This is Part 2 of a two-part series on the Italian island of Alicudi, situated off of Sicily’s northern coast, the most remote of the seven volcanic islands known as the Aeolian Islands. These islands are listed as an UNESCO World Heritage Site for providing “an outstanding record of volcanic island-building and destruction, and ongoing volcanic phenomena.” Alicudi is also my husband’s ancestral home. I strongly suggest you read Part 1 before reading this if you haven’t already! You can read it here.
They say the women flew at night. They called them maiara. They may have been witches, or maybe they weren’t, but if they were, in the morning they were simply wives again, mothers again. There were trances, visions, flying women who traversed the wide blue sea—a trip hours by boat to the mainland even today, let alone in the olden days—to have adventures and shop in Calabria and the bustling city of Palermo. They returned with bags full of treats and trinkets; glistening things of which poor people like them only dreamt.
The island is isolated. Day in and day out the wind off the sea wraps itself around the land, and when the wind quiets there is silence. Cacti sprout figs you have to pick with a gloved hand, or risk injury. Succulent vines meander across chipped stonewalls, blooming delicate yellow as well as leathery purple flowers. Carob trees dangle dark pods above narrow walkways. The island is beautiful, unmistakably so, but in the end, you can’t eat beauty. Poor, starving, ill on a remote inactive volcano off the northern coast of Sicily, they say the flying women returned from their night excursions with little bottles of perfume, sacks of precious grain, lard, candy and pieces of silk. But they could do more than shop; they could also perform magical acts—cast the evil eye on those who crossed them, sink fishing boats, and, at the same turn, heal the sick.
My husband’s paternal family left this island in the 1920s. We can only wonder if his ancestors were among the maiara. If they were, it’s likely no one would have talked about it; not here in America, where they wouldn’t even teach the next generation to speak Italian, let alone Sicilian. Not in America, where they were determined to sift the hardship of Alicudi from memory and blot it from the lives of their descendants. today on the island, the old-timers, what few of them remain, aren’t always keen to talk about what some call the folklore of the island, and what others maintain is fact. Island history. The truth. The stories are, in one sense, celebrated on the island as an attraction (it’s good for business, after all) and they are, in another sense, kept at a distance. Questions to long-time residents about the folklore tend to get a wave of the hand, as if to say, lascia perdere, the laconic Italian phrase for just forget about it. They’ll give you some, but not too much, and the observant will notice the withholding, the way we all withhold some secrets, especially family ones.
Four years ago my husband and I came to Alicudi, before the birth of our baby. We wanted to see where my husband’s people, now my people, too, had come from. Although we stood in front of the house where his great-grandparents had lived, and his grandfather had been born, and tried to get a look inside, there was no key and no one to show us in. The owner remained the same woman his grandparents had sold it to for pennies in the 1980s, because, as someone told us, in those days, no one wanted anything to do with the island. If they made a dollar on the sale of the house they made more than they thought it worth. Yes, they had lived there as children, but then again, they had been taught to be American and let the past scorch beneath the Sicilian sun.
Four years ago, all we could do was look at the house from the outside.
But as often happens, artists from around the world recognized Alicudi’s innate beauty, and they slowly began to give its reputation a facelift. Aristocrats and painters, writers and sculptors, began to buy the abandoned homes, or, in some instances, simply squat in them, drawn to the island’s wild natural beauty and to the solitude that allows a creative to work. Anywhere can be beautiful if you have enough money. Anywhere can be a vacation retreat if you’re not starving. His grandparents sold the house to an aristocratic French woman, a painter, who used the adjacent shop where his great-grandfather, as the island’s carpenter, had purportedly made all the doors on the island, as her painting studio. On our first visit locals told me she was ill, back in France, and hadn’t been to the island in a long while. The house sat, as it always had, facing the Tyrrhenian Sea, unchanged except for an eccentric coat of paint, largely as it had been when our ancestors lived inside of it.
Last month, along with our good friends and our 2 year-old-son, my husband and I again arrive on the island. This time, we manage to find someone able to let us into the shop where his great-grandfather had worked. We were told the house key, however, was still not on the island. Once again, we wouldn’t be able to go inside. Slightly sullen, yet grateful for having seen an ancestral workspace, we’re making our way back up the stone stairs when, miraculously, as I write about here in Part 1, we find ourselves standing several feet away from the home while the woman who’d recently bought it unlocks the front door.
The current owner, an artist of French and Northern Italian ancestry named Colete, opens the weathered front door as we wait behind her in disbelief; the way you don’t march right up to something holy—an altar, a holy man, a relic—but wait to be called. It’s an unbelievable turn of events that here, suddenly, we’ll be able to see where they had cooked their meals and laid their heads. When we walk through the door, we’ll be the first generation not born in that house to enter it, more than one-hundred years after our ancestors walked out.
Before entering, Colete pauses in the doorway, and turns to us.
Our son standing in the doorway of the home his great-great-grandfather built.
“Your grandparents,” she says, looking at my husband, “were so, so, so courageous.”
