Pelagie Islands: the Three Sisters

There is an archipelago lying on a dizzying blue sea. Among the white foam of a restless coming and going of waves, right in the center of the Sicilian channel: are the Pelagie islands, sister islands that include Lampedusa, Linosa and the smallest which is Lampione. Beautiful to be enchanted, once enjoyed the passage of very few human beings, especially fishermen. And so they kept a wild spirit that gave good nourishment to all sorts of legends. Lampedusa remains perhaps the best known, also for the news that comes to us from the mass media: a land full of suggestions and contradictions that nevertheless always manage to make peace with a proud and genuine beauty that never fades over time. Just in Lampedusa some voices place the gold and splendor of an old Atlantis; and somewhere the spirit of the Furious Orlando hovers, and of the battle between the Christian knights and the Saracens that took place there. Then comes the legend of the two monks of Lampedusa, who glimpsed a ship stranded in the land they inhabited. There were only two survivors on board: Rosina and Clelia, who over time became their wives. Linosa is a volcanic island with an irregular, scaly surface. An impetuous and sweet land, it lets itself be lulled by the sea and the song of birds: it is called the Isola delle Berte Maggiore, birds with a large wingspan and curved beak. The female lays only one egg a year, and their song often goes back to that of the sirens who once deceived those who found themselves plowing the placid or stormy sea on a ship, in search of fortune. Lampione is a crumb of an island, compared to the others. It has the poetry of a rock and a lighthouse perched on it, watching over the surrounding lands and waves, perhaps coming in the form of a boulder from the hands of Cyclops. Thrown, born from the indomitable energy of that severe and resistant force, placed from nothing above nothing, with fish tickling grains of earth orphans of peace.