Isole Minori
This issue moves through Italy’s Isole Minori (its most forgotten, remote, yet still inhabited islands), far beyond the summer postcard: through Capraia’s renewed communal life, Tremiti’s layered myths and absurd histories, Linosa’s suspended winter rhythms, and the volcanic imagination of Ferdinandea, the island that briefly rose from the sea and vanished again. Across these stories, the magazine follows those who stay, those who leave, and those who return, asking what remains of island life when tourism recedes, services thin out, and the mainland’s habits press ever closer. What emerges is not paradise, but dignity: fragile, practical, and deeply human.
These islands empty and refill with the seasons, but their real life does not begin when the tourists arrive. It begins in winter, when the ferries thin out and what remains can no longer hide behind the idea of paradise.
In Capraia and Linosa, island life appears less as isolation than as a sharpening of the senses: weather, supply, distance, and need collapsing the space between individual survival and collective care.
The issue lingers with those who stay inside these reduced worlds: beekeepers, fishermen, caretakers, elders, and returnees, each measuring the island not by scenery, but by what can still be sustained there.
Elsewhere, in Tremiti and around the vanished Ferdinandea, the islands become theatres of myth, absurdity, memory, and invention, proving how quickly small fragments of land can gather histories far larger than themselves.
Taken together, these stories do not defend the islands as untouched refuges. They ask what dignity, belonging, and continuity look like in places that are constantly emptying, filling, and negotiating their place against the mainland.
