A slower kind of summer
A week on a cove with one bar, two boats and no plan at all.
The road to Scopello gives up before the village does. You leave the car under a carob tree and walk the last stretch, past a wall of prickly pears, until the bay opens below like something you were not meant to see yet.
There is one bar. It opens when the owner wakes up and closes when the bread runs out. Nobody seems to mind. By the third morning we had stopped checking the time and started checking the colour of the water instead.
What the week was for
Swimming out to the sea stacks before the boats arrived. Reading in the shade of the old tonnara. Eating whatever came off the grill that evening, which was usually whatever came out of the sea that afternoon.
Nothing happened, slowly, and it was the best thing that happened all year.
We left with sand in every bag and no photographs worth posting. That, it turns out, is how you know it was a good week.