Ventotene, Italia

10.06.08
Ventotene, Italia

This weekend nearly our whole apartment went to the island of Ventotene. It’s located 2 hours away from the town of Formia by ferry, and the entire island is about one square mile, inhabited by 600-800 people. We took the train from Roma to Formia early Saturday morning and caught the ferry. Apparently we encountered unusually bad weather, because the water was choppier than anything I’ve ever seen and the boat was hipping and heaving all over the place. I actually felt really sea sick for the first 1.5 hours (like, BAD). I only felt better when I went down to the lower deck. I originally went down there to puke off the side (not kidding, I felt that badly), but having the intense wind and sea spray on my face really calmed me down. I ended up just cracking up at how wet I was getting and how crazy the sea was.
Once we got onto the island, we set off to explore and find a place to stay. Cinzia had been here recently (that’s how we found out about the place) and she said that it’s not the kind of place where you can book a hotel in advance (at least in the off peak season), so we decided to wing it. We ended up getting a full apartment for 25 € each, which was sweet compared to the 60 € one hotel wanted to charge us. We settled in, got a few snacks at the local grocery store, and explored. The whole island consists of about 4 streets, all of which are paved with oversized cobblestones and lined with pink and yellow stuccoed buildings marked by pretty hand painted tiles.
After we got settled into our apartment, we got changed into bathing suits and set off in search of the beach. For such a small island, it was actually pretty difficult; the island is volcanic and thus most of the edges are cliffs. We ended up going down lots of dead end or residential streets and getting pretty turned around. We did, however, find the hugest aloe plant known to man; each leaf was probably 6” wide and at least 2” thick. Freaking massive. Liz also asked a local for directions to the beach and all she could understand was something about down some stairs and an evil beach (it later turned out that he said evil weather but our Italian’s still shaky). We ended up finding a beach that had really sweet caves carved into the cliffs, but just as we were starting to wade into the water the tide started coming in and it began to rain, so we booked it back to our apartment, played cards, and napped.
After waking up, we decided to go watch the sunset, which turned into quite the ordeal. Most of the streets we were on were purely residential, so they didn’t have many public openings to the sea, and it was windy beyond all belief. We wandered and ran and eventually found an area so cliff-like that there were no houses, so we all leaned on the guardrail-wall and watched the most magnificent sunset I’ve ever seen. There were other volcanic islands off in the distance, cliffs to our left and right, and the most amazing colors and clouds in the sky. It was so windy though, that lots of debris kept flying into our eyes, mouths, ears, faces…everywhere. Our hair was blowing all over the place too (which was already mad tangled from the boat ride over…wind and salt water don’t mix well with my thick curly hair), so as soon as the sun went below the horizon we walked back.
We went out to dinner at a very nice restaurant and our waiter cut us a deal because it was very expensive and he knew we were a big group on a budget. We got bread, water, appetizers, and pasta for 15 € each. He said that during the peak season they would get 150 people here a night and when we were there it was totally empty, because apparently nobody goes to Ventotene in October. For appetizers, the non-fishy fans had prosciutto, sliced eggplant, basil leaves, and really good cheese (almost like cheddar). The fish-eaters had a tuna meatball, octopus, eggplant, and small little silver fish (still whole). Pasta for the veggies was linguine with an oily tomato-basil sauce (a bit oily but quite tasty) and the fish eaters had a tomato-seaweed sauce with two whole shrimp-like animals on the plate. We all ended up getting the dessert that our waiter highly recommended as well: pistachio ice cream, made from the best pistachios, grown in Sicilia. This ice cream was amazing. As soon as I saw it I knew it would be the kind of food I would still be able to taste years later. It was full of pistachio chunks and was nothing like the typical pistachio flavored ice cream you see in the states. It was thick, chunky, and full of flavor. It had a perfect consistency and I ate my tiny scoop in about 10 minutes, savoring every bite. This was truly the kind of thing I wish I could pack up and send home to my family, Dad specifically. Sadly, my description and a photo will have to suffice.
