On a Magical Italian Island, Swimming, Stone and Sea
The sea proceeds along a beige cliff so chipped and cubed that it looks like a giant took a chisel to the coast. The water is a kaleidoscope of blue, with two colors dominating — cobalt over the meadows of sea grass undulating in the current, and ice-blue above the long strips of white sand. And somewhere just down the coast, I'd been told, there was a hidden maze of man-made caverns, 'like a temple.'
So I was swimming in search of the vaults, watching the high cliffs slope closer to the sea and the sailboats and tour boats gliding by. After a quarter mile, I saw a dark entrance about two stories high, divided by a column. I climbed onto a stone landing and entered a labyrinth of chambers the size of warehouses, hollowed over the centuries by stonecutters extracting countless blocks of limestone-like rock called calcarenite. The soft dirt floor descended into more dim, empty halls, reminding me of the tombs of the pharaohs in Egypt. Instead of hieroglyphics, the walls were covered in scars from pickaxes and disc saws.
Popular with Italians but little known by foreigners, Favignana is a mostly flat, jagged island with three hallmarks: swimming, stone and tuna.
Now the massive tuna factory is an inventive museum, some of the 200 former quarries have been transformed into a botanical garden, and marble streets once trodden by exhausted laborers are alive with deeply tanned, stylishly dressed Italians on vacation.
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