Seven days · June — August · Capo d'Orlando

The Aeolian Islands

La Canna rising out of the sea off Filicudi, with Alicudi behind

La Canna, off Filicudi Boarding · Capo d'Orlando

Days: 7
Islands: 7
Guests: 9
Under way: under 6 h
Boarding: Capo d'Orlando
Season: June — August

§ 01 — Route

The Aeolians are a UNESCO World Heritage site and, more usefully for you, they are close together. Across the whole week you spend under six hours under way.

This is the summer route, from Capo d’Orlando Marina: a suggestion, which the captain adjusts to the forecast each morning.

Cushions on the bow at sunset, the sea flat to the horizon

§ 02 — Itineraries

The whole week

Under six hours under way

That changes what a week looks like. You are not delivering a boat from A to B: you move between one anchorage and the next when the light, or the wind, tells you to. The rest of the time the boat is still and you are in the water.

The bow, at sunset

§ 03 — Day 1 — 7

Seven days

Day 1

Capo d'Orlando to Vulcano

Boarding from 17:00 · forty-five minutes under way

You board, settle in, and the crossing takes about as long as a swim before dinner. Vulcano announces itself as a smell before it appears as an island — sulphur, warm, unmistakable.
The night at anchor off the north coast. First dinner on board.
Day 2

Vulcano and Lipari

Morning on the western shore, at the Grotta del Cavallo and the Piscina di Venere: clear water against black rock, at its best before the day boats arrive. The thermal mud baths are close by, and are exactly as pungent as everyone says.
In the afternoon, the short hop to Lipari. The largest and liveliest of the seven: a proper town, a castle on the rock above the harbour, and the pumice quarries on the east coast where the sea turns a colour that does not look real.
Day 3

Salina

The green one. Salina has water, which the others largely don't, and it shows: vines, capers, ferns on the hillsides. The morning goes to Pollara, the collapsed crater where Il Postino was filmed, with a beach sitting under a wall of rock.
Lunch on board, then ashore at Santa Marina or Malfa. This is the island where the food is worth going ashore for, and where the Malvasia comes from.

03 · Spaghetti with mussels
Day 4

Filicudi

West, to the quiet end of the archipelago. Filicudi has no nightlife and no interest in acquiring any. What it has is the Grotta del Bue Marino, and La Canna — a rock spire standing seventy metres out of the water offshore.
Swim, dive, read. This is the day the week starts working on people.
Day 5

Panarea

The small, expensive, beautiful one. The morning is spent among the islets — Basiluzzo, Lisca Bianca, Dattilo — where volcanic gas still rises through the seabed and you feel it against your skin while you swim.
Ashore in the evening: whitewashed houses, no cars, and the only real crowd of the week. Then back on board, which is when having your own boat off Panarea makes the most sense it will ever make.

05 · Limpets and lemon, at lunch
Day 6

Stromboli

The one everyone comes for. Stromboli has erupted continuously for millennia — the reason the ancients used it as a lighthouse.
The day goes by the black beaches, with the tiny islet of Strombolicchio and its lighthouse sitting offshore. The evening is the point: the boat lies off the Sciara del Fuoco, the scar on the north-west flank where the lava runs down into the sea, and you watch from the water as the light goes. The eruptions are small, frequent and, from a boat in the dark, hard to look away from.
Day 7

Back to Capo d'Orlando

Last swim off Stromboli in the early light, then south. Breakfast under way. Disembarkation before midday.