Where Italy's Wild Magic Abides
The Tradition of Living Beautifully, Issue #21
A quick note before we begin: As many of you know, my family and I have been in Italy since mid August. The trip has been part vacation, part work, and part reclamation of ancestral heritage. The vacation part is pretty self explanatory. The work part is my collaboration, along with my good friend John Viola of The Italian American Podcast, with Shaye Elliott of The Elliott Homestead. If you haven’t already heard me talk about this on Instagram, you can read about it here. The ancestral heritage reclamation I write about below, as well as in upcoming issues right here on Substack.
I’m so excited to share that this week Shaye released the first of fifteen (!!) videos from our time in Sicily on her massively successful YouTube channel, The Elliott Homestead. You can watch us in Palermo at Caffè Stagnitta, learning about roasting coffee the old-fashioned way from a family that’s been in the business for more than one-hundred years. If you’re not already subscribed to her channel, take a second to do so so you don’t miss any of the episodes to come. Also, just a quick reminder I have my own YouTube channel, slightly neglected as of late, which I plan to revive with video of my own from our two-months long voyage in Sicily and the rest of Italy. You can subscribe here.
Alicudi: Where the Wild Things Are
This is Part 1 in a multi-part series on Alicudi.
In the end of August, the heat on the island of Sicily was in the high 90s, which actually felt like the high nine millions. Even the locals kept apologizing, in the customary hospitality of Sicilians, that this was one of the hottest summers in memory, as if lamenting they couldn’t control the weather and ameliorate our discomfort. Alicudi, situated off of Sicily’s northern coast, the most remote of the seven volcanic islands known as the Aeolian Islands, felt as though we’d left Italy and landed smack in the center of the sun.
More than 20 years ago, these islands were listed as an UNESCO World Heritage Site for providing “an outstanding record of volcanic island-building and destruction, and ongoing volcanic phenomena.” While it isn’t the smallest of the islands in kilometers (Panarea wins that title), Aliciudi is definitely the wildest, the least populated, the island still draped not only in an ancient history, but an ancient pace.
It’s also my husband’s ancestral home. It’s the land his great-grandparents left, along with his young grandfather, our son’s namesake, to sail to Brooklyn in 1920. Until the 1990s, Alicudi remained without electricity, and even today, water used in the delicate plumbing system (you have to discard your toilet paper in waste baskets) is poured into the cistern from jugs shipped from the mainland. There are no roads. No automobiles. A handful of mules carry the luggage of visitors up to their rooms via a series of steep, stone stairs. A whole lot of stairs, which begin at the waterfront and slope their way to the very top. They are ancient, and while the locals (only about 100 people live there year round, a number that swells in the summertime) elegantly take the stairs without the slightest reveal of sweat, I was drenched at every turn, with a sun induced headache for three days that sat just above my right eyebrow. It goes without saying that air conditioning is a not an amenity on Alicudi. Doors stay open; the sea breeze, when there is one, billows the curtains hung above entrance ways. Tiny geckos scurry in abundance, and the ocean stretches out from this remote place at every angle, glimmering into the horizon.
Alicudi is beautiful. It’s beautiful in the way folk tales are beautiful, part whimsical, part menacing. In the way the crumbling facades of Italy’s cities are beautiful, where the ancient reveals itself beneath the wear of time. It’s beautiful in the way we can imagine nature once was—abundant, fecund, overgrown in the most organic way, alive, uninterrupted. On Alicudi, the beauty feels visceral. You can’t deny the presence of nature and all the ancient things it holds. You can’t deny that you are small, and the island in comparison is grand—grand in stature, in force, and in wisdom from centuries of existence. Alicudi is humbling. And as one of the few places on earth still largely untouched by human expansion, let alone the juggernaut of the tourism trade (there is no shopping stretch, no boutiques, and just a scattering of lodging and restaurants), it’s a place where you can still really touch what life may have been like for your ancestors. It’s a place where you can still feel the isolation they felt, still experience the harsh yet stunning environment they lived within. You can walk as they walked and know that the paths are, almost certainly, exactly as they were in their times.
This wasn’t our first trip to Alicudi. Four years ago, before our son was born, we made our first voyage to visit the home of my husband’s people, now of course my people as well, and my son’s. We were there in early June, and the weather was perfect. I also booked us at one of the bed and breakfasts situated just at the top of the first flight of stairs. This trip, however, unwittingly, the house I booked was nearly at the top. As our host, who greeted us at the port, kept ascending and ascending, walking stick in hand, I looked at my husband, toddler son, and the friends we’d brought along—John Viola of The Italian American Podcast and Shaye Elliott of The Elliott Homestead, along with her husband and eldest daughter—and mouthed, I’m sorry, as sweat flooded over my lips.
But nobody minded. In fact, everyone fell in love with the island and enjoyed every second of it, despite the difficult circumstances. Who could blame them. You won’t go to many places like it, where nature feels both ethereal and also like something that might devour you whole. Where the people are friendly but also, like most island people, insular, with the secrets of the land tucked behind their eyes.
On our first trip, I asked any local I struck up a conversation with if they might know where my husband’s great-grandparents’ house stood. When you’re searching for your ancestral roots, being able to speak the language is a very big advantage—it not only garners more information, it earns you the trust of the strangers to whom you are speaking.
