In that regard, it didn’t disappoint. The window of our modest Airbnb was embellished with a typewriter as a result of it was purportedly the place Elsa Morante, the good Italian creator, wrote her 1957 novel, “Arturo’s Island.”
“The Procidans are surly, taciturn,” Morante noticed, including, “The arrival of a stranger arouses not curiosity, however moderately, mistrust. If he asks questions, he’s answered reluctantly as a result of the folks of my island don’t like their privateness spied on.”
All I spied by way of the bed room window was a brood of hens and an incessantly noisy rooster, perched on the excessive branches of an orange tree. A path by way of the backyard’s lemon groves led to a dilapidated outlook, its plaster of painted vines light and fallen, that seemed out onto the darkish Chiaia seashores. To get to them, we walked by way of slim alleys, down winding steel staircases or outdated concrete stairs as steep and straight as sluices.
We took an inexpensive boat trip across the island, with a cease for a dip within the chilly, clear sea. To be trustworthy, it was a lot much less spectacular than the same trip round Capri. There was no Blue Grotto. The Faraglioni of Procida are mere pebbles in comparison with the majestic rocks of Capri. The skipper in Capri had identified the cliff above which the Emperor Tiberius lived, and the Casa Malaparte, a favourite of trend homes, which “doesn’t have work as a result of the home windows are the work,” he mentioned. In distinction, our skipper in Procida shook his head at a concrete block with two tiny home windows atop a small rise of Mediterranean scrub. “A squatter’s home, constructed in a single day,” he mentioned. “A travesty.”
On the Corricella fishing village, we grabbed contemporary orange and lemon juice from La Locanda del Postino bar, the place the film was filmed. The mounds of white and brown fishing nets and lingering, leathery outdated males seemed like props for an additional movie. However the two fishermen bickering with each other for leaving a bucket on their boat weren’t appearing.
“The persons are going to go nuts,” mentioned the chef at Caracalé when he lastly inspected their haul of cod.
The meals all around the island — from the cream-filled pastries within the type of ox tongues for breakfast to the nespolino nightcaps comprised of the seeds of loquats — is memorable, and in comparison with Capri, way more inexpensive.