"This is my island, and Epomeo is my mountain"

By Erri De Luca

"When I return to <%=ischia%>, I order it to remain exactly as it was. And the island, my sorceress, obeys me."

Islands make you think of seclusion, and in fact various kings and governments have built prisons on all the islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Yet for a child arriving in <%=ischia%> in the 1950s, the island represented freedom. We came from the choked-up alleys of "the land of the sun" where the light, despite its reputation, never reached the ground, not even at midday. Suddenly, on <%=ischia%> there were no more barriers against light. We could feel it on and around us, shining even underwater. We cast off our town clothes and went around barefoot all day wearing only a pair of shorts, while our skin got used to the change. The soles of our feet hardened so that we could run on the rocks, and sunburn made our bodies peel until the skin turned thick and dark, like gleaming leather - that was freedom, the tan that marked the boundary between oneself and the world. There were no sun lotions then.
Coming from a densely crowded city, with the largest urban population in Europe, we suddenly found ourselves out in the open, with the sea on all sides. We floated in the crystal-clear water with the dark seabed way below us, under a cloudless, never-ending sky. Such a lot of empty space between ourselves and the horizon - we felt nervous and dizzy like explorers in a newly-discovered land. We ran wild and dried out with the sand and the salt. There wasn't much fresh water on the island. By September it was finished and a water-supply ship had to come to replenish the parched island. <%=ischia%> had no boundaries for a child learning about freedom and discovering that it coincides with pure beauty. My senses have revelled in so much beauty on <%=ischia%> that I have never longed for exotic seas and coral reefs. They are for people who haven't had the chance to sate themselves with beauty as children have on their own island - in my case, <%=ischia%>.

So that I would not feel the lack of a mountain, <%=ischia%> provided me with a crusty spur of rock named Epomeo, moulded by eruptions. The islanders fled there to hide from Saracen pirates in its caves and grottoes. Later it was fortified by monks. At the top, there is a cellar dug out of the rock containing row upon row of bottles of island wine. In the 1960s and 70s, Luigi presided over the top of the mountain from a kitchen, a terrace and a few bare, simple rooms. He let me rummage in the pile of wines all jumbled up, to find a bottle of Per' e palummo (pigeon's foot), a local wine ten years old. Pulling out the cork required a huge effort and the dense red colour did not allow the light to pass through the glass, nor through our thoughts. A self-absorbed wine that also absorbed the drinker, it was unsociable and reserved. But later, our tongues were loosened after the rabbit cooked in white wine and tomato. Luigi and I found our voices again in the evening after the last customers had returned down to the valley. Luigi was a solemn man with a voice like a bucket clanging at the bottom of a well. Blinded in one eye by a cartridge exploding in his gun, he judged people with his other eye. He accepted me because I loved Mount Epomeo. After supper he told me stories of women tourists of all ages who came to have sex with him in some nook carved out of the rock, while hubby sat on the terrace drinking lemonade. They came by day and returned to their hotels in the evening. They welcomed this rough male embrace as part of the treatment, along with sand baths, mud baths and taking the waters. I never heard Luigi mention the word "love". At the time I would have liked to benefit from the leftovers of this female abundance, but there was nothing to be done. They came up there for him and if he was busy they waited their turn. It was real virility, territorial and arrogant.

Mountains entered my dreams thanks to Epomeo. I began climbing them late in life, at thirty-plus. Since then I have known many peaks and will not stop until they stop me. On gigantic, barren rock faces everywhere, I have been someone passing through, quick to remove the weight of my steps, the obstruction caused by my shadow. Except for Epomeo - only there have I felt like an inhabitant of earth, an extension of the summit like a branch on a tree or a wave on the rocks. Mountains and tropical seas were at hand for children running wild in the summer on an island-mentor unfurling the world in front of their eyes, showing each one a hint of his destiny. <%=ischia%> contained both future and distance - all its harsh prophecies have been realised. When I return, I no longer ask to know more. I play another game with the island - I order it to remain exactly as it was and <%=ischia%>, my sorceress, obeys me. All I need is to be shown a single rusty, flaking balcony, a boat with beech-wood oars, a fishing light swaying like a drunken lamp-post - I do the rest, since I am a visionary and that is why I write.

Erri De Luca, writer