Sicily's Secret Island: Pantelleria

September 12, 6:08 PMItaly Culture & Travel ExaminerLucia Mauro

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A typical dammuso. Photo by Lucia Mauro.

Back to Bedrock: Pantelleria
By Lucia Mauro

(Average read time: 7 to 8 minutes)

It doesn't take much for me to become intrigued with a place - especially an obscure one. When I first came across the island of Pantelleria in a guidebook, the words dammusi and passito prompted me to fixate on yet another isolated volcanic patch in the middle of the ocean. It sits alone between Sicily and Tunisia. Though belonging to Sicily, its cuisine (rich in cous cous and preserved lemons) and districts with Arab names (like Khamma and Bukkuram) push Pantelleria historically back to North Africa.

Joe & Lucia at Lo Specchio di Venere.

Dammusi are dome-shaped homes, Arabic in origin, insulated with black lava and divided into small whitewashed alcoves. The stone exteriors consist of brown-and-tan rocks of various shapes fitted together by hand and held in place (for thousands of years) with a simple mixture of soil and water. Undulating roofs, painted with mysterious hieroglyphics, nudge rainwater into attached carved-stone gutters that filter into a cistern - the only source of water on this wind-pummeled, and very literal, desert island. Passito, also called "Pantelleria gold," is an enticing amber-colored dessert wine from the zibibbo grape cultivated across the vast geometric planes of the agricultural Ghirlanda district, bordered by now-empty Byzantine tombs.

L'Arco dell'Elefante. Photo by Lucia Mauro.

So in 2004, my husband Joe and I found ourselves flying from Palermo, Sicily, in a rickety old turbo prop for 40 minutes (versus a five-hour ferry ride from Trapani), to what turned out to be The Flintstones' Bedrock. The entire island has a prehistoric aura. The stone dammusi blend with zigzagging stone walls that line the dusty roads and crawl up the mountains. Wind gusts are so powerful the olive trees grow low to the ground, and the tumbleweed-textured bushes all look like they were fashioned in an upward wave by Don King's hair stylist.

Though clearly an island, Pantelleria has no beaches. Instead the coastline is buffered by enormous boulders. Sunbathers are left to find a tiny square of concrete or rock. One area, Balata dei Turchi, provides a rare smooth surface for lying out, but it's also sheltered by pine trees and thick juniper bushes. Other designated micro-beaches, that can only accommodate a handful of people, are typically reached via long, dangerously sloping, overgrown trails jutting with spiky brambles.

Capri it is not.

Yet Pantelleria captivated us - to the point where Joe and I have returned every year since first landing back in the Stone Age. Over time, what initially appeared a glowering black hole (particularly at night) became like a second home for us.

The island's history reflects Sicily's usual cast of invading ancient civilizations: Carthaginians, Romans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Byzantines - mainly to exploit Pantelleria's abundance of the glass-smooth black stone known as obsidian. We were able to circumnavigate the whole island by car in two hours, but it's not as small as it seems. It's a fully functioning modern community with an airport, hospital, schools, government offices, stores, large expanses of dammusi-packed neighborhoods undergoing restoration, and even a military base. Its abundant natural resources - from hot springs to cave saunas - make you feel like you're living in a spa.

But, quite frankly, Pantelleria is not what I would call a lush or beautiful island. It's craggy and mountainous with hardly any animals. We observed only cats, dogs, salamanders, ring-neck doves and black-shelled beetles. Another irony: Pantelleria is no fisherman's paradise. Its aquatic position allows for some fishing - but not the best. So the islanders often buy frozen fish (still a shock to me) shipped erratically from Trapani or Palermo. It's really an island of farmers drawn to the interior, where they grow capers and olives and the prized zibibbo grape.

I had read that Pantelleria has few hotels (though that's quickly changing). It's best to rent a dammuso for the authentic Panteschi experience. I also read that at the main port, people advertise their dammusi on flyers taped on various buildings. So Joe and I didn't make any reservations. We also thought Pantelleria was small enough to navigate on foot - until we actually saw the death-defying topography.

Fortunately, while we were staying with our friends in Altavilla Milicia, Sicily, their neighbor, a botanist, told us he had a colleague who lives on Pantelleria: Bice Gabriele, who works for the island's forestry service. The no-nonsense woman with a robust Anna Magnani demeanor proved to be our saving grace - and became a dear friend.

It was Bice in her olive-green forest-ranger uniform, who met us at Pantelleria's airport (more air strip than airport), pushed her way to the front of the line so we could rent our Fiat Panda, and motioned for us to follow her in her official car - the revolving orange squad-car light on the roof making us feel like we were getting a police escort. We stopped at her own dammuso to meet her affable husband Gaetano (an Italian Ed Harris with a silver earring) and various relatives and friends. We rented a dammuso the Gabriele family owns nearby. It's a stone's throw (truly) from the airport and faces the ocean on one side and the curled barbed wire of the military zone on the other. Yet it's a surprisingly tranquil spot.

