Ulysses, a ghost under the stars

Up here, we are extraterrestrials hanging from the sky, in the blue Greek Sea. Ithaca, the northernmost tip of the island, the village of Exogí, which means 'out of the world' (έξω, out of the earth, γη). Up here, at the Extraterrestrial café, with a freshly squeezed orange juice in hand, it all makes sense: the feeling is of an alienating happiness, far from everything, with small villages at our feet, almost as if, one morning, Zeus had opened a casket of pearls to roll them towards the sea. Exogí is a few houses, a church with its bell tower, an immaculate silence and the Ionian Sea embracing time.

Iannis runs the café and is a young Greek with a beard like a modern Poseidon: 'I live here nine months of the year, I believe in returning to the land, in the value of listening to those who come, in the slow rhythms and the world that once was. We come from there'. So much so that he took a key and opened the private museum collection behind the bar. It was Chrysanthos Karavias who wanted it, he who made his fortune in Santorini but has his roots here: in a huge space, under 500-year-old beams, there are tools used between the 19th and mid-20th century, including a train engine brought from Germany after the Second World War and used to press olives. There are the amphorae in which to store oil, the tools cast in cannonballs from the Venetian era, the stones used to grind wheat, and the fatigue of living when, in order to fix working hours, one would observe the shadow left by the mountain on the village bell tower. At that point, all that was left to do was to go back home, to Exogí, there were no lamps or torches: 'These objects,' explains Iannis, 'show the intelligence, the adaptability of our people: they are our culture.

On the road down from Exogí to Stavrós, the heart of the island in palatial times (1400-1200 BC, the period of the Trojan War), a diversion on the left leads to the so-called Homer School, ruins - in every sense of the word, left to their fate - of an imposing palace on several terraces, large building blocks. Archaeologists study and the suggestion remains that it is indeed the palace of that wanderer who had a home in Ithaca, but who knows?

The Mediterranean scrubland smells of sage and rosemary, and slopes down to the villages of Fríkes and Kióni, bays blessed with sailboats and for a snack. At the Odysseas tavern, on the harbour, you can eat a delicious savòro, fish fried and marinated in oil, garlic and sultanas, to discover that history also comes to the table. "How can you not feel in savòro the assonance with the Venetian sarde in saor,' explains Gregorio Belloni, an engineer from Padua who for years has chosen Ithaca as his buen retiro to devote himself to free-diving fishing: 'it is a magical island where time dilates, people greet you and you become part of their world.

The villages and marinas, the history and culture, and even the beaches. Ithaca lacks nothing. There is the whole palette of blues and greens because the macchia, a cascade of pines and cypresses that cascades into the sea, has this effect: the light of Gidáki (endless and beautiful) is different from that of Sarakíniko or Kamínia. The sea seethes with colour, it has the secret and mystery of simple things, like that young woman, Veronika Mikos, met by chance on the beach at Dexiá. Intense eyes, elegant manners and a life for the environment. It could not be otherwise: she is the director of Healthy Seas. In 2021, the foundation, which challenges the filth of the seas and coasts, together with the island's inhabitants (they number about 3,000), carried out the project "The journey towards Ithaca": "In eight days," the director recalls, "we collected, thanks to the involvement of about sixty people, more than 76,000 kilos of nets, plastics, metals and we cleaned up a long stretch of the south-east coast where there was a disused fish farm. We had never seen such pollution, yet we succeeded and the islanders, sceptical at first, made the impossible possible. Ithaca is different from other islands, it is conservative and mysterious because the archaeological sites on the mainland are little investigated and those underwater are not at all. Ithaca does not have much evidence of the past, but it touches you with its spirit. It leaves room for imagination'.