Volcanoes, witches, and wild beauty: inside Italy's secret isle of Panarea
'I traveled the globe looking for a home. Then I came to Panarea and found one—with the whole world within it.' This scrawl, attributed to one 'Mastro Ciccio, 1920', is chalked in dialect on the entrance to his Aeolian island home. It is a beautiful door, faded and peeling, but still singing to me as I pass by barefoot. And it's the same cyan as the waves that skirt this tiny car-free island in the Tyrrhenian, moving like a boundless sea of torn silk. Even residents are transfixed by the stretch of water that lies between Panarea—a 1.3-square-mile chunk of volcanic rock—and Stromboli, the island 13.5 nautical miles to the northeast with an active volcano that has erupted almost continuously since 350 BC. When talking, the Panarioti always keep one eye out there. Right now, in the deceptive gold of dawn, Stromboli is as peaceful as a pyramid on the horizon, its red-hot summit just some trick of the light.
Stromboli is nicknamed 'Iddu', a dialect word for 'Him', as a sign of respect for its mysticism and power. Iddu is a shape-shifter encircled by eight shadowy islets. The eastern side of Panarea is the world's best viewing deck to observe 'his' histrionics, in an amphitheater of isolotti whose appearance transforms depending on the sun's position. Panarea is the smallest and oldest of the seven inhabited Aeolian islands scattered like dice up to 56 miles from Sicily's northeastern coast, the result of fiery submarine volcanoes. Above water they open into jagged obsidian fields and sulphur mines. Their Malvasia grapes and salted capers are infused with gun-smoke minerality, as if they lie on a brink between heaven and hell, scented by honeysuckle and an aroma like burnt matches.
Savage in terrain but fertile in the Italian imagination, this remote archipelago of subsistence farmers and fisherwomen was still living in the 19th century when it was discovered in the 1950s by the neorealist filmmakers whose lenses documented its timeless insularity in the fast-modernizing economic miracle that was Italy. Roberto Rossellini shot Stromboli, Land of God with Hollywood's Ingrid Bergman in 1950. In the same year, William Dieterle filmed Volcano, starring Rossellini's muse, Anna Magnani. And Blow-Up director Michelangelo Antonioni tortured his leading lady, Monica Vitti—known as 'the Queen of Italian Cinema'—on Panarea's islets in the bankrupt, blighted production of L'Avventura in 1960.
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