The Islands
The Islands
Travelers typically think of Greece as the Mediterranean’s island nation, but in fact, Italy has hundreds of islands as well— from the usual suspects, Sicily and Sardinia, to the 120 islands in the Venetian lagoon. Some are absolutely enormous—Sicily and Sardinia are the first and second largest islands in the Mediterranean, respectively, and each has dozens of dialects and subcultures within it. But there are also small islands like Pantelleria and Salina, which are governed by Sicily, and Sant’Antioco and La Maddalena, which are part of Sardinia. Then there are the Neapolitan, Pontine, and Tuscan archipelagos, which rise in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the western coast of mainland Italy, and the Tremiti chain in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Puglia. The islands of the Venetian lagoon vary in size from less than an acre to the larger clusters connected by bridges that comprise the city of Venice. (To be honest, the lagoon merits a hundred books of its own—hmm . . . maybe my next project?—but in these pages you’ll find some of my favorite recipes from the lagoon’s islands, including a few for an epic aperitivo spread, as well as descriptions of beloved places in the lagoon like the farms of Sant’Erasmo.) I touch on most Italian island cultures in this book, either with recipes or features, but a full account of each would occupy dozens of volumes.
The map of the islands below will give you a sense of their location, not just in relation to one another, but also to North Africa, France, and the Balkans. Italy’s unification in the mid-nineteenth century brought dozens of island cultures under a single governing body for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. But the impact of modern Italy’s 150 years of collective rule pale in comparison to that of the fallen kingdoms that spanned the Mediterranean in previous ages, shaping the islands’ cultures, languages, customs, and foods. Due to their strategic locations between continents and along trade routes, the islands now governed under the flag of Italy were home to some of Europe’s most ancient recorded civilizations dating back to the Iron Age, and were historically ripe for conquest and trade. The islands, as a result, reflect a confluence of Arab, Spanish, French, Mesoamerican, Mediterranean, and Italian ingredients and cooking techniques, and many of their cuisines developed on parallel tracks to one another. But let’s get a sense of the islands themselves before we dig into the recipes.
Sardinia
And its smaller islands
I’m starting with Sardinia here, not because it comes before Sicily alphabetically, but because I want it to be the destination of your next Italian holiday. Naturally, I think all the islands should be a priority, but realistically, you have to choose one as a starting point, and this should be it. It’s wild. The island lies about 150 miles off Italy’s west coast, just opposite the mainland regions of Campania and Calabria. Corsica is a short ferry ride to the north, while Tunisia is due south. Sicily, which is just a bit larger than Sardinia, is about 200 miles southeast and is home to around 3.5 times the number of inhabitants.
Sardinia was one of the earliest places in Europe to be settled and has historical ruins dating back more than ten thousand years. Things really started to get going among local tribes in the Stone Age, circa 3200 BCE, and by 2000 BCE, settlers had arrived from mainland Europe. The Nuragic culture, the island’s most important native community, survived until the third century BCE. The vestiges of this ancient society are still present all over Sardinia, mainly in the form of nuraghe, fortified stone complexes that rise from fields and perch on hills all across the island.
By the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, things started heating up in the Mediterranean. The Greeks and Carthaginians were on the move and in competition with each other. When you consider Sardinia’s dominant position between North Africa and the European continent, it’s logical that the Carthaginians would establish colonies there. The evidence for their vast trade network is still preserved at sites like Tharros on the Sinis peninsula. The still thriving bottarga (cured gray mullet roe) tradition of the area testifies to the enduring influence of Carthage.
The Romans took over in 238 BCE (though they were unable to completely eradicate the stubborn Nuragic culture, especially in the Barbagia sub-region, which still boasts a reputation for defiance) and reigned over the island for seven centuries. The island was attacked and conquered in the Middle Ages by waves of invaders, including the Vandals, Byzantines, and Arabs. But it asserted self- rule by four kingdoms until the fourteenth century, when Spain’s Aragon rulers began to exert influence amid attacks from the maritime republics of Genoa and Pisa.