Bice took us into town to stock up on groceries and showed us the only portside restaurant, La Risacca, that was open on a Sunday night. After plopping the keys and a plastic colander of fresh-picked green grapes in my hands, she gave us a quick tour of our spacious dammuso, with its two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, bathroom and large patio. She stressed that water is so coveted here, every time we leave we must turn off the water tank (which also was attached to a generator).

Strangely, Joe and I felt like we came home. Over time, we've worked out a system for grocery shopping. We prefer the markets of the big port in front of the refurbished 12th century Barbacane castle built by Frederick II of Swabia. It's a wonderful piecemeal experience: chicken and sausage at the macelleria; prosciutto, pecorinio cheese and olives at the salumeria; wine and barbecue coals at the mini-mart (where the old men sit and chat outside); and the ZaZa (which we've dubbed Joey ZaZa) produce stand for eggplant, tomatoes, fennel and oranges.

We buy our bread at a panificio at the top of the steps, just past a homemade shrine to Padre Pio, and for a while, I thought the bakery's friendly red-haired signora had supernatural powers. She seemed to be everywhere, until we realized she had an identical twin sister, who runs the Sicilian-inflected Panuzzu u Palermitanu bakery (known for its tuna-caper-black-olive pizza by the slice) on the port. We always say "Ciao" to a frisky mynah bird named Saddam outside the pet shop, and hang out with some of the sailors (one in a floral sarong) and fishermen (and their scraggly dogs - some wearing T-shirts) at the port's Bar Tikki Rikki or Bar Aurora, the latter run by the amiable brother-sister team of Battista and Sabrina Policardo.

These days, we whiz around the curving roads (one time racing a car full of nuns in wind-blowing veils; another time with a German Shepherd chasing us), take short cuts around the zibibbo fields and Neolithic rock piles, and can rattle off directions to Scauri and Bue Marino as if they're neighborhoods in our home town of Chicago. But it wasn't always so easy.

That first night, after enjoying a sunset dinner of a mixed-fish grill and pasta with pesto pantesco (a sauce of tomato, garlic, capers and basil) at La Risacca, Joe and I missed a key turnoff in the pitch blackness and found ourselves on the opposite end of the island from the airport. With only our headlights to guide us, and encountering row upon row of identical dammusi, it was impossible to get our bearings. The absence of signs didn't help and, as if on cue, lightning flashed across the sky. We envisioned ourselves sleeping in any one of the scattered abandoned stone huts, then shuddered at the many horror-movie scenarios the idea conjured up.

We managed to get ourselves to the parking lot of a restaurant called La Pergola, where all of Pantelleria seemed to have congregated that night. I went in and asked for directions to the airport but realized our dammuso didn't even have an address. Our only marker was its green mailbox. The people competing to give directions only confused me more. Once back in the car, I spotted a middle-aged man and thought I would give it another shot. When I asked him which way the airport was, he looked at me quizzically and said, "This isn't the airport, it's a restaurant."

Okay, then. So we called Bice on our cell phone. She said that directions (and even a GPS system) would be useless. Instead she and her family hopped into their car, met us and drove ahead of us all the way to our dammuso. We could have been on the moon - the terrain was completely foreign, with the endless stones, craters and mountains indistinguishable from each other.

But we survived. The next day the sun shone, and we were awakened by a tan kitten scratching at our front door. She later brought along her crafty siblings, and Joe and I succumbed by driving to the mini-mart and stocking up on cat food.

During our first stay on Pantelleria, Bice gave us many personal tours of the island's natural landmarks, including the sesi, domed funerary monuments constructed without mortar during the Bronze Age. In this field of spiky ficchi d'India and strange rock formations, two rocks poke out in the shape of trotting horses. We also descended the stairs off the side of the road to the Cave of Calypso, where Joe and I submerged ourselves in small square heated pools. We cooled off in the ocean, then dried ourselves off on a small patch of rock crowded with men in Speedos and bare-breasted women.

Bice alternated as our guide with a forestry colleague from Palermo, Umberto Osso (literally Umberto Bone, whom everyone calls "Umbi"), who was vacationing on the island. An unapologetic chain smoker, Umbi - with his dark slacks, dark shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows and dark Ray Ban aviator sunglasses - loved stopping every few meters for a coffee and a smoke - his favorite spot being Bar U Friscu, a bamboo-covered café in the hip elevated Scauri neighborhood.

