Fiercely-protective of their microcosm, the Panarioti are hostile to unnecessary progress: after all, they were happy with candlelight until electricity came in the early ’80s. When the authorities tried to replace the moon with street lamps, the islanders overruled them. It was unthinkable to murder the romance of walking home guided by swaying mast-top lights like shooting stars. Until about the 1950s, on Panarea—like on Alicudi, the most westerly Aeolian isle—women-fearing locals still believed in the legend of Le Donne Volanti, or Flying Women. Fisher-witches, they reported, took to the skies in their skiffs at night, rowing past the -crescent moon. Such visions were later attributed to the consumption of the hallucinogenic ergot fungus.
Among the first well-known outsiders to drop anchor was Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta, a contemporary of Salvador Dalí, who disembarked from the triweekly ferry in 1954 with an emergency crate of Champagne. “We were poor farmers and fishermen, we’d never met rich people before, so we treated them like everyone else,” says Catania. From the late 1960s the bohemian Milanese set followed, shedding suits, skinny dipping and letting their hair grow as long as the bearded palms. They slummed it at two-star hotel Raya, which has grown organically in size, stature and status over the years. The elite club has lured the summer super-flotsam of the Mediterranean—from late Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli to Aristotle Onassis—to its dance floor, which, in the moonlight, seems to extend, pale and glittering, to the horizon. Raya’s louche reputation has always overshadowed the real Panarea. “But we are not the Italian Ibiza,” insists manager Anna Calì, “Raya holds parties two weeks a year in August. The rest of the time we live quietly.”
Raya’s owners—Paolo Tilche, a self-taught architect and charismatic rake, and the late fashion designer Myriam Beltrami—caused a stir when they first arrived. “She always walked around in a transparent dress with no bra,” chuckles Catania, clapping his hands. “Sometimes no dress at all. She would sunbathe naked on the rocks. There were a few hundred court cases about it.” After coming to Panarea from Milan in the ’60s, these legends of the 1970s—who also shared a house in Bali—built Raya. The minimalist temple to Euro-bohemianism ascends the mountainside above San Pietro like a helter-skelter wedding cake made on magic mushrooms. Rooms with wobbly walls and white floors remain -purposefully no-frills. Raya was always about the club (a kind of precursor to the elite Raya dating app) and its view of the tilted islet of Basiluzzo reclining like a Buddha before the ever-smoldering Stromboli.
Tilche built more homes on Panarea in his primitive-modernist style, for returning soul-searchers. On the wild, fennel-strewn road to the hamlet of Drauto, newly restored villa Antika is a trio of wisteria and bougainvillea draped buildings with five bedrooms between them. It was designed by Tilche in the early 1970s, inspired by Pantelleria’s stone dammusi houses, and has porthole windows and wild capers sprigging from its sea walls. Monochromatic interiors nod to the monasticism of Raya, with walls of marmorino (a putty used by the Romans to give the effect of polished marble) that subtly shift hue with the day, from stone, clay, and almond to alabaster. Colour accents are strictly limited to shades of olive and the coppery blue-green cacti in the suitably undone gardens. Antika’s real living rooms are its columned verandas, where faces and legs are striped with the shadows of cane shades. Beyond the mackerel skin of the water are the hazy outlines of the mainland city of Reggio Calabria and Sicily’s Mount Etna. Antika’s main hedonistic indulgence is eating outdoors. Venezuelan private chef Jehnny Juul, who has lived on Panarea for 18 years, prepares exquisite plates: nectar-like grilled peaches and burrata; petal salad with the purple crowns of caper flowers; and spaghetti allo frescaiolo with sweet bombs of datterini tomatoes. Juul cooks with ingredients from her permaculture allotments at Punta Milazzese, a nature reserve on the southern tip of Panarea and pit stop for migrating Eleonora’s falcons.