Throughout its millennia of civilization, Sardinia has maintained a strong rural character, and does so to this day. There are twice as many sheep (three million!) as people on the island, and about one-third of all of Italy’s sheep reside there. Their main product is pecorino (sheep’s-milk cheese), which takes countless forms. The best known are Pecorino Romano (in spite of its name, almost all of it is made in Sardinia, not near Rome) and Pecorino Sardo, salted cheeses with a sharp, piquant flavor. There are other wonderful cheeses, too, like Casizolu and Fiore Sardo. Since antiquity, durum wheat has been an important product and is responsible for the forms and flavors of Sardinia’s intricate pasta shapes like lorighittas and ornamental breads.
The cuisine is hearty and land-based, featuring plenty of meat, especially lamb, goat, suckling pig, wild boar, and other game. There’s fish, of course, but thousands of years of invasion threats from the sea meant that Sardinians mainly settled and developed their culture on the interior of the island; the food reflects that. Desserts are sweetened with honey, sugar, and sapa (grape molasses). Sardinia’s culture is a boozy one, too, with lots of homemade spirits still produced widely, as well as a thriving wine production based mainly on red Bovale, Cannonau, Carignano, and Monica Grapes and white Nasco, Nuragus, Vernaccia, and Vermentino grapes.
All this nourishes a fiercely independent culture that celebrates rural traditions like nowhere else in Italy and lives to support its politically active shepherds. It’s wild and festive and still bound to ancient religious traditions and the foods that accompany them. A trip through Sardinia really does have the feeling of exploring prehistoric civilization in a way unrivaled elsewhere in Italy.
L’Isola di San Pietro
Ferry arrivals to this small island off the southwest coast of Sardinia land at Carloforte, its main village. The picturesque seaside town was founded in the eighteenth century by coral fishermen originally from Liguria, the coastal region in northwestern Italy of which Genova is the capital, who had settled abroad in Tunisia for economic reasons. When the coral supply off the Tunisian coast dried up, they appealed to Sardinia’s ruler, Charles Emmanuel III, for a place to settle, and he granted them San Pietro, on which they built a community from brick and stucco, transforming the small island into an important tuna-fishing port. The Ligurian cultural heritage persists to this day—pesto alla carlofortina is a popular pasta condiment and combines classic Ligurian ingredients—basil, pine nuts, and olive oil—with the island’s tuna. The Tunisian connection survives, too. Villagers make a dish called cascà, a pasta closer in appearance to Sicilian or North African couscous than to Sardinia’s much larger version, fregula.
Sant’Antioco
Just southeast of the Isola di San Pietro, Sant’Antioco is quite a bit larger and connected to Sardinia via a causeway. The island’s namesake, Saint Antiochus of Sulcis, was exiled to the island, condemned to work in its lead mines for converting others to Christianity, thus transforming it into a pilgrimage destination for devotees to the second-century martyr. There are a few coastal villages connected by asphalt roads, but the island’s interior is mostly undeveloped hills of brush and sparsely inhabited farmland. The cuisine, like that of its neighbor, draws on preserved seafood like canned tuna, as well as bottarga from tuna and mullet.
L’Arcipelago della Maddalena
This chain of islands was awarded national park status, mostly protecting it from the gross development that has virtually robbed the Costa Smeralda in northeast Sardinia of any hint of regional identity. There are regular ferry departures for La Maddalena, the largest of the islands, from Palau, a village in northern Sardinia, and a roadway across a narrow channel connects it to neighboring Caprera. The other islands are sparsely inhabited and really only accessible if you have rented a boat (no yacht needed; a dinghy will do it). The food situation is a bit grim, but there are plenty of sandwich shops and bars on La Maddalena and Caprera that serve generic food, which is really all you need to fuel a swim or a hike. The arcipelago della Maddalena might not be a big player in Sardinian food culture, but it’s an important symbol for the island. Renato Soru, former president of Sardinia, oversaw the closure of the US Navy base in 2008. The base had been there since 1972 and was set up for Cold War defense. For years, politicians ran on a platform of demilitarizing the island, and this anti-imperialist sentiment remains a major tenet of local culture, with lots of graffiti all over Sardinia to prove it. Even today, military bases, both foreign and Italian, trigger the Sardinian instinct to rebel against being invaded and controlled.
