OUT OF EDEN WALK

Editor’s note:
After years of living abroad, Walter Capella returned to Italy hungry to understand his homeland more deeply. In this essay, he introduces his Cammino Adagio, or Slow Walk, inspired in part by Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden Walk. Tomorrow, he’ll give voice to people he and his partner, Elisa Rocco, met on their journey, who shared stories of home.

As an almost bilingual guy with a love for words, I spent a long time trying to translate, from Italian to English, the word territorio. It shares some meaning with the English word territory, but it describes much more than merely an area. When Italians say amo il territorio (I love the territory), they do not only mean that they love a specific piece of land—but also everything it has spawned, such as culture, language, history, and, of course, the very typical food.

Indeed, the physical features of the landscape become a haven for local or regional habits and taste. We can have products from the territorio, such as wine and recipes, or artists from the territorio, such as artisans and writers. Perusing the countryside outside any city from Siracusa to Sondrio, you can find yourself feeling, or even tasting, that territorio.

One of Italy’s most famous places is Mt. Etna, the legendary volcano in Sicily. If you venture into its environs, you can sense how it has influenced people for centuries—and not just for its fertile soils. Despite Etna’s periodic eruptions (there’s one happening as I write this), its slopes host many towns and an amazing variety of local businesses and farming traditions.

“I couldn’t do this job anywhere else than here,” said Giampiero Buscemi. A ceramist from Caltagirone, Giampiero is someone I would call a true artista del territorio. He treasures the pottery-making tradition of his town and the view of the volcano. “Each time I pass by, I stare in awe at the power of this piece of land,” he said. “It’s like a sacred site, and you could genuinely call it Her Majesty Mt. Etna, because when you look at it, you realize how small we are.”

Giuseppe Puglisi, a local wine producer whose fields are on Etna’s slopes, thinks differently. “I hate that volcano,” he said. It’s all the ash, he explained, which requires annual cleanups. And, he added, there was that unfortunate event in the early 1990s. (We’ll get to that later.)

I decided to travel on foot across parts of my native country to surface stories hidden in the landscape, starting from the oldest (the geological stories, which took shape millions of years ago) to the most recent (people’s own stories, which might be only years, months, even days, old). Italy is traversed by mountain chains, the backbones of the boot-shaped peninsula, and every region is a cultural microcosmos. My aim in walking on land so rich in diversity and personal meaning was to explore the influence of geology on society, to plumb the connection between the physical and human world.

This, I believe, underpins our history and our present. Geology is involved in many of the challenges we face as a society. For example, we must find rare metals to make new technologies that enable the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. Similarly, by studying the Earth, we can better understand past and present changes in climate and prepare ourselves better for the future. For me, the best part of being a field geologist is spending time outdoors reading the landscape like a book. Stories of a former world are written in it, and I find that awe-inspiring. It’s like putting on special glasses that read through space and time—the power of x-rays and a time-machine combined.

In October 2021, I took the first steps of the Cammino Adagio project in Palermo, Sicily—the first of many that would take me across and around the Mediterranean’s largest island. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone. Three months earlier in Rome, I’d met my partner, Elisa Rocco, a professional actor and amateur botanist, who was on a forced sabbatical because of the COVID-19 pandemic. She enthusiastically joined my adagio journey and helped me with managing the project website and social media. I couldn’t have been luckier. Apart from her knowledge of plants, which expanded my spectrum of observations, she brought an innate ability to listen and get to know people.

That has been the most challenging aspect: to learn how to listen, hearing what’s said but also feeling what’s felt. It took a great deal of effort to become a good listener. But it paid off. From one town to the next, Elisa and I have built an extensive network of contacts. Very few people we met lived isolated lives; most seemed to be part of a great, interwoven fabric. Every meeting links to others, piecing together a story that reveals how people relate to the environment around them.

