The lumber room

When one is born and brought up on a small island, one learns to live with, and possibly love, the familiar. There is little choice since by the time one is 20 or so, new places and faces begin to run somewhat thin. There is always 'abroad', as the English put it, but that is a different world beyond the horizon, to which one does not really belong. Island life is a bit like growing up in a family home. Eventually the day comes when one runs out of spaces of discovery: the jumble in the cellar or the washroom (the Maltese equivalent of the attic) turns out to be not so new or mysterious after all.

Which is why I found Lampedusa so fascinating, uncanny almost. It's only a hundred odd miles away and smaller than Gozo. The topography and landscape are Comino writ large. The rocky arid plateau which makes up most of the island gives way to inlets and beaches on one side and impressive cliffs on the other. Wild fennel grows at the roadsides and thyme and squills are everywhere save for a narrow ribbon around the coast. The smells, the colours, the tendency for everything to be powdered in limestone dust, are all very familiar. Lampedusa is like discovering a long lost wing of a home one knows well.

Culturally, too, there are some continuities. We are both located on the southern margin of Europe, with Africa breathing down our necks. Sometimes literally, as when the warm scirocco brings to Lampedusa, as the xlokk does here, an unbearable humidity and a red desert dust which makes breathing a labour. It also brings migrating turtle doves and causes men to sit outside watching the sky, bemoaning the days when spring hunting was the highlight of the year. "Ci mangiamo le mani", one Empedocle told me as a dove whizzed past while we were having a coffee in the square, "nowadays it's migrants of another sort we're prepared for".

Indeed, in the little harbour down the road fishing boats vie for space with military vessels of every type. On my last day on the island the talk was of hundreds of immigrants taken ashore the night before, and of one casualty. I saw van after van of Africans being taken to the detention centre, weariness written all over their faces as they took in their first glimpse of Europe.

Both the doves and the immigrants trigger talk of the EU. It's mostly along the lines of mixed blessings and double standards. Everyone I met asked me if the euro changeover in Malta had brought about the explosion in prices apparently experienced in Lampedusa. On neighbouring Linosa (a verdant paradise of red-and-yellow-painted houses perched on a landscape of lava and spurge bushes), old stone mangers lie abandoned. A former cowherd who now runs a tourist bar explained how EU regulations made it impossible for locals to slaughter their animals. The last three Linosan cows are now enjoying an unexpected retirement in the backyard of the Lampedusa mayor.

Environmentalists too are sceptical. On one hand, Brussels has brought about the end of spring hunting and a flood of money to protect the breeding turtles on the famous spiaggia dei conigli. On the other, sweeping EU policy leaves erstwhile fishermen with stacks of cash for winding up their operations, cash that goes straight into more and more concrete boxes for tourists even as fishing, a key tourist attraction, ebbs away.

Like us, Lampedusans are used to being at the periphery, be it of the Italian state, Europe, or both. Unlike us, however, their local roots are somewhat shallow. The island was only colonised in 1843 when the Bourbons bought the island off the Tomasi, who bequeathed the leopard to the coat of arms of today's comune. The population is what one may call regionally cosmopolitan, in the sense that it represents a hundred years of island hopping in the central Mediterranean.

A Gatt family from Malta lived there before the colonisation proper, and the 'da Malta' surname is a dead giveaway. Many of the people I spoke to originally had family origins in Favignana, Marettimo, or some other Sicilian island. Most have relatives on mainland Sicily itself.

These two accidents of topography and history separate us. Lampedusa may share a place at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, but it has nothing that even remotely approaches our deep-water harbour. As such it had to live off its aridity, and for most of its history very few people were prepared to share this fate. When they did, Sicily was their safety net, while we looked elsewhere. Unlike us, Lampedusa attracted no despotic civilisations and colonial enterprise to thrive on corsairing and maritime trade, and to build heavily fortified cities facing the sea. As such it never had a rural-urban divide, an urban working class, or a legacy of social hierarchies.

Lampedusa today is just one of a group of islands off Sicily. It is the most remote and southern of all, attracting thousands of fleeting visitors annually but very few residents. The first thing that people will tell you is that Domenico Modugno and Claudio Baglioni chose the location to build holiday homes. With us it's not celebrities that redeem us, but a harbour.

So, which island was dealt the better hand? If the answer seems obvious, one might consider a sunny corner of the piazza on Via Roma, an espresso as only the Italians make it, and a slice of real Sicilian cassata. Thank chance for making us so different.

mafalzon@hotmail.com