Sicily
And its smaller islands
Sicily isn’t quite as historic as Sardinia, having only been settled around 8000 BCE. From that point on, civilization advanced slowly until Carthage began launching expeditions from North Africa, establishing colonies in western Sicily around 850 BCE. A century later, Greek settlers landed in the eastern part of the island and developed their own important settlements at Syracuse and Gela. Greek expansion on the island brought Sicily into Hellenic culture’s own identity. The Greeks built temples, too, including the spectacular sanctuaries at Agrigento and Selinunte.
Tension between the Carthaginians and Romans flared up in the third century BCE, and the outcome of the resulting Punic Wars was Roman supremacy. The Romans relied on Sicily for its grain, grapes, and oil during their seven- hundred-year reign there. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, a series of wars for the island followed. Vandals and Goths vied for power and ultimately the Eastern Roman Empire (aka the Byzantine Empire) took control of the island until the ninth century. Byzantine rule was challenged by Arab armies led by the emir of Tunisia beginning in 827, and after nearly a century of warfare, most of the island came under Arab rule. The period coincided with a golden age of technology, economics, agriculture, and philosophy in the Arab world. Land reforms and improved irrigation massively improved Sicily’s productivity and transformed arid deserts into lush gardens and citrus groves; the advancements are visible even today. Thousand- year-old qanats (irrigation canals) continue to supply Palermo’s suburbs with water.
The period of Arab rule was an impactful one in the culinary sense. Not only did new farming practices improve crop yields, but they also changed what could be grown on the island. Eggplant and sugarcane arrived for the first time, while citrus, almonds, and pistachios flourished in a way they never had before. Palermo (then known by its Arabic name, Balarm) became one of the most sophisticated cities on Earth, and following the expulsion of the Arab settlers by Norman invaders in the eleventh century, the island’s culture and cuisine continued to flourish as the Normans built on their predecessors’ successes.
The beginning of the Spanish period in the fourteenth century was a prosperous one, and ultimately peaked in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when nobility embellished Sicilian churches and cities with funds from colonial plundering and introduced new ingredients from Spain’s Mesoamerican conquests. During this period, tomatoes, potatoes, prickly pears, squashes, beans, and chocolate arrived and enriched the local gastronomic culture. The wealth and stability didn’t last, though. The stunning novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa perfectly traces the late-nineteenth-century decline of the island and its wealthy patron class in the time just before and after Sicily fell to Italian unification.
Pantelleria
Arriving on the island of Pantelleria from the air is a lesson in volcanic activity. Two calderas are the first topographical elements visible on the horizon, their pronounced peaks surrounded by evidence of ancient explosions and lava flows that stained the earth with rough black stone, iron-rich red deposits, and friable gray pumice. On these earth-toned swaths, the roots of grapevines and caper plants, the buds of which appear in many island dishes like pesto pantesco and insalata pantesca, burrow deep into the soil. The vines’ trunks and tendrils are trained close to the ground to protect their fruits from months of blazing sun and the relentless winds that gust off the African continent, a mere 37 miles away, closer even than Sicily, which claims Pantelleria as its own.
Le Isole Eolie
The Aeolian Islands are spread over a span of 60 miles off Sicily’s northeast coast. Their silhouettes are staggered shadows visible from Sicily, where there are regular ferry departures to the islands from Milazzo. The traditional cuisine of the islands is built on simple foundations: anchovies, herbs, bread crumbs, tomatoes, and capers.
Alicudi: The westernmost Aeolian island is the archipelago’s most remote. It’s a spent volcano called Montagnola, a circular mound that is mostly rippled green stone. The only inhabited part of the island is the eastern side, and there are donkey trails—still traversed by plenty of donkeys—for getting around on foot.
Filicudi: Ten nautical miles to the east of Alicudi, its neighbor Filicudi is a haven for divers. There’s a small archeological museum with finds from shipwrecks and the Capo Graziano Neolithic site on the island.
Salina: The name of this island will be familiar to anyone who read Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s masterpiece Il Gattopardo(among the protagonist’s many aristocratic titles was Prince of Salina). It is formed of volcanoes, which created the fertile terrain. Salina is one of the most productive of the eolie, and grows many aromatic malvasia grapes used for making Malvasia delle Lipari, a sweet wine named for the neighboring island. Capers are harvested and salted here, as well.
