Salina: the Green Aeolian Island, Capers, Malvasia, and the Real Il Postino Beach

If Vulcano is the Aeolian island people visit for the mud baths and Stromboli for the volcano fireworks at night, Salina is the one people go to for everything else: it’s the greenest island in the archipelago, genuinely tied to two real agricultural products — capers and Malvasia delle Lipari, a sweet dessert wine — and home to the beach that made an entire generation of film fans want to visit an island they couldn’t necessarily name.

Pollara and Il Postino

The village of Pollara sits inside the rim of an extinct, half-collapsed volcanic crater, open to the sea on one side — which is exactly why it looks the way it does in Il Postino (1994), Michael Radford’s film starring Massimo Troisi as a small-town postman who befriends the exiled poet Pablo Neruda. Pollara’s rural and beach scenes — Troisi cycling along the cliffside road above the water — were filmed here, even though the film’s fictional village is meant to be a small island near Naples; the harbor scenes were actually shot on Procida, near Naples, but Salina is where the postman actually rides his bike. The crater-rim beach below the village is Salina’s most photographed spot for exactly this reason, and it’s worth visiting for the setting alone even without having seen the film.

Capers and Malvasia: the two things to actually taste

Salina’s dry, volcanic soil turns out to be close to ideal for two very different crops. Capers grown here are considered among Italy’s best, sold still on the branch in local markets rather than pre-jarred, and used far more liberally in Salina’s own cooking than most visitors expect. Malvasia delle Lipari is the island’s DOC dessert wine, made from grapes dried in the sun before pressing to concentrate their sweetness — worth tasting at a vineyard rather than just from a bottle if you have the time, since several small producers on the island offer tastings.

The villages

Santa Marina Salina, where the main hydrofoil dock is, is the busiest of the island’s villages and the natural base for a first visit. Malfa, on the north coast, is quieter and closer to Pollara. Lingua, at the island’s southern tip, is small enough to walk end to end in a few minutes but has one specific reason to stop: granita by the water, eaten at a café table close enough to hear the waves — a genuinely simple pleasure that’s become one of the standard things people recommend doing on Salina specifically.

Getting there

Liberty Lines runs the hydrofoil route from Milazzo (on Sicily’s north coast, itself reachable from Messina or Palermo) to Salina’s two ports, Santa Marina and Rinella, in around 1 hour 40 minutes, with roughly a dozen daily departures through the summer season, starting early morning and running into the evening. Siremar’s conventional car ferry covers the same route in closer to 3 hours 20 minutes if you need to bring a vehicle, with departures a few times a week rather than daily. For most visitors without a car, the hydrofoil is the simpler and faster choice.

Practical tips

• Plan for more than a day trip if you can: Salina rewards a slower pace than the hydrofoil-hop-between-islands approach some visitors take to the Aeolians.
• Rent a scooter once you’re there: the island’s roads are narrow and winding, but a scooter covers the distance between Santa Marina, Malfa, and Pollara far more easily than walking.
• Go to Pollara in late afternoon: the crater-rim setting catches the light best a few hours before sunset.
• Book Malvasia tastings ahead in peak summer: the smaller family producers don’t always have space for walk-ins during August.

Staying on Salina itself instead of hopping over from Lipari? Search hotels on Salina on Booking.com (affiliate link — booking through it costs you nothing extra and helps support this site).

More on the Aeolian Islands, and see Salina on our interactive Sicily map.