Salina, Sicily

Where it sits. Salina is the second-largest of the Aeolian Islands, an archipelago of volcanic peaks off the northern coast of Sicily in the province of Messina, and it lies at the centre of the group, with Lipari and Vulcano to the south, Panarea and Stromboli to the east, Filicudi and Alicudi to the west. It covers about 27 square kilometres and is built from six volcanic centres, of which two dominate: Monte Fossa delle Felci at 962 metres, the highest point in the whole archipelago, and Monte dei Porri at 860 metres. Seen from the sea the two cones give the island a perfect double silhouette, which is why the Greeks called it Didyme, the twin. The modern name comes from the salt pan at Lingua on the southeastern shore. Three comuni share the island — Santa Marina Salina, Malfa and Leni — with a resident population of around two and a half thousand.

Why it looks different. Salina is green, and no other Aeolian island is. The two high cones catch moisture and hold springs, so the slopes carry chestnut, oak, ferns and terraced vineyards where Lipari and Vulcano have bare pumice and scrub — Fossa delle Felci literally means the pit of ferns. That water is why the island has been farmed rather than merely inhabited. Two products carry its name: the caper, grown on the volcanic terraces and harvested by hand through early summer, and Malvasia delle Lipari, a sweet passito wine made from grapes dried on cane racks, which nearly vanished after the phylloxera collapse at the end of the nineteenth century and was revived from the 1960s and 1970s, largely through the work of the Austrian-Italian producer Carlo Hauner. Much of the high ground has been a nature reserve since the early 1980s.

On screen. Salina supplied the other half of Il Postino (1994). Michael Radford's film divided its imagined island between Procida in the Bay of Naples and Salina in the Aeolians: Pollara, a hamlet sitting inside a collapsed crater on the northwest coast, provided the house of the exiled poet Pablo Neruda and much of the film's most memorable coast, a black-sand beach under a sheer tuff cliff reached by a path down through the crater wall. Massimo Troisi, gravely ill through the shoot, died the day after it ended. A year earlier Nanni Moretti had used the archipelago for the central chapter of Caro Diario (1993), island-hopping through Lipari, Salina, Stromboli, Panarea and Alicudi in a sequence that is half travelogue and half satire on Italian intellectual life. The Aeolian screen tradition runs deeper still, back to Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli on the neighbouring island in 1950 and Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, shot around the islet of Lisca Bianca near Panarea in 1959.

What you actually see today. Santa Marina Salina is the main port, a single long street of shops and bars parallel to the water. Malfa, above the north coast, is the largest settlement and the base for Pollara, twenty minutes further west; the Pollara beach is spectacular and also hazardous, subject to rockfall from the overhanging cliff, and access has been restricted at times — the crater rim above it gives the classic view regardless. Lingua, south of Santa Marina, has the salt lagoon, a lighthouse and a small ethnographic museum, and is where Sicilians drive across the island for granita. The walk up Fossa delle Felci from the sanctuary of the Madonna del Terzito at Valdichiesa takes about two hours through fern and chestnut to a summit with the entire archipelago laid out below.

Getting there and timing. Hydrofoils run from Milazzo on the Sicilian mainland to Santa Marina and Rinella in roughly ninety minutes to two hours, with frequent short hops from Lipari; slower car ferries take longer, and services thin considerably from November to March and cancel outright in heavy weather, which is a real planning constraint rather than a formality. Buses circle the island and cars can be hired at the ports, though the roads are narrow and steep. Nothing here is step-free. Late May, June and September are the best weeks — warm sea, working restaurants, and none of the August pressure that fills every room in the archipelago.

What to eat and where to swim. Salina's kitchens are the best in the Aeolians and the cooking is built on what the terraces produce: capers and caper berries in everything, cherry tomatoes, wild fennel, ricotta, and the pane cunzatu that Lingua's granita bars serve alongside their almond ice. Swimming is off rock and coarse shingle rather than sand — Rinella, Santa Marina and Lingua all have accessible water, and boat trips run to the sea caves and to Filicudi. The Malvasia is best tasted at the estates around Malfa and Leni, several of which open their cellars through the summer.