Lipari: To the south of Salina, Lipari is the largest and most developed of the eolie. Overlooking the port is a sixteenth-century castle, a fortified complex that today houses an interesting archaeological museum tracing the ancient civilizations of the seven islands. The terrain is volcanic, with red stones in Valle Muria and dark pumice flow on the northeastern coast.
Vulcano: The best name is reserved for this island, closest to Sicily. True to its moniker, the island has black sand beaches and offshore hot springs, the product of eruptions and volcanic activity.
Panarea: Panarea, northeast of Lipari and Salina, is the smallest of the islands, at under 1.5 square miles. It’s known for its fashion, luxury travelers, clubs, and overall trendiness.
Stromboli: Half black sand mound, half vegetation-covered hill, Stromboli is a young, merely hundred-thousand-year-old volcano, and it erupts regularly—a few summers ago, from a safe distance in Salina, I watched hot lava spew from its crater into the air. The remote village of Ginostra in the west clings to black stone, while the major action is in Stromboli’s port on the other side of the island.
Le Isole Pelagie
Lampedusa and Linosa, the inhabited Pelagie Islands, have a relatively new food culture, considering they were only colonized in the 1880s. Lampedusa’s classic ingredients include pesce azzurro (literally “blue fish,” a category rich in omega-3 fats that includes sardines, anchovies, and mackerel), which are poached, then packed in oil to preserve them. Eggplant, cùscusu, and simple vegetable dishes are also typical, but a lot of what you find served on the island, like pasta alla Norma and arancine, is borrowed from Sicily. Linosa, on the other hand, has a small fishing community that catches local lampuga (mahi-mahi) for dishes like lampuga panata and most of the other three hundred residents are farmers, many of whom grow the island’s specialty, lentils. Lampione, the third Pelagie island, is inhabited only by a lighthouse and wildlife.
Lampedusa: There are seasonal flights to Lampedusa on budget airlines with names like Blue Panorama and DAT. Otherwise, connection to the rest of Italy is via a nine-hour ferry to Porto Empedocle near Agrigento on Sicily’s southern coast. This island, which sits closer to Libya than to Sicily, feels—and is—very remote. Upon arrival, you fly in low past rust-colored bluffs from volcanic eruptions. The plane glides past a cemetery with ornate mausoleums. Unless you’re a fan of long, hot walks on dusty, windswept roads, you need a scooter to get around (though the island is pretty dreamy by mountain bike, if you’re in shape).
The main village is made up mainly of simple, utilitarian buildings in sunbleached pink and cream hues. None are particularly historic; the island was colonized in 1884 and is one of the youngest parts in all of Italy. Accordingly, it lacks a distinct culinary identity and has mainly adopted pan-Sicilian recipes.
Lampedusa is windswept and beautiful, but it’s also a bit unsettling that visitors come here for carefree holidays. For years, refugees seeking asylum from war and famine have fled on boats, casting off from Libya and bound for the closest land in Europe, Lampedusa. Many don’t make it, effectively transforming the sea into a watery grave for thousands. Lampedusa’s authorities have largely sanitized this grim history, and there’s often not much left to testify to the island’s tragic role in geopolitics. But an abandoned ship with faded Arabic writing on the side and an open hull filled with waterlogged mattresses remains next to the ferry port, a stark reminder of the many people lost. The Donate section includes organizations to which you can donate to support refugee causes.
lInosa: Linosa, Lampedusa’s island neighbor, is even more remote. It has a fairly primitive tourism industry and is mainly a farming and fishing island. The village around the port is painted in bright, bold colors, not unlike Burano near Venice, which make the hues of the surrounding volcanic terrain pop. The island is volcanic and the coastline is made up of jagged black rock, and you can almost imagine lava bubbling up through the water in the bays. The island is much smaller than Lampedusa, and you can cover it all in a couple of hours if you rent a scooter or electric bicycle, and a bit longer on foot if, like me, you love hiking around in the blazing heat.
