Diary: Island time

Assplanting, standing, swimming: the natural language of the body

She fell over

Seb and I each assplanted twice on our recent trip to Ischia. The first instance was almost immediate. I had travelled from Naples airport to meet Seb at a restaurant called La Taverna Del Buongustaio, recommended both by Henry Woodland and Esther Sorooshian. As I was sitting down to the table, which was on a piece of astroturf carpet on the side of a narrow street, Seb slipped on the astro and slapped onto their back like a beetle.

The second and third slippages happened in quick succession. After hiking up Mount Epomeo, we were scrambling down the mountain’s eastern face to try and reach Ristorante Braccionere — a hunting lodge famous for its rabbit — before it closed at 3pm. We decided to take a short cut and were hopping like ibexes down a scree slope before Seb assplanted in the dust and I followed thirty seconds later.

The restaurant enjoyed a beautiful aspect over the bay of Naples and was packed with hunting memorabilia and the like. When we arrived it was still in full swing, with dozens of Ischian diners enjoying olive-oily Sunday lunches. It turned out the place had run out of rabbit for the day, but this was not fatal. Seb ordered a boar ragu and I rigatoni in a Genovese sauce. There was also a handsome litre of red wine, which came with salty fried potato skins.

During the fourth assplant, which happened at sunset on the same evening, Seb was actually in the shower. I slipped on a copy of Harper’s which was disguised on the polished concrete floor of our bedroom. It is worth reading Pankaj Mishra’s piece from the front.

The Roman Journalist

On the final evening of our stay we sat down for pizza with the Matera family, who own Castello Aragonese; Jana Curcenco, who had curated the show of Gabriele Matera’s works; Jana’s boyfriend, family and best friend; and a Roman journalist who had come to review the exhibition.

This Roman hack was an individual with a hard nose — but it wasn’t clear what was going on with her stomach, which seemed soft. She emptied two different effervescing powders into her water before dinner and two after, as well as sending back a chicken salad twice. She was an unstoppable inquisitor. And after an hour long grilling of Karin, Nicola Matera’s daughter, about Galen (whom she was studying in her ancient philosophy course at Turin), she only let up when everyone else had already risen from the table.

Stormy night

The second night of our stay an outrageously violent thunderstorm descended on the island. We had already closed our shutters and blinds by the time it began but left some items of glassware on the balcony which were promptly obliterated.

From 10 in the evening until 4am, Seb and I were awake spectating. The wind screamed through the buildings of the castle, which huddled at the top of the rock like a group of animals. Cascades of lightning, broken into stripes by the slats of the shutters, threw themselves down repeatedly. On the one occasion we tried to open the balcony doors to see what was happening, the wind was so powerful it was literally impossible to force the door open.

In the morning we woke up to a placid day with the waves lapping quietly at either side of Ischia Ponte, the gossamer structure connecting the castle with the main part of the island. I swam, dunking my head for refreshment and watching volcanic bubbles rising cheerfully to the surface of the sea.

Gabriele Matera

Gabriele Matera was a painter as well as the co-proprietor and restorer of Castello Aragonese, where Seb and I stayed this weekend. He died in 2005.

Jana called her show about Gabriele Matera, ‘Anacoreta e Artista Contemporaneo’, choosing to place Matera’s oeuvre in a tradition of anchoritic lives. It is easy to understand why: Jana explained, Matera’s life was about the pursuit of what is satisfyingly good in life and the mission of constructing a place where the world’s other distractions might be excluded — allowing the focus of the heart to be pure.

Jana’s show was formed of three movements: the ‘tende’ (tents) pictures of a sheet suspended on tent poles on a beach; the ‘bagni’, depictions of bathers lying on a highly abstracted beach; and the ‘uomini in rosso’, pictures of men in differing seated poses in a carmine monochrome. The uomini are Baconesque but also reminded me of John Bulwer’s rhetorical manuals (‘the natural language of the hand’) because of their interest in comportment and the language of the body.

I was really struck by all of the paintings, which shared an exacting, existential edge – but I thought that the ‘tende’ were particularly interesting in the context of the castle, inviting reflection on the nature of a home, and suggesting Matera’s own engagement with ideas of shelter. A shelter may not just be a physical shelter, from sun or from rain — as a sheet on tentpoles implies — but also a shelter from diversion; attrition.

In her cataloguing work, Jana discovered on the verso of one of Gabriele’s paintings an inscription which reads: ‘Searching, searching, searching…to exclude’. It’s a paradoxical statement but it captures something about the point of Castello Aragonese: the search for what is satisfyingly good. The difficult practice of excluding what leads us away from that.