As if the moment couldn’t be more emotional, we are all, even Colete, suddenly welling up with tears.
“And they did it for you,” she adds, pointing to my husband. “For you for you for you,” she repeats, pointing to him once more, then to our son, then to me.
The heat of a Sicilian August beats down us. It’s one of the hottest summers on record, and even the locals acknowledge the heat’s brutality, calling it a shame we hadn’t come the week before, when the weather was a bit more merciful.
Things were hard when they lived here, Colete continues. She makes a motion like picking bugs off her arms, saying, “There were…” pick, pick. She puts her hands into her hair, indicating a kind of lice or flea. “They all slept in one room,” she adds.
“People were so courageous…because the sense of beauty, the sense of love, the sense of peace [here on the island]…” to leave it for something completely foreign and unknown took an incredible bravery.
My husband is almost pacing in place as she speaks, his face a mix of excitement and overwhelm. He picks up our son. Our friend John and I hang back for a moment, letting him and the baby walk in first.
My husband and son inside the home.
On our last trip, and this one as well, I asked, delicately, whomever I felt I could about the stories of the flying women. When our ancestors lived on the island, in daily life, there was no room for waste. Nothing could be thrown away. Moldy flour, rotting produce, whatever had the semblance of edible would be eaten. As women everywhere did, the women here made bread. But their flour was corroded with ergot, a fungus that, it turns out, is also the base for LSD. Unwittingly, islanders regularly consumed the hallucinogenic bread, which proved an escape hatch, a secret door of perception that ferried them away to far out places where bottles of Northern Italian liqueur and French hair brushes could make their way into the homes of people forced to eat rotted food.
But sometimes a new sac flour did appear, one that was real to the touch. Sometimes fresh grain or a chunk of cured meat actualized, and this seemed to prove the fantastical stories of flight true. Because no one talked about how the ships that came every few weeks to deliver supplies docked for the night at port. No one talked about how some of the women slipped out of their homes, shuffled down the ancient stone steps, and fluttering like ghosts in the dark, slipped onto the boats where, in exchange for salt or butter or what have you, they lay with the seamen.
If the story of the maiara is not a supernatural one, then it is a very real one, half a story of bad hygienics and the other a story of dignity—a population trying to maintain the honor of its wives and husbands by dramatizing away a dire, scandalous necessity.
We walk into the home my husband’s great-grandfather built with the souls of those stories on our shoulders. You can hear it in the wind. You can feel it in the dust. It hums in the stones. It taps your feet as you walk on the rocks that centuries of foot and hoof traffic have smoothed.
Inside the home, aside from piles of original floor tiles and a few pieces of vintage furniture, the house is unchanged from the turn of the 20th Century. So that we can see, in the bookcase set into one corner of the main room, his great-grandfather’s woodwork. We can see, in the great tall doors themselves that stand between the rooms, his craftsmanship. We walk into the kitchen and see where his great-grandmother cooked, the small adobe oven, clearly built into the wall by hand, waiting for her to slide in logs of wood. It’s small yet spacious, two stories, with characteristically tall Italian ceilings. The floors are original, laid with traditional tile of the time, beautiful hand-painted ceramic in colors that are faded, yet somehow still vibrant to the eye.
On the second floor, we look out the window, seeing the view his ancestors would have seen every day. It’s the ocean, of course, blue and sparkling as far as the eye can see, which to us looks stunning, as it must have to them, but as I stand there, I can’t help but think that it must have also looked like a jailer, locking them into such intense isolation.
We descend the creaky wooden stairs, also likely built by his great-grandfather, and gently walk around the main floor once more. My husband lifts a heavy, thick tile from one of the piles.
“These are the original floors?” he asks.
They are, Colete tells him, adding, “Take one.”
My husband pauses, startled.
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“Take one, please,” she adds, “take a few and take them back to your family.”
We shake our heads, overcome by the series of events that brought us to this moment. My husband looks through tiles, like a kid looks through a candy store, even the broken bits, and picks a few to bring back home. If there’s anything his ancestors must have never imagined, it’s that a piece of the flooring they laid down in their home in Alicudi would, decades later, somehow find its way back to New York in the baggage of their great-grandson. But time is a circuitous thing. We like to think of it as a line that starts at the beginning and marches straight to the end, but really it winds, moves backwards and then forwards, to the earth where the living reside and down to where the dead are buried, back up to the heaven where the souls have ascended.
It drops, during years of carelessness, and then it’s lifted once again, perhaps by two somewhat young descendants who take a trip to their ancestral island with the next generation in tow. The net is cast to the lost and some of what was lost is found, the way a net cast to the sea can never dredge up the entire ocean, but it does draw back pieces of it.
The end again becomes a beginning. The place of departure becomes the point of arrival. The past is not burnt to ashes, but carried, a flame small and strong enough to fit in a man’s heart, from one generation to the next, from one shore to another.
Thanks for being here with me.
-Dolores.
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Truly beautiful writing about an experience that is hard to put into words.