Malaparte’s bastard was truly phenomenal. We went to Canneto, where the pumice mines are, and collected a huge block of that porous and light stone that looked like a block of granite of about ten tons, but which in reality weighed just a couple of kilos. I lifted up on my head with both arms smiling. The photographer clicked the lens, and so I was portrayed in that athletic stance. The Italian newspapers published the photograph, and my mother wrote to me: “I am happy to see that you are well, and that you have become strong as a Hercules”.
The mother is happy, the Duce is happy, he is satisfied writer in confinement, who had overturned the stupidity of the regime in a mockery: When I was deported to the island of Lipari, the French and English newspapers announced that I was very ill, and accused Mussolini of cruelly against political convicts. I was, in fact, very ill, and it was feared that I was tuberculous, I will write about it Skin, recounting that Benito himself gave the order to the Lipari police to have me photographed in a sporting attitude and to send the photograph to Rome, to the Ministry of the Interior, which would have it published in the newspapers to show that I was in good health. So one morning a police officer came to me with a photographer and ordered me to take a sporty attitude. The bickering between the two over physical exercises was irresistible. Until the cop says solemnly: Muscles are more useful than the brain. If you had a little more muscle, you wouldn’t be here. Sic.
If Curzio Malaparte returned to Lipari today, it would struggle for a long time to find a bastard so disproportionately large as to satisfy the expectations of that ducesco bureaucrat. The pumice stone that with obsidian was the island’s only wealth for millennia, sold throughout the Mediterranean then all over the world in blocks for construction (even the dome of the Pantheon in large part of pumice and volcanic slag: otherwise it would have weighed too much), in smaller stones (for foot care from ancient times) or in very fine powder (for beauty products), in fact it has been almost abandoned for years. Worse: on the verge of unhealthy repression. An almost total cancellation of the past. What do you do with old mills and rails and trolleys and wharfs, if the quarrymen who worked there for a decade have been parked in the limbo of socially useful jobs and the liquidators of that little ancient world have only a damned hurry to get rid of the ferrous material to sell by weight, as if they were industrial scrap from the Ruhr?
For years a patrol of historians, enthusiasts, lovers of memories of the archipelago pulled by the Aeolian Study Center, has cultivated the hope that the literary, artistic and landscape heritage could give life to a widespread mining museum. To preserve an absolutely unique story on the relationship between islands and volcanoes, beauty and fear, life and death, cited among others by Diodorus Siculus, Strabone and down to Alexandre Dumas (Lipari, with its stronghold built on a cliff and its houses that follow the curves of the ground, offers an image of the most evocative) or Guy de Maupassant, who describes a curious white mountain that, from a distance, under a colder sky, could be mistaken for a snowy mountain . This is where pumice stone is mined for the whole world.
That project for, despite the reasons that in 2000 led UNESCO to recognize the Aeolian Islands as a World Heritage Site not only for the dazzling beauty, but for the peculiar volcanic aspects of the islands (which) represent in an exemplary way the object of volcanology studies world, never managed to break through. And it risks remaining a dream. Adrift in the blue sea like The floating stone island on which in 1934 an elzeviro signed Candido appeared in the cultural pages of the Corriere.
Who was behind that fictitious name chosen to write from confinement to the face of the Duce? Malaparte again. Who, after describing the flock of dilapidated huts and the old sailor Valastro with only one eye on his forehead like Polyphemus and the moray eels hidden among the rocks (which) tremble with sweetness, like girls waiting for their lover, told how from America and from France the ships come in front of Acquacalda to load the pumice stone dear to Catullus, very light, white, sweet to the touch and soft to the nail, like the skin of a young girl; yet very hard and rough if you do not know how to smooth it out … until you paint what today are called water bombs on Mount Pilatu when sudden rains drag down the sides of the mountain precipitous rivers of pumice pebbles, which they overturn into the sea like avalanches and the waves, the wind, the currents push the rivers of stones adrift, which gradually expanding form an immense white carpet: it seems, from a distance, an innumerable multitude of seagulls at rest, a cloud on the surface of the water, a wandering island like the ones Homer alluded to with the fable of wandering islands …
A crime: this is what would be the loss of all memory of pumice and obsidian, the sister stones, one white and the other black, generated by the eruptions. And linked to the myth of the ships that crossed the Mediterranean to sell the hard and sharp spear points and knives everywhere, writes the historian Pino La Greca in Aeolian, gates of the underworld, six thousand five hundred years before Columbus and four thousand before Ulysses. Who, however, was directed to return to Ithaca by Aeolus, who was the lord of the archipelago …
As for the underworld and al Pilate, the dormant volcano since 1230, how can we forget the death of Theodoric announced by an anchorite of great virtue who lived in Lipari and was revealed at the end of the sixth century by Pope Gregory the Great in The Dialogues? Yesterday, at the ninth hour, without belt or shoes and with his hands tied, he was led, between Pope John and the patrician Symmachus, into the crater of this nearby volcano and was thrown into it. Image that would have weighed on for centuries. So much so as to push Giosu Carducci to go back to it: Here is Lipari, the palace / Of an arduous volcano that smokes / And among the bmbiti flashes / De l’ardor that consumes it: / Here the black horse has come / Against the sky strong spring / Nitrending; and the knight / In the inabiss crater.
Even more than towards literary references, the erasure of the memory would be offensive to the Aeolian grandparents who faced the underworld to snatch their bread to live in that paradise that does not feed, as Francesco Rosso called it in an amazing reportage in La Stampa of 1961: The mountains rise like horrid immaculate overhangs up to more than three hundred meters and the workers climb one step after the other, very slowly, gradually scratching the smooth walls with a pickaxe and making the dusty breach slide downstream. They remain there for eight hours a day, with their feet resting on fragile projections of the crumbly almost vertical wall, in an unstable position of balance that breaks their back. In the summer months, when the sun flashes relentlessly, work scary up there. The rock releases an intolerable heat, the scorching dust suffocates, the thirst tortures, and the less strong give up. A dizziness, a clumsy effort to move the legs spliced with fatigue on the smooth wall, and the chasm opens wide under the unsuspecting ….
May 31, 2021 (change May 31, 2021 | 20:36)
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