Quando Ulisse approdò a Marettimo

WHEN ULYSSES LANDED AT MARETTIMO

That Marettimo be a island of unusual beauty It goes without saying, and I won't dwell on it too much. Wild and rocky, over the millennia it has managed to gather only an enchanted village and a few tourists. Marettimo is one of those islands that, magically, do not consist of their land, but of their sea, an extraordinary sea that in a few kilometers of coast exhibits an incredible quantity of magical caves at the water's edge, of fishy seabeds that would make the Maldives envious, of beaches from commercials. As if that were not enough, the seafarers do not care about all this, as in 1870 when there was the great fashion of the time (Rome to Italy) and they erected the only monument on the island not to the Unity but to a saint, for a miraculous catch. They were in fact great fishermen and when they were forced to emigrate they founded a colony that became famous in California, in Monterey. Today almost all of them find it more convenient to take care of tourists.
These rocks are 200 million years old, but they broke away from Sicily just 600,000 years ago. There are plants that are found here and nowhere else. In these seas the Romans faced the Carthaginians on the water for the first time, in 410 BC, and defeated them with the simple and ingenious invention of the rostra. The historian especially likes to think of this island - the extreme tip of Sicily, therefore of Italy and Europe - as the balcony of a conquest concluded by many peoples: the Romans, of course, then the Vandals, the Goths and the Ostrogoths, and so on up to the modern cousin of the Aragonese.

Harsh peoples who, as was the custom in the past, saw islands as places of isolation, perfect as outposts and cruel prisons. One of the cruelest that I know of was the one that the Bourbons, soft and ferocious, inflicted on Guglielmo Pepe. There is, on the very tip of the island, a magical and impregnable castle, equipped with a water tank in case of siege. Once the tank was emptied, the cave became the most terrible of prisons, where Pepe was locked up for years, in the dark, until he was pulled out green and with his skin attached to his bones.

But the most fascinating story about Marettimo is that of a modern Englishman and some ancient Greeks. Samuel Butler was anything but stupid. He was born in Langar-cum-Barnstone, (Nottingham) and, destined by his father for an ecclesiastical career, he studied at Cambridge. Bored by the life they had chosen for him, he fled to New Zealand, where he became a farmer. His most famous work remains Erewhon (1872), a story set in an imaginary country that recalls, and ridicules, the bigoted and money-loving England of his time. He was a master loved by his contemporary and later English writers, from Wilde to Joyce. Butler, who died just over a century ago, discovered Marettimo, and the account of his first voyage was published by the periodical Il Lambruschini of Trapani: it shows that in ancient times it was a fortified island, surrounded by walls, but no one has yet carried out a serious excavation campaign that could demonstrate the existence of ancient civilizations. The best, however, is yet to come. Butler, a profound scholar of Greek history, language and mythology, took it for granted that – a problem still debated – the Iliad and the Odyssey are not by the same author. Moreover: like other scholars, he identified Trapani and the western Mediterranean as the place where the Odyssey took place. He is not the only one, truth be told. Other scholars have come to the same conclusion, such as Robert Graves, who insists in particular on the anti-Phoenician function of the pseudo-Homeric work, Butler pushes his analysis to the point of specifying that Marettimo was Ithaca, that the Cyclopes were in Erice, and that the true author of the Odyssey was a woman, a princess from Trapani, Nausicaa, probably the daughter of King Alcinous of Scheria: the historical - geographical - anthropological clues that Butler identifies are numerous, too many to indicate here, but enough to make you want to read a recent reprint of his essay The Author of the Odyssey (Edizioni dell'Altana). It is a topic that few scholars (mostly Anglo-Saxon) deal with. Butler, hoping to ignite some passion among the people of Trapani, donated the manuscript of his work to the library of Trapani, but the culture of the city has long had to do with modern Proci. Who knows, perhaps, in this forgotten centenary, something may change. If not, never mind, Marettimo will remain there, for who knows how many years, to be the island that exists only for those who exist. by Giordano Bruno Guerri Il Giornale | Thursday 8 August 2002