It is not on foot, nor by bike, nor even by boat that the Adriatic is told to us. This time, the pages of some literary works are used as a means of transport. Our exploration of the sea that unites

by Fabio Fiori – 11/05/2020 – Source: Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa

In these long days of quarantine, space is closed to us, travel is denied us. For the first time in our lives we are serving a confinement unimaginable only two months ago. Despite the news, which previously came from far away, and the facts, which immediately afterward happened among us, should have immediately alerted us. Then I walked and pedaled carefree, I tacked dreaming of wider spring and summer horizons. An incredulity and an unpreparedness that, in many respects, is the same as always, at least that's what I thought reading enlightening pages, those of "The Plague" by Albert Camus: "Nothing could have made our fellow citizens foresee the incidents that occurred in the spring of that year and which were, we later understood, as the first signs of the series of serious events that we intend to chronicle".

But it is not news that I want to write today. Instead, I want to fantasize, on this cool late April morning. Travel, not in the space denied by the pandemic, but in the time offered by literature. I am a sailor, I am obsessed with time and space, as Bruce Chatwin said. A silver light reflects the Adriatic after the night's storms, while a cinnabar sun tries to free itself from leaden cumulus clouds. Lost drools draw ephemeral arabesques on the water. Not a ship on the sea, not a plane in the sky. It is a silent and ancient horizon, that this suspended time offers. A time that invites us to reread Adriatic pages of other people's travels, made by sail and oars, in an ancestral relationship with places, still necessary today. Pages that soothe travel nostalgia, that sharpen nomadic desires, in the grace of the winds, in the sacredness of walking, pedaling, swimming, rowing, sailing; waiting for tomorrow.

I leave the mouth of the Pescara on board the trabaccolo Trinity cargo of wheat bound for Dalmatia, at sunset on an October day. Fires are lit on the banks and the sailors sing romances. “The six men and the cabin boy first maneuvered in concert to catch the wind. Then, as the sails swelled in the air, all colored red and marked with rough figures, the six men sat down and began to smoke calmly,” recounts Gabriele D'Annunzio. The weather is good, but a sailor prophesies: “He fears not to send them”. Out at sea we meet a pair of fishing boats returning from a successful fishing trip. Unfortunately, a few hours later, the weather does not hold up. The wind strengthens from the north, the sea swells and we are forced to flee towards the east. “The noise of the sea covered the voices. A few waves broke on the deck, at intervals, with a dull sound”. I shiver, I do not have the mettle of those sailors from Abruzzo who at the beginning of the twentieth century faced the bizarre Adriatic. I take refuge below deck, I listen to excited words about the worsening conditions of a sick companion; then a wave shakes the lugger from the keel to the masthead. Frightened, I try to fall asleep. When I wake up, the wind is calm, “In the clear night a small island, which must have been Pelagosa, appeared in the distance like a cloud resting on the water”. But the landing is still far away, other winds and contrary seas, to which is added a sudden mourning. Finally the second storm also calmed down, the blue island of Solta appeared. After passing the strait, the moon “illuminated the shores. The sea had almost a lake-like calm. From the port of Split two ships were leaving, and they were coming towards the Trinity. The two crews were singing”. They were also from Pescara. Then a sailor informed them of the death of his companion: “The aveme pirdute to the sea, 'n midday lu furtunale. Tell your mothers".

They are still at sea, in the same years, but on Mary risen that fishes in tandem with another trawler from Fano. It is a journey far and wide between the two shores of the Adriatic that Giulio Grimaldi, with a wealth of nautical details, recounts in the novel of veristic style that takes its name from the same boat. These are pages that have the strong smell of the sea, that convey the joys and sorrows of a difficult environment. Rereading them I always find the pleasures of sailing, the gentle journey "with the foremast and mainsail swollen by a good mistral, over a blue sea and slightly wavy that stretched as far as the eye could see, with no other noise than a light splashing against the robust sides and the dull creaking of the sheets in the rigging". A sea that has never been a friend of man, Joseph Conrad recalls, at most an accomplice to his restlessness. Even the Adriatic is frightening when the Bora blows, whistling and hissing through the sails, the masts, the shrouds. With waves that "came back from all sides. They came in ones, in twos, in threes, swollen, sloshing, rumbling, foaming; they lifted the boat as if to capsize it with a monstrous blow of the shoulder, or they hit it and hit it as if they wanted to crush it: and every time the Maria flew over them, sustained their formidable embrace, and the great threatening mass dissolved, almost by magic, in a cloud of spray and foam against its robust flanks”. A life on board made of hardships and pains, but also of joys and visions, of enchanted landscapes such as the barely perceptible nuance of the “double hump of the Catria, and then the Carpegna and further back the San Vicino, and the Sibillini or Fairy mountains”. Then there are the pleasures of the on-board kitchen, when “seated in a circle around the plate of red mullet roasted on the embers” the sailors eat in silence, “watering down the meal with a mixture of water and vinegar that they poured from a small jug, all using the same glass”.