We went home and began to play cards and drink some of a jug of wine we had bought, but the wine ended up being terrible and we were all tired, so we pushed some beds together and all 9 of us fell asleep spooning together. It was fabulous. Before falling asleep, though, we went up to the roof (there was a window out of one of the bedrooms) to look at the stars. There was a tiny bit of light pollution from the main land, but that was 2 hours away and there was nothing on the island, so it was pretty fabulous. Viv, who’s from near NYC, had never seen the milky way before and also saw her first shooting star.
The next morning I woke up just in time to catch the sunrise. Viviane and I clambered up to the roof again to find Adam, Sarah, Jeff, and Liz already there huddled under blankets. We watched the sun rise over the mainland we had set sail from yesterday and it was exquisite. The outlines of all the buildings were silhouetted against pink, orange, red, and purple, and we sat watching it get brighter and brighter, listening to roosters crow and smelling bread and pastries from a local bakery. Once we could no longer look east without being blinded, we decided to troupe over to the Forno bakery because our stomachs and sense of smell had gotten the better of us.
The Forno turned into quite an adventure, because one of the men running it was hell-bent on having a political discussion with us (at 7 in the morning!). He was convinced that Obama was a Muslim, a black man shouldn’t be in the white house, no Jews died on September 11th, and nobody could have done a better job than how Bush handled the situation. We whole-heartedly disagreed with everything, really not wanting to cause a ruckus and just get our pastries and leave. We ended up staying there for half an hour because he just wouldn’t give up. The final word was okay, you can buy pastries, but come back this time next year and we’ll talk again, and I’ll give you free bread. We said bene, bene, bought our pastries (I got sfagiatella napolatina, my favorite), and went home. We ate, began to play cards, but again just fell asleep and napped until 11am.
After our nap, we threw on bathing suits, bought focaccia pizza from the Forno (politics-free) and set off for another beach we had been told about. It ended up being really rocky (down some stairs on a cliff) and too choppy to swim in, so we ate our pizza (I got onion pizza, no sauce or cheese, and it was delicious), then set off to climb rocks and go beach combing. The beach was mostly covered in small, smooth, black rocks, but there were lots of bits of tiny beach glass once you looked closely. Individually, they were nothing special, but we were able to gather so many so quickly that they looked quite striking piled together. We took lots of indie rock band album cover pictures of us climbing all the rocks extending from the base of the cliffs and generally had fun clambering around as we tried to avoid scraping up our feet on the volcanic pumice.
We were determined to swim in the Mediterranean, so we went back to the beach we had been at yesterday. The weather was much better, and the water was the clearest beach water I’ve ever seen in my life. It was a good thing we walked along the rocks before swimming, because we ended up seeing tons of vicious looking jelly fish. They weren’t very big, but their tentacles were so full of venom they were almost a purple-ish black. (Once we got back to the apartment, Caitlin informed us that they very well may have been man-o-wars.) We ended up getting out to a really sweet rock formation without getting stung, and had fun clambering around, taking in the view, and wishing we could swim out to other rocks, but knowing we shouldn’t with all the jellies. Back on the beach we had a lot of fun beach combing (lots of beach glass and pottery) and skipping rocks.
Once it got close to our boat’s departure (4:30pm) we headed back to the apartment, rinsed off, cleaned up, packed up, and headed out. The ride back was much smoother, thankfully, and we arrived back in Formia with a bit of time to kill before our train reservations. We played cards, and once on the train fell sound asleep in a big pile of people. We’re all now official cuddling addicts. We got back to our apartment around 10:30pm. All in all, a wonderful trip for not much money (about 110 €, including lodging, transportation, and food).

PICTURES: the view from our apartment looking back east towards the mainland, the sunset we watched, the rock formation we climbed on at the beach