Gate Crashing a Mafia Party?

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Today we travel to Lipari, which is one of the Aeolian Islands off the north coast of Sicily.

As we pack I again notice that there's a tin on the desk in our room; when we arrived here Issy told me that it was full of tobacco. I ask her if she wants to take it with her. I'm not sure why; she doesn't smoke. I open it, and find two lollies in the bottom. It seems that she told me it was full of tobacco so that I wouldn't open it and find her secret stash, which she's now nearly finished eating. I'm clearly blindly trusting of her. She says that she can't believe that she made me believe that the hotel had given us a tin of tobacco, which now that I think about it is probably an excellent observation.

We board our train back to Naples, and then catch a taxi from Naples station down to the port. Our driver heads off at the same time as one of his colleagues, and it seems that the two know each other. They wind down their windows and have a conversation, all the while travelling through heavy traffic at somewhere around 50 kilometres per hour. This must surely be a special skill taught only at taxi driver school. The other taxi needs to slow down because the cars in front of him have slowed down, but our driver wants to continue the conversation, so he slows down too. There's nothing in front of us, so he's now holding up all the traffic behind us. There's now lots of horn blowing and arm waving going on, but the conversation calmly continues. Our driver asks us where we're from, and when we tell him Australia he says "kangaroo" very excitedly and holds his hands up close to his chest in his very best Skippy impersonation.

We check in at the ferry terminal, and now have two hours to kill until it leaves. I order some drinks from a small stall next to the waiting area. It's run by a Russian sounding lady, and two Russian sounding men. When I go to pay, one of the men offers me some very suspicious looking cigarettes. He's very insistent. I hope this isn't a sting, and he's really a member of the Naples Drug Squad carefully disguised as a Russian stall owner. I pay for the drinks and leave quickly.

Issy's happy to sit in the waiting area, while I stroll around the waterfront. We'd heard that Naples was a bit seedy, but the waterfront looks very attractive. The skyline's dominated by Mount Vesuvius and an old waterfront fort - Castel dell'Ovo. We read that there's been a fort on this site since the sixth century BC, and it's the oldest fort in Naples. The harbour's well populated with fancy looking yachts and cabin cruisers. I wander past a small beach area crammed with bathing boxes, sunlounges, umbrellas, and people sitting in the water on plastic chairs. There's a large sign right in front of it saying that bathing's forbidden because the area's part of the port. I suppose that sitting on a plastic chair in the water isn't bathing in the strictest sense of the word.

We get on our hydrofoil ferry. Issy's dosed up on her seasick pills, so she falls asleep. It's four hours until we reach our first stop - the island of Stromboli. This is a seriously active volcano that we've booked to come back to to climb in a few days time. It's then another two hours and four other island stops before we finally reach Lipari.

Our hotel's up the hill above the town. Our room has a large balcony and overlooks an infinity pool. It's dark now, but the views are still excellent, and the whole scene looks very attractive.

We ask the hotel manager where we can get some dinner. It seems that the hotel doesn't usually serve dinner, except once a year on 15th August, which just happens to be today. We're not sure what's special about today, and we're too hungry to bother asking. The manager says he'll reserve a table for us. The area around the pool is packed with tables set for dinner, and most of them are fully occupied, mostly by large groups of people who all seem to know each other. Everyone's well dressed, well everyone except for us. It feels like we've gate crashed a private function. Most of the guests are in their sixties, and look like they're probably the social elite of Lipari. Lipari's a very small island, and I wouldn't necessarily have thought of it as having a social elite, but I do then remember that we're now in part of Sicily. I hope that the men aren't Sicilian "businessmen" like the ones in "The Godfather". There's a band playing, and people are dancing. We're fairly sure that we're the only people here who don't know anyone, and we're feeling very out of place. The meal's a set menu. The dishes come out very slowly, and there are lots of them. It's now midnight, and we're very tired. We wait patiently and finally dessert appears. It looks like two slices of pink tart garnished with peaches and a sauce. I drool as I bite into it. It looked like dessert, but it's actually salmon, and it seems it's the main course. We're both now close to falling asleep. Dessert finally appears at 1am. We gobble it down quickly and stagger back to our room. We Google "15th August Italy". It seems that today is a religious public holiday in Italy for Assumption Day. I wonder if Sicilian businessmen like the ones in The Godfather celebrate religious holidays. I also wonder if they read obscure travel blogs. I wouldn't want to come back to the room one day and find a horse's head in our bed, or worse still to be dragged off in the middle of the night to be fitted with a large pair of concrete shoes. Despite being very tired I can still feel a sleepless night coming on.

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[Suzanne Conroy]

Gullible