The sails of work, those of trade and fishing, lug sails or lateen sails; of cotton, white, ochre, rust, with a heraldry that is both imaginative and indispensable for recognition from afar. Adriatic sails that still in the first decades of the twentieth century strenuously resist the advance of engines.

Sails that when the wind was favorable, placed crosswise, gave the bragozzi and trabaccoli the appearance of doves with open wings, writes Giovanni Comisso, a lover of that archaic world. I often embark on his Chioggia sailing ships that shuttle between the lagoon and the islands, from west to east and vice versa. I can hear the captain's enthusiasm: "Scirocco, sirocco, but strong enough to get home before evening," he shouted to the crew, as they set course from the Carnizza roadstead, in the Arsa canal in Istria, to Chioggia. "The bright yellow of the sails opened to their maximum width" made the masts bend like crossbows. But the Adriatic winds are even more bizarre than the others and in the space of a few hours a happy Sirocco gives way to a furious mist from land. It forces you to lower the sails and put to sea a few miles from the port. Long hours of waiting at the mercy of the waves, only to hoist the sails again when the caligo he let off steam. We finally reach the port where a large number of sailing ships have come to take shelter from the weather. “The night was deep and the wind whistled through the shrouds as if it were winter.”

The twentieth century is also the century of leisure, of the joys that the Adriatic offers, not only along the shores to millions of bathers who come from all over Europe.

These are the joys of sailing as told by Arturo Marpicati or Giani Stuparich. With the cutter Happy Stocco we set out from the port of Eneo in Fiume, on July 9, 1920, arriving at the fort of San Nicolò in Sebenico, on July 30. Twenty days, an “Adriatic Itinerary”: Pula, Rovinj, Trieste, Miramare, Portorose, Venice, Novigrad, Parenzo, the delightful bay of Cigàle on the island of Lussino, the island of Selve, where the “surface of the sea, at every shiver of the breeze, shines while waving”, Zadar, a Venetian museum.

Smaller, but no less passionate is Stuparich's sail, “A sail! Our sail from Umag. At midday the mistral strengthened. And the two of us waited for that moment to get back on the boat, alone. … Where are we going? In the sea it has no destinations / Nor logic of roads and paths. / Hand on the helm, feel how it bubbles / And jolts on the hinges of life”, are “Istrian Memories”, for me they are Istrian dreams of a coming summer.

With Ario and Berto, two kids who grew up in Sacchetta in Trieste, I'm going to row the caício through the mandracchio and beyond the Lanterna, taking a dip and a couple of strokes in the gulf, as told by Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini. And after the swim, I'll go back to reading "L'onda dell'incrociatore" on a shore in Ponterosso, eating a slice of watermelon.

It's almost evening, the sea is the color of lead and the strong smell of the Levant makes me want to take one last sail back in time.

Fifties, I am with a boy who sold his cello, his music library and all his records to pay for a launch. Half, actually, because he tries to pay for the other half by going fishing. “The sea was already lively because of a light Greek wind, in the clear air it was a riot of healthy colors, without dust, like the foam that jumped on our bow as we headed towards the Tremiti Islands”. I always gladly return to those islands dear to Diomede, sailing sometimes, reading “Levantazzo” by Antonio Mallardi, more often. Especially in April when it seems that the Adriatic has “turned off the winter fury and its mood can take on a more serene and inviting aspect”.

I look out the window as the moon rises from the sea, the Levant has calmed down. I too, like the sailors of Trinity I love being outdoors, exposing myself to the waves, seeing men, breathing the wind. The calm will return, I will raise a sail and a gentle gust will carry me far away, beyond the horizon.

 

PS

The sails and sailors of this story are literary certain. The routes and winds are uncertain. Apologizing for the wavering fantasies, I thank in order of appearance:

Gabriele D'Annunzio, 1902. The sea surgeon.

Giulio Grimaldi, 1908. Risen Mary.

Giovanni Comisso, 1922. A cheap storm.

Arturo Marpicati, 1922. Adriatic Itinerary. A Little Novel of a Sail.

Giani Stuparich, 1961. Istrian memories.

Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini, 1947. The cruiser wave.

Antonio Mallardi, 1961. Levantazzao.