At one point, we met up with Bice's husband Gaetano, a runner and owner of one of the island's frozen-fish stores. He and Joe got into an animated conversation about marathons. When Joe said he's been jogging about eight kilometers every morning, Umbi interrupted, "Maybe one day, I'll join you. But instead of running eight kilometers, I'll follow you and smoke a cigarette for every kilometer."

One afternoon, Umbi insisted we see L'Arco dell'Elefante - a phenomenal rock formation in the shape of an elephant with its trunk lapping water from the sea. As we drove, he told us how every year he spends one to two months on Pantelleria and has no desire to go anywhere else. "Pantelleria has character," said Umbi while dodging speeding cars and, in Italian, shouting the equivalent of "Crazy kids - quit hogging the road!" "I like that there are no beaches. It's rugged and wild with a sense of history. You can keep Lampedusa and Ischia - all you can do there is lie on the beach like a baccalà."

After pulling off to the side of a precipice, we all surveyed the elephant arch in awe. Then Umbi began talking about all the new construction going on, and Joe and I - always eager to check out the Italian real estate market - later casually drove around looking for vendesi signs and jotting down the phone numbers.

Umbi came with us a few times, but always lamented how disrespectful new builders were toward authentic dammusi structures. They retained the shape of the dammuso (traditionally modest in size) but essentially turned it into a gargantuan McMansion. One company was shut down in mid-construction for building too close to the water; another created a subdivision along a stretch of desert cluttered with pre-fab dammusi. Still others were trying to sell off uninhabitable agrarian dammusi (used to store farm implements) at high prices for refurbishment.

More recently, Joe and I decided to delve deeper into Panteschi real estate. While in Palermo, we visited a friend's lawyer who had contacts on Pantelleria. We were interested in looking at a dammuso with a lot of land being sold for an unbelievably low price in the protected agricultural zone. The lawyer - who resembled Armand Assante in The Odyssey but wore tight jeans, a button-down shirt and tie - scribbled a phone number and said we should ask for Frank, which he enunciated as "Fraaaaaank."

Then, just before we left, the attorney told us to "look for the Panda Rosa." Joe and I burst out laughing, picturing in our minds Hoss and Little Joe on Bonanza's Ponderosa. He meant that Fraaaaaank had a red Fiat Panda parked in front of the dammuso.

Once back on Pantelleria, we phoned Frank. He gave us directions as best he could for a place located in one of the remotest interior parts of the island accessed by driving between narrow stone walls. We kept edging closer but still could not locate the Panda Rosa in the midst of the endless zibibbo fields. I called back Frank, who finally revealed the secret landmark: "I'm just after the house with the chicken on the roof." I asked, "Chicken? What kind of chicken." Frank replied, "I don't know - a chicken. You can't miss it." No sooner did he say this, Joe and I turned a corner and faced a big Foghorn Leghorn-like chicken weather vein.

Frank turned out to be a French hippie, who was staying here with his toddler son. The land was certainly abundant - more like a serious Napa Valley-sized vineyard. The house, though, was a mere shack. The sole bedroom had such a low ceiling, Joe remained in a permanent crouch. There were only two more rooms: a kitchenette and a bathroom with just a toilet and shower (no sink). Frank regaled his "spartan lifestyle" as his son ran around barefoot oblivious to the thorny branches he was trampling. He then poured us African tea and served us fresh figs on a broken amphora from Punic times he found buried in the garden.

"This is the life," Frank beamed. "You know, man, this is how you become one with nature."

That's all fine and good. But Joe and I are products of an urban environment. I asked, "And what do you do for lights at night?" Frank opened his arms wide and said, "Who needs electricity when you have so many stars in the sky?" It's a beautiful thought, but I really don't know what I would do living in such a secluded hovel with no electricity whatsoever...not even streetlights.

Frank marked the end of our dabblings in Panteschi real estate. Instead Joe and I return and stay at Bice's now-expanded dammuso. It's our home away from home. We have dinner at each other's dammusi and have met more of Bice's friends. One hefty, warm-hearted man named Enzo - a Panteschi firefighter - often stops by for coffee in his orange fireman's jumpsuit. We've asked him about parts of the island that look like war zones. These bunkers on hills and along the coast date back to World War II when Mussolini made Pantelleria a Fascist military base. It was nearly bombed into oblivion by the Allied forces.

"Can you believe there are still un-detonated bombs in the ground?" asked Enzo matter-of-factly, while adding more sugar to his espresso.

