Summer in the Islands by Matthew Fort

Author:Matthew Fort [Fort, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783523337
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

Ponza is an elongated, nubbly mass, and just large enough to have two communities, Ponza Porto at one end and Le Forna at the other. The interior is a rocky, scrubby affair, scattered with a remarkable number of ruins – Etruscan, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Phoenician – that says something about its significance in Mediterranean power politics over the centuries.

Some experts have suggested the island got its name from Pontius Pilate, whose family had property on the island. Well, it’s one theory, I suppose. The Romans certainly made full use of the place. There are still Roman fish tanks carved out of the rock in certain grottos where they kept fish ready for shipping off to the market. The fish fared rather better than Nero Caesar, the eldest brother of Caligula, who was exiled to Ponza and then murdered in AD 30. Caligula also dispatched his sisters, Agrippina the Younger and Julia Livilla to Ponza in AD 39. They were lucky and were recalled to Rome in AD 41.

Ponza’s isolated position later made it a prime target for Saracen and Turkish ‘pirates’, and eventually their repeated depredations caused the island to be abandoned in the Middle Ages. Any attractions it might have had as a settlement weren’t helped when the Ottoman fleet under the command of Turgut Reis (aka Dragut) defeated the Spanish fleet of Emperor Charles V commanded by Andrea Doria, near Ponza in 1552. The island was finally re-colonised in the eighteenth century as part of the Kingdom of Naples. In 1813 it was taken and briefly held by Charles Napier during the Napoleonic Wars.

As seems to be the case with almost every Italian island, Ponza has served as a prison at one time or another. Mussolini lodged Ras Imiru Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian Prince Regent, there in 1936. A few years later, Mussolini got a taste of his own medicine when he himself spent a few months as a prisoner on Ponza after his overthrow. In view of his subsequent fate, he may have wished he’d stayed there. More recently, Ponza has been a source of bentonite, used in the steel industry and for blocking up drill shafts; and kaolin, used mainly in paper production, but familiar to me in the kaolin and morphine formulation used to treat upset tummies when I was a child.

As well as its fair share of history, Ponza has accumulated an impressive mass of legend as well as history. Some authorities have identified it as Aeaea, the island in Homer’s Odyssey where Circe had her cave or grotto. She turned Odysseus’s crew into animals and blackmailed him into sleeping with her; not that he put up much resistance, even though he was prone to burst out weeping every time he thought of hearth, home and wife. Circe said she would only release him if he visited Hades, which he duly did, and she was as good as her word.

I’ve been reading the Odyssey, at a leisurely pace, hoping to learn something from Odysseus about the nature of travel.

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