Anita Motta takes a sip of her ginger margarita and considers the kind of people who visit the Aeolian Islands. “They’ve changed,” she says, as we sit on the veranda of Il Principe di Salina, the elegant boutique hotel she co-owns on Salina, the second largest of the islands. “When I was little my parents brought me on the overnight ferry from Napoli, and it was Italian families like us who holidayed here. These days more than 70 per cent of our guests are British, American or Australian. And now they’ve found us, they keep coming back.”
I too am drinking a ginger margarita. It’s a recipe Motta brought back from a trip to New York last winter, and as the tequila begins to swirl, my attention wanders to the view over her shoulder. It’s 7.30pm, the colours are deepening and there, framed between the veranda’s pillars — like a scene from a widescreen movie — is the Tyrrhenian Sea. With every passing minute its blues grow more hypnotic, and all I can think is, what took us so long?
The elegant boutique hotel Il Principe di Salina is the place to stay on Salina
After all, it’s not as if this archipelago is sunk below some far horizon. Blasted out of the sea by 260,000 years of volcanic activity, it’s less than an hour by ferry from Sicily’s northern coast. On two of the islands — Stromboli and Vulcano — the volcanoes are still active, and all of the islands are dramatic in some way. So it’s no wonder film-makers have found them irresistible. Roberto Rossellini was here in 1949, falling in love with Ingrid Bergman while he directed her in Stromboli. At the same time, his furious estranged lover Anna Magnani smouldered in a rival production called Volcano, shot on nearby Salina. It was here, nearly 45 years later, that Il Postino was filmed. The tale of a poetry-loving postman, it sent arthouse ripples across the English-speaking world and won an Oscar for its score, by Luis Bacalov. But even so, only a handful of UK tour operators now feature the islands in their programmes.
It has taken someone exceptional to shift the dial. Motta is already on her third career. First she was a triathlete in Italy’s national team, then she played the corporate game in Milan, Manhattan and Bangkok, and finally, in 2017, when her family opened Il Principe, she discovered a talent not just for social media but for playing the hostess. Her Instagram posts got the hotel noticed but it’s her instinctive ability to animate an evening, in English, and make everyone feel involved that has made it such a success. Combined, of course, with that view.
Panarea is the smallest island in the chain, but and is popular with celebrities
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You alight from the plush VW minibus that picked you up from the harbour — and there, through the open door of the hotel, is the letterbox of sea and sky, beckoning you in. All you can do is gawp, then Motta hands you a glass of something delicious and introduces you to fellow guests. Pretty soon you’re sitting down to a communal dinner cooked by her husband, Filippo, and everyone is talking to everyone else. I’ve never stayed anywhere quite so sociable.
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“Just promise me you won’t only go to Salina,” Sarah McLennan said when I booked the trip a couple of months back. McLennan works at Real Holidays, one of that handful of Aeolian holiday specialists, and urged me to consider island-hopping instead. “The three biggest islands are almost within touching distance of each other,” she told me. “You can’t just sit there and look at them. Go and stretch your legs.”
The charming harbour on Lipari, which is worth a visit for its fascinating archaeological museum
ALAMY
So, on her recommendation I start with a volcano. Not Stromboli. Even when its eruptions aren’t making headlines (as they did from July 4 to 11 last year), minor explosions send frequent showers of lava into the sky — and the top half of its cone has been off-limits since 2019. I go to Vulcano instead. In comparison, the Fossa crater here seems to be having a protracted nap. As it does so, a mix of sulphurous gases and snotty-coloured steam seeps from its vents as if from a giant nostril. A traffic light controls access at the bottom of the path; if it’s green you can walk up to the bottom edge of its lopsided crater in half an hour — although I wouldn’t advise stopping there: it’s too close to the vents. Instead keep walking upwards. From the top it looks as if the smooth Tyrrhenian Sea is having an acne attack and one of the spots has just popped. It’s raw, messy and thrilling.
