Poetry in motion

EAR the summit of Monte Fossa delle Felci, we step out of cool woods into dazzling light. It is a windless, scorching day on Salina. The Aeolian Islands bask peacefully in the heat haze: behind us, the isles of Lipari, Filicudi and Alicudi; in front, Panarea and the magnificent pyramid of Stromboli with its cap of volcanic gases. Sicily, to the south, is a shadow; Italy doesn’t exist at all. Bosomy Salina, with its twin volcanoes, floats in a little world of its own, in a blinding-blue pool of sky and sea.

“People say Salina’s a little place. I don’t know what they’re talking about,” jokes Elio, the ebullient chief ranger of the island’s nature reserve. “From where I stand, it’s pretty big. It’s everything else that’s tiny.”

Salinieris are fiercely proud of their home, which, in their view, is not only by far the best island in the archipelago, but probably in the world. In the hugely popular film , about the exiled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s friendship