three roundabout, related reasons why we went to the Aeolian Islands for our summer holiday (and one pragmatic reason)

Reason 1 - there is a song on the 1998 album Mermaid Avenue (in which Billy Bragg and Wilco put music to and perform songs using previously unheard lyrics by late American folk singer Woody Guthrie) called ‘Ingrid Bergman’ that goes: ‘Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman/ Let's go make a picture/ On the island of Stromboli/ Ingrid Bergman’ and then goes: ‘Ingrid Bergman, you're so purty/ You'd make any mountain quiver/ You'd make fire fly from the crater/ Ingrid Bergman’ and so on and is Guthrie’s ode to Bergman after seeing the 1950s film ‘Stromboli’ and is a pretty fantastic song.

Reason 2 - on an observer film weekly podcast they were interviewing Isabella Rossellini as she was about to open a film festival celebrating the work of her father Roberto Rossellini who directed, amongst other things, the above mentioned film ‘Stromboli’ and not only that but, as she revealed, it was in the making of said film on said island that Roberto and Ingrid fell in love and as such came to produce, a few years later, Isabella herself. She said that until quite recently the island was a poor fishing community known for its earthquakes and although very beautiful had become quite abandoned after World War 2 when many locals left for places such as the Australia and the United States but had now transformed itself into a wealthy resort (although she didn’t holiday there much herself because on the few times she had visited found herself too celebrated, with too many parties thrown in her honour and said in her accent this sounded very charming) and during the interview the interviewer mentioned that his upcoming honeymoon was going to begin in Stromboli and I wondered if he planned his honeymoon this way so that he could just slip that little fact into his interview with Isabella Rossellini.

Reason 3 - outside Angel tube station there was a news stall where the proprietor had placed a box of old or damaged magazines at the cost of three for £1. So I selected a Vanity Fair and a movie magazine and a copy of Conde Nast Traveller, the latter of which I would never usually buy due to its highfalutin reputation but which was promoting ‘affordable europe’ on its cover and that sounded promising although later closer examination revealed that the idea of ‘affordable’ is subjective and would mean something different to someone who, say, owns their own yacht. That magazine has led us to the Greek Islands, south of France and now the Aeolian Islands (although the article about the latter I had not previously noticed but now stood out due to reasons one and two above) and I have to admit has come to cost us considerably more than the initial 33p.

Reason 4 - we took such a long time finalising dates that tickets to Croatia (the original plan) had become ridiculously expensive and we had to choose somewhere fast and we loved Italy the first time round and so flights to Palermo it was to be.

The Aeolians are a string of seven volcanic islands north of Siciliy. They vary in their degrees of sophistication and modernity. While some attract the international fashion crowd and P. Diddy-types, we were after a more key affair.

We chose Salina, where we holidayed amongst the holidaying Italians. There were no multi-language ‘touristico’ menus here. In fact some places did not even have menus, instead describing to you (in Italian*) the various catches and specials of the day. The film Il Postino was filmed here. It is set in 1952 and they apparently didn’t have to change much to give it that retro vibe.

We also stayed on Filicudi, where we were two of the total of four people who got off the boat from Salina and two of the couple of hundred people in total on the island.

One day we did a hike where we saw not a sole except for a dog who looked like Santa’s Little Helper with one of those white cone things around its head and a bandage around its stomach (and it ran by too quickly to get a photo of it but it looked something like this: ) The hike reminded me of when we were in the Cinque Terre on our first trip to Italy but only because although the scenery was equally beautiful the atmosphere was the complete opposite - there I felt like I had landed in an episode of The O.C., ‘Spring Break in the Cinque Terre Special’ such was the extent of American college kids around and here it was just us and the nature and the sun and sea and all was good.

* At one point, as we looked particularly blank, the waiter realised our difficulties - which included not only our lack of Italian but our attempts to explain Brendan’s coeliac disease and his inability to eat pasta, bread, pizza, flour, etc. so called over an English speaker (who luckily was working at the restaurant and was not a fellow diner whose meal we were interrupting - which is what happened at another place, much to our mortification) and he came over and not only could he speak English but did so with an Australian accent and it turned out that he was from Sydney and his father owned the restaurant and they spend six months of the year in Siciliy and six in Sydney and he had had eight summers in a row which sounds like a nice life if you can get it and he asked if we had relatives on the island and when we said no he said, so why did you come here then? and I said because it sounded nice (rather than going into the whole explanation as per above) and then he informed us that the restaurant, on an island with a population of 2,000 people, served gluten free pasta (and the next night we found out it also served gluten free pizza) which was pretty amazing as we have never been offered this in London restaurants who probably serve that many people in a week.