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Accommodation on Vulcano comes courtesy of the Therasia. Even if you’ve not the slightest interest in volcanoes, you should consider staying at this low-rise five-star spa hotel, which spreads across the northern end of the island in a crazy-paving pattern of terraces. From every one of them you can gaze across the narrow strait towards neighbouring Lipari, which is so close you’ll hear the music playing on the yachts moored in its coves. At dinner you’ll also be treated to a mesmerising sunset, framed by sheer volcanic cliffs and a golden sea. It’s a fitting overture to the Michelin-starred food on the tasting menu at I Tenerumi, the Therasia’s vegetarian restaurant. Vulcano tomatoes, fermented onion cream, potato millefeuille — the flavours are as intense as the colours of the evening sky.
Therasia hotel on Volcano has a Michelin-starred restaurant, a spa and splendid views
Thanks to McLennan’s prompting I also call in at Lipari and Panarea. At Lipari’s archaeological museum I sense the depth of the islands’ human history — courtesy of floor-to-ceiling stacks of amphorae and an unrivalled collection of expressive miniature masks, buried with the islands’ dead more than 2,000 years ago. Panarea is, by contrast, all about modern pleasures. Here a single harbourside nightclub, the Discoteca Raya, has cemented its reputation as a mini Mykonos — at least, it has among A-listers and Italians. Giorgio Armani, Bradley Cooper and Rihanna are among the names dropped here. But on either side of July and August the pace along its whitewashed maze of alleyways slows to a sleepwalk. Whether you come to dance or to daydream, the Bali-flavoured Quartara Boutique Hotel is the pick of its places to stay.
I’m glad I’ve seen all four. The Liberty Lines hydrofoils that run between the islands (and link them with Sicily) — skimming over the water at 35mph, sealed off from the sea and sky by stormproof cabins — may be short on glamour but they make day-tripping between the islands a cinch, with fares from Vulcano to Lipari starting from about £4.70 one way. A sense of adventure has rarely come so cheap.
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Even so, now that I’m on Salina it’s clear that this is the lushest, greenest island, and when Motta suggests I walk three miles westwards, I learn that it’s arguably the most magnificent too. Here the northern scarp of an extinct 2,821ft volcano plunges down to the turquoise sea but pauses just before the bottom to shelter a bowl of fertile farmland, long cultivated by the inhabitants of the village of Pollara. There are no beach bars, cabanas or hotels here — in fact, there’s barely any beach: just a scrap of shingle beneath a cliff — so it’s futureproofed against mass tourism. It needs to be, because it’s mind-bendingly beautiful.
Don’t miss the three-mile walk from Il Principe di Salina to the beautiful farming village of Pollara
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My final act is to explore the settlement of Malfa, where Il Principe di Salina is. In many ways Motta’s hotel is the appetiser: its cool, white interiors are the perfect palate-cleanser before I meander downhill. Peppered with cafés, hotels, mini-marts and a petrol station, it is no longer just a farming village but is not yet an upmarket holiday resort — although its direction of travel is clear, especially as I keep wandering into groups of languid twentysomething Americans hanging out on café terraces. Most appear to be in town for a well-heeled wedding. And when a tall woman with cliffhanger cheekbones and piercing film-star eyes asks for directions to the harbour, something suddenly occurs to me: they could all be characters in the next Aeolian Islands movie. It would have to smoulder, in keeping with the theme. After all, from here the smoking cone of Stromboli is clearly visible, 24 miles northwestwards. It would also, inevitably, lead somewhere explosive. But en route the audience would be bathed in a 90-minute wash of Aeolian colour. Purple sprays of bougainvillea. The vivid greens of the vineyards, backlit against the sun. The endless turquoise sea. And they’d be dazzled, just like me.
I wonder what they’d call it. Halfway to Heaven, perhaps?
Sean Newsom travelled to the Aeolian Islands as a guest of Real Holidays. He stayed on Vulcano as a guest of the Therasia Resort Sea & Spa (B&B doubles from £283; therasiaresort.it). On Salina he was a guest Il Principe di Salina (B&B doubles from £165; principedisalina.it). Real Holidays has seven nights’ B&B, with three nights at the Therasia and four nights at Il Principe di Salina, from £2,200pp, including flights and ferries (realholidays.co.uk)
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