Originally published by Vogue
“Anyone who has once known this land can never be quite free from the nostalgia for it,” D.H. Lawrence said aboutSicily.The statement counts double for the Aeolian Islands and triple for the island ofAlicudi, a gem in the Mediterranean Sea that has been a refuge for my family for 34 years. The island is too steep for cars or roads; instead, hundreds of steps have been built to the top of a now-defunct crater.
My mother and I half-jokingly called the Alicudi house that belonged to my family our “room of one’s own.” Whenever my mother was working on a book, often books that took place on the island or were in some way involved in its history, she would come here. And when I visited her, it became that for me too. But sometimes, to have a room of your own, you have to work extra hard. Getting there required taking a flight to Palermo, a boat to the island, transferring your belongings onto a donkey, and climbing 450 steps. (Everything has to be carried up by donkeys: groceries, suitcases, water, sometimes even furniture, hoisted slowly along the same ancient routes.) Both of my parents are writers, but this was my mother’s space. It was the place she could go to be alone with her thoughts and her work. By the time you reach the top, you have shed, or sweated out, months of city life. The creative payoff, after so much effort, always felt incredibly earned.
The house came into our family thanks to my mother’s wildly adventurous brother, who fixed up a ruin on the island in the late ‘80s, and we’ve been going there since 1992. I have a clear memory of listening to “Rhythm Is a Dancer” on a Walkman, lying on a limestonebisuolooverlooking the sea, absolutely bored by the absence of activity or social gatherings. And yet, even as a young girl, I knew I should be grateful for the boredom and stillness that forced me to create worlds out of rocks, sun, and sea—worlds that have stayed in much of my work and consciousness.
Later in life, when my family moved to America and summer visits were harder to organize, a craving for that primordial silence bonded me to my mother. My brother and I had complicated adolescences—shaped by the proximity of gangs and drugs and the pull of all the wrong paths—but knowing the island would be there waiting for us was a balm. Even later, when I began to share my life with the screenwriter who is the father of my children and quiet and solitude had to be constantly negotiated, the house in Alicudi became an answer. The sun-warmed bedrooms, the smell of jasmine rising at night, the salty breeze moving through the open shutters—it was a place that existed outside of the compromises that come with marriage.
There is a certain feeling you have when you disembark in Alicudi, one that many people speak of: an encounter with a silence that feels absolute and disarming. It is a kind of muffled absence, a wide breath that greets you as soon as you step off the boat. I have loved and longed so passionately on this island where, like in many volcanic places, emotions multiply a hundredfold. Sometimes I would arrive like a shipwrecked girl at the beginning or the end of tumultuous relationships. Climbing up the staircase, I would cross the threshold of my mother’s bedroom, decorated with a mural of Stromboli’s volcano that my uncle painted, and collapse onto her bed. I would often develop a fever or some explosive physical ailment as soon as I arrived, the manifestation of some stress I had accumulated out there in the world and was now ready to release. On that bed my mother would stroke my hair and hands.
In the outside world, my mother’s capacity for empathy was difficult, but on the island, depth was allowed. She had lived through a lot as a young woman and had a hard time showing empathy for other people’s pain. Often it seemed to her that I made a very big fuss of things and she had simple solutions to everything. If I had a problem with my period, I might as well get a hysterectomy. If a boyfriend was in a hospital because he got mugged, I should just make some pasta to cheer him up when he returned. But on the island, our differences peeled away. It was easier for her to show her love in a place that was emotionally nourishing for her too. Over time, I came to crave the island because it was where she could be her most generous.
And so we would find ourselves in the summer months for hours in silence, she on the bed, me at the desk next to her, overlooking the sea, writing, reading. In the late afternoon, when the heat died down, my mother fried eggplants and added the salty ricotta she knew I loved, sometimes with the capers that tasted like the sea. I made sure she ate some greens and prepared elaborate salads. She would lie naked on the outdoor sunbed, reading on her Kindle, the lush succulents surrounding her protectively. At night we would eat candlelit dinners on the porch, the breeze carrying the sounds from the port below, and fall asleep early. In a family where men’s voices and needs often filled the room, the house became an unspoken pact between the women—a kind of sanctuary. And once I had children, my son and daughter began to love the place too. One day I caught my daughter in bed with my mother—both on their laptops, each in her own world, focused—and I felt like the heart of my own relationship to my mother had been passed forward.
Things with my father could also get rocky, and again, it was thanks to Alicudi that we found our rhythm. This was the one place where he, an adventurous Sagittarian, would also slip into a gentler, more feminine side. Less competitive, more open. He would spend long hours quietly painting on the porch or stretch out in the hammock in the late afternoon, playing old romantic Italian songs from the ’60s into the fading light. Last summer he brought out a folding chair and his three granddaughters and I circled him with an electric shaver. We had decided his sparse hair needed shape and structure, and he sat there in the sun, laughing, as his granddaughters styled him. It was the first time in my life I had seen him open like that. Vulnerable but sweet.
My mother always said that when she died she wanted to be buried in the island’s cemetery overlooking the sea, and some part of me felt, when I visited last summer, I was beginning to prepare for that eventual absence. I believed, without ever being told, that the house would remain as a kind of female lineage carved into that barren rock.
Of course I knew that one day the stairs would become too much, but when my parents sold the house, it took me by surprise. They had visited a place in Greece—breezy, horizontal—and decided to sell in order to begin something new. A perfectly understandable choice, but one I wish I had been part of, if only in the telling. I didn’t hear the final decision from my mother but from a friend. My reaction bordered on disbelief. How could they make such a decision without consulting us? Hadn’t my mother felt what I had felt all those years? Wasn’t it important to say goodbyetogether? She reminded me of years when I didn’t visit. It didn’t matter that they were also years when my children were very young, when I was navigating my marriage or recovering from knee surgeries. But I could never imagine a life without that climb. The idea that they didn’t think it would matter to me was what hurt most.
My parents acknowledged that selling without a collective goodbye had been insensitive. They said we would return one last time together with the kids too. During that time, friends sent me listings they had seen online. The house was already on the market. Within weeks it was gone. I won’t get to say goodbye.
The loss is not the house itself but the people we were when we were there. I was on a train when I found out about the sale, and my heart skipped a beat. It wasn’t the first time my parents had acted impulsively, but this time I registered it in a new way. Something internal shifted, almost imperceptibly but irreversibly. The past didn’t disappear, but it became harder to inhabit. It lost a kind of innocence. And once that shift happens, you can’t quite return to the version of things you held before. You have to begin again from somewhere slightly altered.
Of course, I don’t ultimately blame my parents for wanting a new place that suited them. But the sudden disappearance of our house has made me think about making sure—for my own children—that each bend in the road finds its moment of mourning and ritual so that everyone’s feelings can be held. This, I realize now, can be a gift. It’s not the inheritance I thought I would receive, but it may be the one I carry forward—the need to say things out loud before they disappear.
Hand Me Downsis a series, with a new essay appearing each day through Mother’s Day, celebrating the gifts—tangible and intangible—that our mothers give us.
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