Le Isole Egadi
The Egadi Islands live in stark contrast to one another. Buzzy Favignana was home to a thriving tuna industry pioneered by a noble family from Trapani in western Sicily, so many of its classics like cùscusu and sarde a beccafico come from Sicily proper. Sleepy Marettimo, which only has a year-round population of about 350, has a diet based on locally caught mackerel and sardines, and bean soups. Levanzo is even smaller and has a single, tiny village built around an ancient harbor.
Favignana: The ferry arrives from Trapani at a port overlooked by a large sandstone building, a tourist attraction that was once the mansion of Ignazio Florio Sr., the nineteenth-century entrepreneur. Florio directed his vast tuna- fishing empire from the tonnara (tuna cannery) at Trapani. The complex was one of many owned by Florio, who also owned the island of Favignana itself. The tonnara now houses a museum about the tuna hunt, a bloody spectacle that was practiced until 2005. Tuna still figures heavily in the local diet in the form of polpette di tonno (tuna meatballs, similar to polpette di pesce spada) and bottarga di tonno.
Marettimo: An hour’s ferry ride farther west from Sicily than Favignana, Marettimo is remote. That’s one of the things that makes it so appealing. There aren’t even that many buildings, so there’s not much chance the place will blow up as a tourist hot spot and rapidly change as a result; with a scant few existing rooms, there would be nowhere for people to stay! Most of the island’s action is around the port. There are a few hiking trails that lead up and through the forest to the island’s other side, but there aren’t any settlements there, just pristine beaches.
Levanzo: With fewer than 300 residents, Levanzo feels wild compared to its neighbor Favignana. It’s a place you can easily pass a few low-key, sun-drenched days, traversing the island on foot and recharging on locally caught tuna and swordfish at the handful of seasonal restaurants in the port.
Ustica
Thirty-five miles north of Palermo, Ustica’s beauty belies its former use as a penal colony and destination for political exiles. Today, it’s a popular retreat for palermitani and scuba divers attracted to its pristine waters and underwater geology.
Le Isole Pontine
The Pontine Islands, off the coast of Lazio, were resettled in modern times by Spanish Bourbon aristocracy and Neapolitan peasants, which is why their dialect and cuisines are so closely related to Naples. They share a somewhat common history with Ischia and Procida, farther south. The diets are rich in brothy soups likepesce all’acqua pazza and zuppa di cicerchie . Ventotene’s lentil soup is nearly identical to that of Linosa—an example of two distant rural island cultures on opposite sides of Italy coincidentally mirroring one another.
Ponza
Arrivals to Ponza from Anzio skirt the island’s eastern coast, where sheer tufa cliffs bleached white by the sun are a preview of the dramatic vertical volcanic walls that partly define Ponza’s topography. Ponza is best appreciated from the water— boat rentals in the port are a convenient and affordable way to explore the island and offer spectacular views, not to mention access to coves and bays not accessible by land.
The port is the largest village on the island; its pastel buildings follow the volcanic peaks of the area. As the closest island to the Italian capital, Ponza is popular with Romans. As such, it’s crowded on summer weekends and during the high season of July and August, but during the rest of the year, it’s sleepy and downright magical.
Today’s Romans were not the first to discover Ponza. In antiquity, it was a place of exile as well as voluntary retreat. Aristocrats built villas on the island, and according to legend, carved saltwater swimming pools into the soft rock faces, for bathing without the risk of sunstroke or suntan. Later these caves were used to raise eels, still an island delicacy. But after the fall of the empire, the island fell into a period of neglect, and it wasn’t inhabited again until the 1730s, when Charles III of Spain founded the village that now accepts ferry arrivals. A few decades later, Le Forna on the north side of the island was founded by inhabitants of Torre del Greco, a town on the Bay of Naples.
Ventotene
Once a fishing and farming village, Ventotene is now a sleepy island with just a small year-round population. It’s famous for its dried legumes, especially lentils, once a major export that has seen a decline in production due to an economy that has shifted away from agriculture toward tourism.
