All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [47]
I did climb Stromboli on that trip, with a couple of amusing Italian men I met on a hydrofoil zipping between the islands. After a steep and rocky hike to the summit, we watched as molten red lava spewed into the sunset and rolled down the mountain, crashing into the ocean with a hissing boom. It’s a sight I’m forever grateful I didn’t miss. But walking down in the twilight, I knew, as the Professor had, that I’d probably never want to make that trek again. And now I’m not sure I want to return to the Aeolians at all.
I call my friend Giovanna in Bologna. I met her when she was doing a house trade in San Francisco ten years ago; I visited her in Bologna, and she came back and stayed with me for a month, nothing an Italian considers an imposition—really, a favor to a single friend. Giovanna would cook dinner every night, making dishes I didn’t think were possible with American ingredients; it was only when I visited her in Bologna that I realized the dishes could taste even better, just from ingredients grown on Italian soil.
I mention the story idea to Giovanna, the fact that a magazine is going to pay my way to the islands, we can share a hotel room, and they’ll take care of all the meals with a friend. Then I launch into how I’m not sure I should go, if it will spoil the memory to return, how I’m not really up for a trip by myself.
“Dai,” she interrupts me. Come on. “Andiamoci!” she says. Let’s go!
And so I find myself once again in Naples, to meet Giovanna at the dock, where the hydrofoil will take us to the islands. Giovanna, a Giulietta Masina lookalike with the same impish flair, shows up with eggplant-colored hair, orange jeans, and a bright pink sarong for me to wear on the islands. We greet each other in a flurry of kisses on each other’s cheeks.
When the hydrofoil slows down and the islands first come into view, they look dry and inhospitable; they are desolate places where all living things—figs, capers, apricots, rabbits—struggle so for survival that they are bursting with the intense fragrances and flavors of a brief but concentrated life. Suddenly I am hungry: for the spicy perfume of pale pink caper flowers, for fish that swim in turquoise waters, for sweet cherry tomatoes that explode in your mouth like Stromboli, for pasta with fennel and sardines.
We spot the island of Stromboli, its whitewashed houses stacked up by the port. I don’t want to mar the magnificent memory of that place, so we don’t disembark. I remember Stromboli’s charm, though—its narrow streets and its nervous atmosphere in the shadow of the volcano. And then there’s the carnation-colored house with its plaque commemorating the place where Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini had an affair while filming Stromboli. (Previously, Anna Magnani, who had been living with Rossellini and had been promised the lead, overturned a bowl of bucatini with red sauce on his head before fleeing with the crew to another island, Vulcano, to make an equally forgettable film by that name.)
If there were a plaque somewhere in the Aeolians to commemorate a love affair of my own, it would be on Filicudi, one of the remotest and most desolate islands. There, for ten days, I stayed with the French professor in a white house at the top of a steep hill overlooking the port and the other craggy islands beyond. We did nothing but read, swim, make love, and decide where we wanted to eat that day. I always voted for Villa La Rosa, for the pasta of wild fennel fronds and sardines, which tasted exactly like the island’s aromatic sea breeze. As with Stromboli, Filicudi is a place where I can’t return, for fear of spoiling the memory of those magical days. Those days with the Professor were too perfect, that relationship too precious; I don’t want to touch it, to pretend that you can have everything in life over and over again, but preserve it in the amber of memory.
That still leaves five other