbent napkins. We opened our cans of Coke and rested them on an old water pump and listened to a guitarist performing Sicilian ballads in a small piazza. Then we stopped for a Sicilian cassata at the decadent Pasticceria Subba. Here, we caught sight of a hefty woman throwing a tennis ball across the busy main street for a pack of German shepherds to catch – miraculously, the racing dogs did not disrupt the steady stream of strollers, bicycles and people taking a leisurely passeggiata.
One of our favorite dishes in Italy is pollo allo spiedo, juicy rotisserie chicken (cut in pieces with especially high-powered kitchen shears), and a side order of roasted potatoes. Joe and I had read a very flattering review of a macelleria (butcher shop) that also served a delectable pollo allo spiedo. The inviting aroma alone convinced us that this low-key establishment was the place for the dish we were craving. We entered and struck up a conversation with the owner, who doubles as a journalist. When we mentioned that we heard his chicken was the best in town, he puffed up his chest and presented us with a book of traditional Aeolian recipes: “You speak well of our chicken,” he responded. “Here take this book as my thank you.” We walked anxiously back to Pensione Neri with our hot, oily takeout bag. A young girl at the hotel brought us a tablecloth and flatware for us to dine in the now-empty breakfast area. We savored one of our most memorable meals at a humble wooden table under the soft glow of a gaslight with Lemon, the hotel’s labrador mascot, dozing at our feet.
But we ate perhaps our most sensual and characteristic Aeolian meal at a sequestered restaurant, the Moroccan-inspired E Pulera, a few steps from Pensione Neri. With its abundance of hookahs, hanging ferns, multi-patterned rugs, plush cushions and pointy brass oil lamps, it felt like a sultan’s villa. Here we were reminded of Lipari’s historic ties to the Arab and Greek worlds. Our appetizers consisted of little bowls of caponata and olives; a mixed grill of tuna, shrimp and squid drizzled with olive oil, cherry tomatoes and the island’s indigenous flavor-bursting capers; and crostini slathered with pureed eggplant. The maccheroni di Pulera also featured a puree of tomatoes, eggplant, almonds, capers and cream – sprinkled with ricotta salata (never parmigiano). My zitti were tossed with a shrimp and zucchini paste. We ended with a selection of phyllo-pistacchio pastries and the slightly medicinal malvasia elixir.
Joe and I felt as if we had tasted centuries of invasion, occupation and a blending of remote cultures. It’s what makes us return so often to the Aeolian Islands. They’re not your typical beach getaways. After our subtly luxurious meal at E Pulera, we sort of slinked back to Pensione Neri – undoubtedly joined along the moonlit road by many ancient souls from the necropolis below.
END
Next up: Salina
Related Article: Too Much Solitude: House Hunting on Alicudi
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