CAPO TESTA

There are many strange and hidden places in the Mediterranean Sea, like Les Calanches in Corsica with its red cliffs, its black sand beaches and the green green Eucalyptus trees for all the world like a tropical Pacific paradise where one keeps expecting to see Polynesians or Tahitians or like Sabaudia and the Isle of Circeo which is really a peninsula but Ulysses' lost men went in circles, where the sorceress turned them into pigs
which may have been freeing them to find their true nature for which they perhaps owed her a world of gratitude...those ancient Greeks were always rife with symbolism describing the timeless arrested psychological realities of long suffering humanity...

or the deserted islands of Gorgona, Giglio and Capraia where I would go for solitude and hide in the herbs and brambles and the rabbit warrens, crouching on my knees and crawling on my belly like a serpent all day beneath the sun and gusting wind...without seeing a living soul except occasionally when I startled a bird of prey who would open his wings only for a second, just long enough to carry him a few yards down the wind to drop back into the underbrush to return to his rest safe away from me...and far off down below the smooth and shining, round sea...you could almost see the curve of the earth on the horizon...

and some days from the rocky shore I would swim out all alone and dive down to the bottom and sit among the kelp and look out into a wall of blue water for as long as I could hold my breath,imagining that any moment a whale would come up from the abyss to nudge me...

But Sardegna…now that has true mystery and drama…places like Filitosa with its ring of prehistoric figurines and Dorgali and Arbatrax and the Grotto of Neptune and even the language seems of unknown Neolithic origins, words like Nuragh, wines like Su Canonau and Anjulu Ruju…however of all those strange and metaphysical places none is so dramatic as Capo Testa...I have never seen any where on earth such a place, such stones in the forms of dinosaurs, elephants, seals and eagles…and even Pterodactyls…they look like Henry Moore statues only in frozen motion…contrasted against the light blue pastel sky and the dark blue almost violet glassy and gemlike sea and the crashing surf all frothy white…

I cannot decide if all these statues hewn by the waves and wind are frozen in motion by a look from the Medusa or the wand of the winter witch of Narnia or if they come back to life each night like the old recurrent theme from the “Nutcracker” or “Toy Story” or “Night at The Museum” when inanimate objects come to life as long as no one is looking…I was only there by day but had I had the time, I should have liked to have hidden from their view and kept a vigil one moonlit night to see if they might dance in circles round and round…under the silent cloud play passing the moon in and out of obscurity suddenly emerging like a raging dragon's eye beneath a dark, brooding and ever changing brow...perhaps these dancing stones had started as its teeth like the story of Jason and his Argonauts and the Golden Fleece...

If I were a seabird, an albatross, surely I should choose Capo Testa to be my rookery…the enchantment of the place without much help from the imagination is suddenly a few centuries back in the days of the square sailed tall ships and Moorish pirates come to raid the coast or retrieve buried treasures looted from the Spaniards…or perhaps this is where the sea monsters Schylla and Caribdus from the Odyssey lived and these their scattered fossil bones…or maybe the gorgon sirens’ lair whose song entranced the lust filled sailors to their doom…

And there among the towering gargantuan stones, I imagine I’m the all embracing night with my arms all around them hugging tight, I am the darkness itself which hides a multitude of sins as well as frightening the daylights out of the timid seekers of the light…while the only sound is the snoring of Poseidon sending waves to lap the restless shore with each rise and fall of his heaving chest from the bottom of his watery bed…

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