The ANNOTICO Report

Lipari Islands, formerly Aeolian Islands, volcanic island group (1991 pop.
10,382), 44 sq mi (114 sq km), Messina prov., NE Sicily, Italy, in the
Tyrrhenian Sea. The group includes Lipari (14.5 sq mi/37.6 sq km), an
exporter of pumice and the site of Lipari, the group's main town; Salina,
where malmsey wine and currants are produced; Vulcano, the site in former
times of the worship of the mythical fire god, with a high volcano that
emits hot sulfurous vapors; Stromboli, with an active volcano (3,040 ft/927
m) that has several craters; Panarea; Filicudi; Alicudi; and 11 other
islands. Fishing is an important occupation, and there is a growing tourist
industry.[The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.]

In Homer's "Odyssey," Lipari was the domain of Aeolus, king of the winds.
Lipari, has a sporadically dramatic history: It was a Greek colony, the
scene of naval battles between Rome and Carthage during the Punic Wars, and
a place of plunder for North African pirates.

At least three well known movies have been filmed in the Islands. The 1949
movie "Stromboli," directed by Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni's
1960 "L'Avventura,", and 1994's "Il Postino" in Salina.

Susan Spano an accomplished travel writer, has ancestral ties to Lipari,
and therefore it makes her visit so much more personal and even spiritual.

A search for ancestral roots leads an Italian American family back to
Grandpa's homeland,
a place of deserted coves, pebbled beaches and massive cliffs.

Los Angeles Times
By Susan Spano
Times Staff Writer
February 20, 2005

That's it, I thought, emptying a plastic bag of capers, the last of the
little hoard I'd brought home last summer from the Italian island of
Lipari. I've eaten capers many times without really knowing what they are:
the immature buds of a shrub that loves heat and bright sun and grows in
rocky crevices around the Mediterranean. I put one in my mouth and rolled
it around. Its flavor was earthier and more intense than an olive, and its
essence took me back to the island flung into the middle of the Tyrrhenian
Sea, where the parched, volcanic soil yields little but capers and where my
Italian grandfather was born.

In Homer's "Odyssey," Lipari was the domain of Aeolus, king of the winds.
Lipari, the capital of a seventeen island archipelago north of Sicily
called the Lipari Islands or the Aeolians, has a sporadically dramatic
history: It was the source of shiny, black obsidian for the Mediterranean
basin in the Neolithic Age, a Greek colony, the scene of naval battles
between Rome and Carthage during the Punic Wars, plunder for North African
pirates, a place of exile for opponents of Mussolini in the 1920s.

This seems the gist of what there is to say about Lipari: Just 13 square
miles, with a population of 13,000, it isn't Tuscany or Rome.

And it isn't easy to get here. There's no airport, which means you must
take a ferry or hydrofoil from Naples, Sicily or Reggio di Calabria, at the
toe of the Italian boot. My family and I — my brother, John, his wife,
Susan, and their daughter, Sarah, from Malibu, and my sister, Martha, and
her husband, Scott, who live in Brussels — left from Naples.

Fortunately, we were in good humor, having just spent a week in a villa on
the Amalfi coast, a long-needed reunion for the dispersed remnants of my
little clan. We were in VIP class on the hydrofoil, which meant we got
packaged sandwiches. But the air conditioning wasn't working; passengers
were allowed outside only on a tiny deck clogged with smokers; and there
was just one bathroom. When we reached the Aeolians, all but comatose after
five hours at sea, the hydrofoil stopped at four of the outer islands
before landing at Lipari.

First, Stromboli — a perfect volcanic cone rising out of a flat, glassy
sea; it occasionally erupts so violently that the entire island has to be
evacuated. During filming of the 1949 movie "Stromboli," directed by
Roberto Rossellini, there was an eruption of another sort: a love affair
between the Italian director and Ingrid Bergman, his then-married leading
lady. Fans were scandalized.

While serving in the Navy during World War II, my father passed the island,
the northernmost in the Aeolian chain, during a storm at night. "I was the
officer in charge of the ship," he wrote in his journal. "As much as I
tried to head the vessel away, it was being driven inexorably toward the
light on a small island. The next morning, I went into the chart room and
realized that the light was on [one of] my father's islands."

