All articles about Pantelleria

About Pantelleria

Pantelleria is closer to Tunisia than it is to Sicily, and it does not behave like a Sicilian island. There is no sandy beach anywhere on it — the coast is black lava rock dropping straight into very deep, very clear water — and there is no resort strip, no promenade and very little of what the word "island holiday" usually implies. What it has instead is a volcanic landscape people have farmed for three thousand years.

The signature sight is the Specchio di Venere, a thermal crater lake you can swim in, ringed with sulphurous mud that people plaster on themselves for free. The signature building is the dammuso: a thick-walled house of dry-stone lava with a domed roof shaped to catch rain, because the island has almost no fresh water of its own. Both exist for the same reason — this is a place that had to be engineered before it could be lived on.

The vines are the clearest example. Zibibbo grapes here are grown in hollows dug into the ground, each plant sheltered from a wind that never really stops, and the technique is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. The wine it produces, passito di Pantelleria, is the island's best-known export by some distance.

Be clear-eyed about the practicalities: you need a flight or a long ferry, you need a car once you are there, and the wind that shaped the agriculture also cancels boats. Come for a week, not for a day trip from Trapani — and come for the landscape and the food, not for a beach.