Our conversation often turns to the latest property for sale, including one crumbling feudal estate down the road. Enzo says it once belonged to an old aristocratic Sicilian family (Joe and I immediately pictured Burt Lancaster in The Leopard) that suffered great tragedy, moved away and allowed the house to fall into ruin. One night, he managed to get the keys and we crept in with flashlights - our faint light hitting an ancient cobweb-encrusted kitchen with giant rusty basins and a stable, practically disintegrating to dust.

Joe and I like to take day trips to the hot springs of Gadir, not far from Giorgio Armani's sprawling dammusi-and-palm-tree-lined villaggio. We also make the trek to the sequestered Bagno Asciutto (or natural cave sauna) - the heat so intense it can't be far from the Underworld. And we go for long walks around Pantelleria's mythic hydrothermal lake: Lo Specchio di Venere (Mirror of Venus). Legend has it that Venus used the translucent light-green water as a mirror before her dates with Bacchus (who was no doubt already guzzling goblets of passito).

This lake is quite mysterious. It doesn't feed into a larger body of water, but sits in the middle of a volcanic crater. One particularly windswept day at Lo Specchio di Venere, Joe and I saw four elderly men in Speedos rubbing the lake's fango mud on their bodies. All around us the terrain looked like the Bronte's Moors, except for the giant cacti, and a stray yellow lab trailed us the whole way - his fur covered with patches of mud from the lake and his sage eyes identical to the water's greenish hue. Then I swear he vanished into thin air.

Nearby, archaeologists have partially unearthed a Phoenician temple still under scaffolding and stuck behind an unsightly fence as the excavators await the necessary permits to continue digging. Considering Italian red tape, the permit may not come through until the next century.

On Pantelleria, we feel a casual coexistence with the spirit world and long-gone civilizations. It's so much more than a sea-and-sand getaway. Actually, it doesn't even have sand. But it has an eccentric beach-community vibe - best personified by a wild-and-crazy fisherman, Franco, who takes groups on boat excursions around the island.

Franco (a dead ringer for Van Halen's Sammy Hagar) can easily be found at the port - his electrified blonde-highlighted hair bursting under a crocheted skullcap and a cell phone glued to his ear. One slightly overcast day, Joe and I took one of these six-hour excursions, together with a group of Italian tourists. It gradually evolved into lighthearted, innocent and ridiculously profane fun.

The wind picked up, so all of us were clutching our windbreakers as we set out on Franco's powerboat. One kind woman from Rome saw me shivering and gave me her scarf. Franco, on the other hand, was bare-chested and proudly pointed out rocks shaped like penguins, dinosaurs and camels. From this vantage point, we could see the rainbow-colored ridges of the craggy rocks along Pantelleria's coastline.

By early afternoon, the sun came out and Franco began preparing lunch: he basically lit a garbage can full of coals on the deck with a blow torch and slapped between two grates a bunch of small fish and slices of bread. We all gathered around a communal table and sat on plastic stools. While the food was cooking, some of the passengers opted to swim, including an old man who donned a wet suit, dove into the clear water and grabbed a few spindly sea urchins he threw on deck - to his wife's fussy irritation. The water frolicking was cut short by a vicious school of jelly fish ("meduse") that began feasting on some of the divers.

We all ate the delicious fresh fish with our hands and drank Franco's potent homemade wine as the boat bobbed around an ancient cove, where occasional flotsam and jetsam from tankers (like big red oil canisters or a tire or two) floated by. Then the show began.

Franco stripped down to a leopard-skin thong and proceeded to do acrobatic flips on a suspended bar. Previously, he was giving us a guided tour of the many "grotte," or caves, around the island. As soon as he hung upside down from the bar - his hairy crack too close for comfort - Joe asked Franco, "Scusi, ma come si chiama questa grotta?" ("Excuse me, what do you call this cave?") The boat roared with laughter.

"Il caffe!" Franco exclaimed absent-mindedly as he unwound his body from the pole. "I almost forgot." So still in his thong, he made coffee in a mocha pot and personally poured it for everyone. Then he brought out a microphone and began belting out Italian pop songs and shamelessly gyrating before Homer's wine-dark sea. That caught the attention of the Coast Guard, whose boat pulled alongside ours. Instead of turning down the volume, or at least putting on some clothes, Franco blared club music, shouted into a megaphone and thrust his hips in front of the Coast Guard's now hysterically laughing faces. The party continued for at least three more hours. Lovers of the absurd, Joe and I had found the island of our dreams.

That night, while sipping passito on the patio of our dammuso - kitties scurrying around our feet - Joe and I looked up at the crystal-clear sky and saw a shooting star. Maybe Frank, the French hippie, was right: Modern conveniences, like electricity, suddenly seem irrelevant on this Prospero-esque island illuminated by a million constellations - a natural planetarium where the gods appear each night. END