The story

Thus was born the idea to visit them all

It seemed such a distant goal, with so far to go, with so much sea to sail.    But, also so much time appeared to be available, and not even the possibility of not succeeding.  The stage of life that Borges does not name, the age of conscious unconsciousness, sets no limits and gives itself none, rather offered a thousand opportunities to set off. 

At the time, a commuter college student, I used to return mid-afternoon on an ugly, dirty, slow local train. They still used 1930s-style vagons with wooden and iron seats, which are completely unthinkable today. They used to call it the “hunger train,” because it made all the stops and you pined for a missed lunch, a real torment.

The air that smells of spring is inescapable, giving you no alternative, leading you to think of the coming summer and for a moment you see yourself free of books and commitments and imagine yourself flying to some bay, some sea.  Rushing to catch the train, I spotted at a newsstand a tourism magazine quite in vogue at that time, with an intriguing title and figures on the cover. I bought it, trusting that at least that afternoon, reading it, I would not feel the heaviness of the commuting.

I read the entire impressive article. That magazine, materially, is still in my bookshelf today, it has a prominent place, and I find myself flipping through its pages quite often. The archaic windsurfers on the cover mark the period, perhaps it is better to say the age, of the publication; the undressed models tell us of truly “other” times; the unglossy pages makes us wonder about the concept of nostalgia, considering the today’s travel and tourism magazines.

From that reading was born the desire to measure myself with the small Italian islands, hypothesizing and dreaming of visiting them all.  Not knowing this, I had actually started years earlier, backpacking and tenting, with high school classmates.  Then would come the commitments of  the life, family, career, work, disappointments, realizations, long periods without travel and little sea.  But I always felt the innocent enthusiasm of that spring day that then led me back to go to islands and eventually to pull down these my uncertain pages. Lucky me!  It took decades, it was so fine.

The following is the April 1979 Gente Viaggi article, not quite yesterday.  It was the genesis of the idea, an investment of 1000 old liras that would have yielded plenty of excitement in the years to come.

Here the link to the original article, extracted from Gente Viaggi 04/1979:  GV79    .