L’Arcipelago Napoletano
The three main islands in the Bay of Naples— Capri, Ischia, and Procida—have a robust relationship with the mainland, so their cuisines share a lot in common with the Amalfi Coast and Naples and are particularly rich in seafood. This is in contrast to other islands, where risk of invasion meant harvesting seafood was dangerous and mostly avoided. But the arcipelago napoletano has been an established tourist destinations for centuries (as opposed to the other small islands, which only saw a tourism boom beginning between the 1960s and 1980s).
Capri
Close your eyes. What’s the first Italian island that comes to mind? I’d put my euros on Capri (pronounced CAH-pree). It’s home to Italy’s most famous salad (insalata caprese with mozzarella, tomato, and basil) and a delectable flourless chocolate cake, torta caprese. This tiny island in the Bay of Naples was developed in the nineteenth century for foreign travelers, mainly well-heeled tourists from America and Northern Europe. For well over a century, it has drawn tourists to its famous sea cave, the Blue Grotto, luxury shopping, and lemon tree–dotted coastline. In 2019, Capri drew 2 million tourists to its 4 square miles. Compare that to 9 million to Rome’s 500 square miles, and you can imagine how absolutely unpleasant Capri can be in high season unless you can retreat to a private beach club or your boat to enjoy the island away from the crowds.
Ischia
From afar, this ancient island looks like a green volcano rising from the sea. And in a way, it is, though the volcano is barely active, merely emitting heat from springs that warm coves around the southern part of the island. For a couple thousand years, islanders have been eating coniglio all’ischitana while farming the fertile, terraced terrain of their verdant island.
Procida
My aversion to fancy things is almost as intense as my attraction to that which is unpolished. It is both of these factors that draw me to Procida again and again. As a bonus, the food is better than Capri and Ischia, too. The place feels like a little slice of Naples has broken off and floated into the bay. The chaotic, soulful, and colorful place had so much in common with the nearby mainland, much more than with its island neighbor, Ischia. Procida’s port is loud and raucous, with backfiring scooters and old women shouting from windows. Above the port, the rest of the island’s settlements are a mix of apartment blocks and modest villas surrounded by citrus groves and other fruit trees.
Le Isole Tremiti
Lying about 12 miles off the coast of Puglia’s Gargano Peninsula, the Tremiti archipelago is composed of five islands: San Domino, San Nicola, Capraia, Cretaccio, and Pianosa. Only the first two are inhabited. Due to their tiny year-round population and reliance on tourism, there’s not a huge litany of local dishes, and you’re more likely to find generic seafood specialties like spaghetti with clams or fried calamari. There are a few bread soups on the island that speak to just how frugal the islanders were, never letting even stale bread go to waste.
La Laguna Veneziana
The part of the Venetian lagoon that most visitors encounter is Venice, a cluster of islands connected by bridges spanning its many canals and linked to mainland Italy by a causeway. This is also where most visitors eat, standing at the counters of the city’s bacari (local taverns) serving cicchetti (small bites) like whipped salt cod on polenta or sweet-and- sour sardines. There’s a strong grazing culture in Venice, and you’ll find locals sipping Select spritzes, cold beer, or quaffable still and sparkling white wines at all hours of the day, perched at counters gossiping in the impenetrable dialect. There’s plenty of seated dining, too, and unsurprisingly, lagoon fish and catch from the nearby Adriatic Sea abound. Unlike on the other Italian islands, polenta is far more prevalent than pasta, though one of the city’s signature pasta dishes, bigoli in salsa, did end up on the cover of this book! There’s lots of fabulous produce, too, and much of it comes from the so-calledterraferma (the mainland; terraferma in Venetian dialect, which shuns double consonants!), like the farms of Treviso and Chioggia, especially all the incredible winter radicchios.
Beyond Venice itself, the other lagoon islands each have their own character, and some are downright rural. The island of Sant’Erasmo is teeming with farms and does its part to feed the city, producing highly prized artichokes in the winter and a year-round bounty of fruits and vegetables. The northern and southern lagoon and Pellestrina boast small- scale fisheries. If you arrive by air, look for the trabocchi, cantilevered nets used to catch local fish, protruding from wooden huts on stilts. Or even better, hire a boat to take you around the lagoon and its islands for a full immersion in the ecology and cuisine of Venice (if we’re friends, I’ll take you around in Laura, otherwise contact Classic Boats Venice located in La Certosa).