It may be hard to imagine a better example of geological and human connection than the territorio centered on Mt. Etna. We arrived at its base on a sunny winter day in early 2022 aiming to skirt around it. The wind was cold and the sunshine warm on our skin. We walked along the coast from Catania to Aci Castello, where a dark-stone Norman castle overlooks the bay and the Cyclopean Isles, rock pinnacles owing their name to Homeric mythology. Legend goes that in this spot, Odysseus tricked the cyclops Polyphemus, who furiously hurled boulders at his ship. Those huge rocks became the islands.

At the castle's base, we touched lavas half-a-million-years old. They were among the first to solidify in seawater when Etna was just a submerged mound. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine the birth of the volcano, the creation of what would become a mighty mountain. We learned that the volcano has not only defined the physical territorio but also imbued its residents with a collective spirit.

“In face of disasters, citizens of Catania are incredibly resilient,” said Oreste Lo Basso, an archaeologist and tour guide in Etna’s biggest city. “Last year there were exceptional, deadly floods that caused a lot of damage to the whole town.” As the water receded, he said, shopkeepers and restaurant owners immediately set about cleaning up the mess. “They didn’t even take one day off. They know everything changes constantly under their feet—better keep up and move on.”

Etna’s slopes are carpeted with villages, vineyards, fruit trees and other agricultural fields, the surface boiling with activity no less than the subsurface. Rugged crests and dormant craters give shape to unique natural and cultural niches, such as the endemic birch thickets on the mountain’s northeastern slope or the tradition of pistachio farming around the town of Bronte.

The ethereal beauty captured in pictures during each eruption contrasts with the tangible weight of volcanic debris that falls upon the surrounding towns. The sand-to-gravel-size “ash” is the stuff of Etna, like it or not. It’s what Giuseppe Puglisi, the wine producer, grumbled about. “It would make life so much easier not to have it,” he said in his dimly lit shop in the village of Zafferana Etnea. “Every time, we are obliged to sweep the ash away from our entrance door and our balcony… let alone the damage it causes to agriculture.”

But you can sell prestigious wines thanks to the Etna provenance! I pointed out, referring to the Italian system of classifying wines according to specific regions and methods of production and standards of quality. Wines from the Etna territorio are among the roughly 300 in Italy that hold the prestigious DOC label.

Giuseppe shrugged. “See there, beyond those houses,” he said, pointing out the window to the forested slopes. “About 30 years ago, I lost several hectares of productive land. As an eruption spilled over into the valley, my vineyards were blanketed by lava. Volcanos are beautiful in pictures… until you live next to them.”

Some 50 miles southwest of Zafferana Etnea, is the workshop of ceramist Giampiero Buscemi, who venerates the volcano as Her Majesty Mt. Etna. “A large part of our history and pottery-making artistry comes from this very spot,” Giampiero said as we looked north at the clayey badlands fronting Etna’s profile. Caltagirone's clay is loaded with kaolinite, a mineral that imparts plasticity, rendering the material optimal for shaping pottery.

“People's livelihoods were made possible by this particular terrain,” he said. “It gave birth to a millenary tradition that I’m honored to continue. I'm not interested in gaining notoriety. For me, the most important thing is to do my job, my art, in this place. Each day, I come to this viewpoint and stare in awe at the power of this piece of land. It’s like a sacred site.”

Giampiero, whose black fedora and mustache give him a rugged charm, described how the earthiness of his hands-on craft has shaped him. “By now, I've become one with the land,” he said. “The sky, the land, the Sicilian sea—these are elements that flow within me.”

Contemplating the landscape, he added, “You see, if I pause enough, I hear the voices of my ancestors, villagers speaking an old form of Sicilian while walking back from the fields, building the town that will be our present, our future.”

As an Italian who has lived many years abroad, it’s been a spiritual experience to travel on foot through my country and meet people such as Oreste, Giuseppe, and Giampiero. They helped me understand the connection between landscapes and cultures, getting to the heart of each territorio. Eventually, I hope to go beyond our borders and find those connections in other places around the world.

Moving adagio, like a piece of music through time and space, we relish the brilliance of a continuous epiphany.

Walter Capella, PhD, is a researcher-geologist, multimedia storyteller, professional dreamer, and world enthusiast. After living in Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the U.K., he returned to his native Italy in search of a deeper understanding of home.