My father would visit Lipari with my mother on vacation nearly 50 years
later, in 1990, seeking evidence of his father, whom he'd hardly known.
Giovanni Spano came to New York in the early 20th century, married my
grandmother, had three children with her and then divorced. They remarried
some years later, but by then, it was the '50s, and my father had started a
family of his own in the Midwest. In that time and place, people wanted to
blend in, not expose their ethnic roots. All we knew of our grandfather was
where he came from and that he died in 1973.

But an imagined Lipari lived in my mind. As the boat rounded Lipari, I
pointed out to my niece Quattropani, the village on the island's portless
northwestern coast where my grandfather — her great-grandfather — was born.
We made another stop on bleak, crater-pocked Vulcano, just south of Lipari,
separated from the bigger island by a narrow strait.

I gazed out the window, trying to decide what set the barren, cliff-flanked
Aeolians apart. "This is what Santorini and Rhodes must have been like 50
years ago," my brother said. The Aeolians look superficially like those
fabled Greek paradises, except they've as yet avoided the kind of tourist
development many people say has spoiled the Greek islands. Still, even from
a distance, the Aeolians seemed to me quintessentially Italian, not Greek —
a distinction similar to the one between capers and olives.

*
Exploring the island

We had reservations at the Hotel Carasco, with white stucco domes and
arcades, ocean-facing balconies and a saltwater swimming pool, about a
10-minute taxi ride south of the port.

After checking in, we were advised to take a boat tour of the Aeolians with
Marco, the captain of a small motor cruiser.

He picked us up on the rocks below the hotel, and I soon understood why
boat-touring is the best way to see the Aeolians, which, like California's
Channel Islands, are not a place of gentle meetings between earth and sea.
The best spots — deserted coves and pebble beaches — lie beneath massive,
eroded cliffs and can't be reached by land. For this reason, sailors favor
the islands, which are the setting for Michelangelo Antonioni's 1960
"L'Avventura," a stunningly beautiful film about a young woman who goes
missing on a yachting holiday in the Aeolians. Marco showed us grottoes,
rock arches and volcanic plugs, or towers, stranded off southwestern
Lipari, then crossed the strait to Vulcano, where we anchored in a cove
with yellow broom spilling down its sides. We swam there, blissfully,
plunging from the side of the boat into clean, cool, buoyant saltwater.

The village of Gelso, on the southern side of Vulcano, has a family-style
restaurant and a little harbor and pier. From Gelso, you can see Sicily on
the southern horizon. You can also be pretty sure of getting fresh seafood
in the restaurant. There, salt-scrubbed and sun-varnished, we sat down to
lunch: first Vulcano cheese with hot red pepper, then heaping dishes of
squid and eggplant spaghetti, followed by little goblets of sweet, sticky
malmsey wine, made from sun-cured Aeolian grapes.

The next day, we toured Lipari by van with an English-speaking guide,
Pasquale, a professorial-looking man whose manners were polished to a
sheen. When we stopped at a viewpoint near the crater of Monte Pilato, he
pointed out a rock with a glistening black streak of obsidian, which
ancient man used as a cutting implement. Farther up the eastern coast, we
saw hillsides of white pumice, like ski runs, bottoming out at quarries
near the shore.

On the northwestern corner of the island, we stopped at a farm stand by the
highway, looking across the strait to Salina, the setting for 1994's "Il
Postino." Everyone found something to buy: bottled sardines, sun-dried
tomatoes, cactus jelly, homemade biscotti, obsidian jewelry and capers,
bagged and preserved in sea salt.

We told Pasquale that we were here because of our grandfather and that we
especially wanted to see Quattropani. "Other families have come looking for
their roots," he said. "They all find something."

*
In search of family

My grandfather's town was just down the road, with houses pinioned to the
hills and views so beautiful it was hard to imagine how anyone could leave.
Quattropani has just one grocery store and restaurant, one old and one new
church, and a cemetery strung with lights that make it look a little like a
fairground after the circus. There were pictures of deceased loved ones on
crypt fronts and tombs, among them many Spanos — Giovannis, Giuseppes,
Antoninos — but none we knew.

