STROMBOLI, ITALY
by Sabine Mirlesse

A train to a plane, to a bus, to a ferry. Time slows down. When I get to the port of Messina to board the boat, I’m mentally preparing myself to be deliberately stranded.

Messina. The strait of Messina is where many a sailor saw the Fatamorgana, that mirage of castles floating in the distance, like sky islands hovering just above the ocean. Castles… Hills... Boats… There’s something about boats and the clarity, or the hallucination, that staring at the horizon tends to bring.

Embarking. Like you should be waving a hanky in the air. Arriving in Stromboli is like arriving at an island of the mind. This triangular destination in the middle of the sea. It is black (volcanic sand), blue (sea) and red (lava) all over. And don’t forget the smoke pouring out the top.

“There isn’t a discotheque,” people say, as if to explain why it’s escaped the trendiness of its neighbouring destinations. Would you really come all this way to go to a club? No, you come to sit on the skin of a volcano and swim in the clear waters stretching hundreds of meters below to that explosion’s origin on the seafloor. You come to return to something even if it’s the first time you’re visiting. Somehow, the people that are meant to find Stromboli, do. Some never leave, or so the story goes.

Stories. They say when you fight with your lover here, it’s because of the volcano. And although most couples are very much in love, when watching the eruptions at dusk, even the most affectionate stand side by side rather than interlaced, for there is plenty of time for that later, at aperitivo. The roaring urgency of what they are witnessing is too extraordinary, too intimately powerful, to behold in the same way you would a firework display. People tend to stand silently apart, wind circling around them, in each other’s presence but above all being present before this extraordinary sight, summoning all our senses. The lighthouse of the Mediterranean. You be Ingrid Bergman, and I’ll be Roberto Rosselini. Or maybe we’re both Iddu – the volcano’s true name.

• Sabine Mirlesse is a multidisciplinary artist currently living in Paris. She has a particular interest in landscapes and explores how geological sites are divined, interpreted and recounted.