Paesaggi politici: il giardino pantesco

It seems that on Pantelleria, described in tourist brochures as 'the black pearl of the Mediterranean', one finds a miniature version of paradise on earth. Compared to Lampedusa, which the honours of the news refer to - sadly - as a land where it is easy to disembark, Pantelleria has steep ridges along almost its entire perimeter. In the long windswept weeks, the obsidian merchants who frequented it for millennia must have seemed unapproachable or, if already there, impossible to leave. Seneca, the first of its illustrious visitors, spoke of it as a 'deserta loca et asperrima', and again in the 18th century the geologist Donald de Dolomieu (before he gave his name to the Alpine Dolomites) had to give up on land there because of the high waves that had been surrounding it for too long.