LIPARI, Italy -- Islands have a way of distilling experience. A little more remote, a little harder to get to, they offer travelers not only a sense of adventure but also the taste of a culture less likely to have been homogenized to mainland standards.
If islands distill, islands off islands distill again. A visit to Sicily in March 2004 had provided so much rough-edged gusto that March 2005 found us heading for the Aeolian archipelago off the Sicilian north coast.
The main departure point for the Aeolians is Milazzo, a four-hour train ride from Palermo's Central Station. The tracks hug the coastline, with snow-capped mountains and ubiquitous citrus groves, palm trees, and cacti on the right and the intense blue-green water of the Tyrrhenian Sea on the left. An hour or so before the end of the trip, the nearer islands thrust their sharp, volcanic silhouettes into view.
In Milazzo, we boarded an early hydrofoil for the short run to Lipari, the largest island in the chain.
The Aeolians, seven in all, emerged after a great tectonic shift on the sea floor a million years ago. Inhabited since ancient times, they are named for Aeolus, the wind king who gave Odysseus a tightly stoppered bag of his best gales. When the hero's curious men, with their own home in sight, pulled the plug and were driven helter-skelter back to his shores, Aeolus angrily turned them away.
The morning we arrived was sunny and calm. On the horizon, a dramatic plume of smoke from Stromboli, the outermost island and most active volcano, rose straight into the sky. (It was to Stromboli that Roberto Rosselini brought Ingrid Bergman when he wanted to give persistent paparazzi the slip.)
The proprietress of Le Terrazze, the small guesthouse we had found online, met the ferry, grinned broadly, and, with the muscular independence that seems a hallmark of island women everywhere, hefted our bags into her too-small trunk and drove us the two minutes to our pretty beach-front lodging as she steered with one hand and dialed her cell phone with the other.
After settling us, Signora mostly left us to our own devices. She greeted us daily, and on one occasion -- pointing enthusiastically to a picture in her brochure -- encouraged us to rent one of her go-carts to tour the island. The 100 euros a day was a deal breaker, but we delighted in the exchange. Her main selling point was that the tiny vehicles required no helmets (''Caschi, no," she proclaimed, motioning with both arms), so we could have flouted death by weaving, bare-headed and free, among trucks, cars, and Vespas.