Seven kilometres. That is the whole distance between the town and the water, and I had read it a dozen times before I came and understood nothing by it. Seven kilometres is nothing. It is a number you skip over….
Stromboli, and the Boats That Wait in the Dark
We went out at seven and the light was already going. The boat was small and open and there were nine of us on it, which I had not expected. I think I had imagined something more solitary. It is…
The Complete Guide to the Aeolian Islands
There are seven of them and they are not versions of each other. That is the thing to understand before anything else, and it is the thing almost every account of the Aeolian Islands gets wrong. They are written up…
Palermo, and the Hour the Market Wakes Up
I got to the market before it existed. Not before it opened. Before it was there at all. At ten past six Ballarò is a street, an ordinary one, with shuttered fronts and a man in a doorway smoking and…
The Complete Guide to Palermo, Sicily
Palermo is the least polite beautiful city in Italy. It does not arrange itself for you. There is no single view it wants you to photograph, no piazza that functions as a stage set, no stretch where the shops have…
Polignano a Mare – What You Get Instead
I woke at five to a different sound. Not louder. Different. For two nights the sea had been a soft thing underneath everything, going in and out of the caves on its slow count, and sometime in the dark it…