My husband’s great-grandfather was supposedly the island’s falegname, or carpenter, purportedly the builder of all the doors on the island. This bit of information, along with our last name, jogged the local wisdom in their minds and we were pointed in the direction of the home, as well as the adjacent shop where he worked. Through old family photos we’d brought along, we confirmed that yes, this was it. We peeked through the dirt darkened windows. Tried to see inside through the splintered frames. We stared at the view his family would have stared at every day—the sea, folding out for what must have felt like toward forever. Of course, we were disappointed to have come all that way and not of been able to go inside. We were even told by a couple locals that a man held the key on the nearby island of Lipari. If they’d known we were coming, they could’ve secured it for us. Alas, we left with our photos and our memories, grateful to have walked where his ancestors had.
But this trip, I was determined. This trip, I began asking the host of the house we were renting weeks before we even left for Italy. Could she help? Did she know of the key? Could she talk to Silvio, the oldest life-long resident on the island, and ask if he remembered us? She wasn’t able to locate the house key and seemed unaware of its owner, but she had located the man who had the keys to the adjacent shop. When we disembarked from the hydrofoil that brought us from Palermo, we were introduced to Simonè and made plans to meet him at the shop early the next morning.
That night I was so drained, as was the baby, that I stayed behind as he slept while everyone else began the brave descendent in the darkness (flashlights in hand) to find something to eat. In the morning, they told how on the brutal walk back up they took a wrong turn. Realizing they were lost in the dark, hot, exhausted, in the middle of a volcanic island, they stopped to figure out what to do, when just then two older women suddenly appeared from the blackness. One of them spoke English in a fine British accent. Turns out she had married a distant relation of my husband’s. They talked for several minutes, and he explained that his grandfather had left the island as a boy. The woman, Jessica, knew of his family. She had been coming to Alicudi for decades and shared stories of what she’d heard through the years from others. Then she set them on the right path, and they made it home.
John kept saying to me, “I really wish you were there. You would have loved her. The way she spoke. The stories she was telling. Her demeanor. I kept thinking, Dolores would love this…”
I made a sad face and shrugged. There was a moment, lost, that life would never recreate. We quickly finished our espresso, needing to head off to meet Simonè. Still exhausted and tired, my husband and I had a moment where we debated cancelling, and not going after all. Then, pushed by the wild energies that famously fly around Alicudi, our minds snapped to, knowing no amount of exhaustion could get in the way of this experience; we dressed the baby, and with John in tow, not one to miss something like this, set back onto the stairs and trekked in the direction of my husband’s ancestral home.
Simonè, true to his word, was waiting for us outside the shop. It was very kind of him to meet us. He, too, had to take those stairs in the heat, and he did so out of generosity, expecting nothing in return. The shop, inside, was shaped like a dome and very worn with time. While our toddler ran around the stone floors, and we tried to keep him from cobwebs and bits of debris, my husband and I took in the realization that we were standing where his ancestors had worked. Here, in part, is where they labored to feed the people that eventually created him.
There is something indescribable, some kind of electric knowing in your blood, when you return to a place your people once inhabited. I don’t know many things, but I know that my husband’s great-grandfather never imagined his great-great-grandson would some day travel to Alicudi and stand in his wood shop. We could feel all kinds of converging in that space—the room, its knowing yet silent walls, the next generation, young and just at the start of all things, the past, us, the gateway through which both currently travel, the land, weird and pure and burningly magical, it was all we could do not to weep. We walked out, and there waited John, one of my dearest friends in this world as well as our son’s godfather, and it seemed just perfectly aligned that he would be there with us at such a moment. His face was somber yet illuminated.
This is amazing, he said.
We thanked Simonè and watched as he locked up the shop. We were ready to leave when a woman appeared below, taking the steps slowly and smartly. She held a walking stick, her gray-white hair pulled carefully back into a proper bun. She wore a turquoise dress that fell nearly to her ankles, and a sensible, black leather purse draped across her body. It was Jessica.
I could immediately see what John had been referring to, and I listened joyfully as she stopped to tell us a few more stories she knew about my husband’s family. My friends had encountered her on the opposite end of the island; how odd to run into her again so soon. I heard John say once more, Amazing. We told Jessica, in turn, that we were so grateful to see the shop, yet what a shame we again wouldn’t be able to see the house. Alicudi isn’t an easy place to get to; it’s not a place you pop by often. Who knew when, if ever, we’d be back.
“But Collet lives right here,” said Jessica matter of factly, “she owns the house now, she has the key.”
She disappeared for a moment, and Collet, a tall, sleek French woman, an artist we were soon to learn, appeared through a white stucco archway. Jessica explained who we were and asked on our behalf if she would let us into the house.
Of course, Collet said, also with great generosity, and as she slipped away to retrieve the key, Jessica, in a hurry to get to the port, bid us goodbye. We watched her disappear around a turn of steps, our mouths still slightly agape at all that continued to unfold this morning, and John leaned close to me and whispered, This is the Holy Spirit…
I felt the truth of that hit in my stomach. And it seemed appropriate, especially in a place like Alicudi, which has a long history of the otherworldly, the mystical, the fantastical, converging on its shores. Collet reappeared, and we turned to walk back down to the house’s front door, our hearts slightly pounding, our heads shaking in disbelief as we looked to one another, the emotion and wonder of it all in crescendo, teetering on the edges of our eyes…
I’ll write more about Alicudi’s magical history, as well as my husband’s ancestral home and the things that unfolded from there, in Part 2, the next installment. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, please consider subscribing today to be sure you receive access to the next installments, as well as more behind-the-scenes content from my trip with Shaye and John.
Thanks for being here with me.
-Dolores.
Thank you so much for sharing such an intimate moment and allowing us the beauty of honoring your ancestors and the gift of their lives with you💜The photos mean everything.