The old church nearby is the destination of an annual Liparian pilgrimage,
honoring Sicily's Santa Maria della Catena on Sept. 8. It's fronted by a
blank piazza, with benches looking across the strait to Salina, and has
green doors and a Byzantine dome. I was unnerved when I saw it, because the
church and piazza reminded me of the setting for the profoundly troubling
last scene in "L'Avventura," in which a man and woman — friends of the
boating accident victim, now lovers — gaze, resignedly, into Mediterranean
nothingness. And then we met an old woman right out of the Antonioni movie,
the church custodian, sitting on a bench, with the gravitas of a Piet? and
dyed, thinning hair. She said there was a Spano who ran a florist shop in
Lipari town and told us stories of our Quattropani kin, including a cousin
several times removed named Francesca, whose love letters from a swain in
America were confiscated by her maiden aunt, almost scuttling their budding
romance.

I don't know what people who go looking for their roots expect to find. We
didn't get to know Grandpa Spano despite the time we spent on his island.
But for me, there was the joy of being in a place that somehow felt right,
with my family. We wandered the cobblestone alleys of Lipari town,
decorated with drying laundry, shopped for custom-made sandals and old
prints, then climbed to the Aeolian Museum atop the acropolis, a
Gibraltar-like rock that has been inhabited since the 4th century BC. Its
tombs and pottery testify to wave after wave of immigration from Sicily,
Greece, the Italian mainland, Normandy and Spain. From the Greek era, there
is an extraordinary cache of theatrical masks and figurines, some of which
have told scholars all they know about plays lost in text form by
Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Menander.

That night, we went to Da Filippino, which guidebooks said was the best
restaurant in town. We ordered a bottle of Sicilian Chardonnay, then looked
at the catch of the day, displayed on a nearby table — sea urchin,
swordfish, squid, tuna. I started with antipasto Liparota, a kind of
Italian sushi wrapped in pecorino cheese, chose a dish of Hades black squid
ink risotto as a main course and then had homemade chocolate tartufo as a
dolce. The dinner lasted forever, or until little glasses of malmsey wine
came around. Everyone in my little family band was happy.

*
Span?s meet Spanos

The family reunion ended, as Susan, Sarah, Martha and Scott headed back to
Naples, leaving just my brother and me. We have traveled together often and
like the same things. So after the heat of the day had broken late one
afternoon, we walked around the southern point of the island to the
Geophysical Observatory, where scientists observe seismic activity in the
Mediterranean. John did some amateur geology on the edge of a cliff nearby,
while I sat on a rock with my eyes closed.

Another day, while wandering along Lipari's main street, Corso Vittorio
Emanuele, we happened upon a florist shop and stopped in. A small, sturdy,
dark-haired woman behind the counter was wrapping flowers for a customer.
When she finished, I asked in broken Italian if her name was Spano. She
looked blank for a moment, then said she was Francesca di Span?, with the
accent on the last syllable. We told her we were Spanos, with the accent on
the first syllable, from the U.S. At that, she called her teenage daughter,
Moira, who spoke some English, from the back of the shop. When she heard we
were the grandchildren of Giovanni Spano, who left Lipari for America in
1906, she had no doubt we were related through our common
great-grandfather, Antonino di Span?. I'd have been skeptical, because when
my parents went to Lipari in 1990, they also met Spanos of uncertain
relation, who took them around the island in an antiquated Willys jeep.
Could there be, I wondered, a small cottage industry on Lipari in Spano
roots tours?

But Moira drew up a family tree, and there was no mistaking the resemblance
between Francesca and my father's sister. When Francesca's son, Marco,
appeared, there was no mistaking his hairline. It was my dad's.

The Span?s took the Spanos to lunch at L'Orchidea, a family place in the
village of Pianoconte, west of the port. The young wife of the owner, a
second-generation Italian American immigrant to Lipari from Brooklyn,
served as our translator while also presenting us with plates of delicious
homemade pasta and fresh fish. After lunch, we went to Francesca's house in
Quattropani, surrounded by gardens and vineyards, and then back to the
local cemetery to find out what we'd missed on a previous visit.

Francesca stopped at the tomb of her father, Antonino Giuseppe Span?, my
Grandpa Spano's nephew, and kissed his picture. Then she led us to our
great-grandfather's crypt, bearing a picture of the Span? scion, who wore a
waxed handlebar mustache.

What all this means to me is still hard to say, except that it's good to
know who my great-grandfather was and the right way to pronounce my name;
that part of me comes from an enchanted island in the Tyrrhenian Sea; and
that, of course, I know how to cook with capers.

— Susan Spano

Travel, Hotel, Restauarant, Photos, Map available at:
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