To Polynesia! That was where Mauro Morandi wanted to go. By 1989 he had the means to get there, a 16-metre seven-cabin catamaran, “a Ferrari of the seas”. Flat, dull Modena would be left behind; in the footsteps of Paul Gauguin he would discover tropical forests, coral reefs, turquoise lagoons and dark, brooding women. He would break with the Western world, and find himself.
Sadly, though, the Ferrari ran into a storm before it had cleared Sardinia. It was laid up for repairs in La Maddalena, where he and the crew had to hang around for a while. And there began an intriguing chain of events. By sheer synchronicity (not fate, an absurd imposition, but close vibration with the universe) he happened to talk to an Argentine. The man mentioned an island, the smallest in the archipelago, called Budelli, and knew the warden. The gruff warden, when visited, happened to be leaving his job in two days; and Mauro, who had instantly fallen for Budelli, became his successor, making the island his for more than 30 years. Stranger still, this scrap of a place, less than two kilometres square, had the turquoise waters, pink coralline beaches and rampant vegetation he had meant to find in Polynesia.
He had longed for years to escape. At nine, he had run away from home for the first time. As a young man he would take the family’s punt through the maze of canals and ditches round Modena, ever exploring, while longing for the riskier open sea. He became a PE teacher in a rural school, where he got into trouble for introducing music and asking the children to imagine they could fly. He managed a seven-year marriage and had three daughters, but chafed at doing what hidebound, consumerist society expected of him. One reading of Richard Bach’s “Jonathan Livingstone Seagull” convinced him that he could perfect himself, like the seagull, only in flight and in exile.
His job on Budelli was simple enough: to look after the island, especially the Spiaggia Rosa, a beach of rare, beautiful salmon-pink sand made of fine-crushed coral, fossils and shells. It was also to work on himself. Living there alone, in a tiny granite-block cottage hidden in juniper trees, was less easy. He had no running water, just a cistern to collect the rain. Power came from one solar panel on the roof, not enough to run a fridge during the baking summers. In winter storms ravaged the island; he was once stuck in his house for 25 days. Vegetables refused to grow there, and all his food had to be shipped from La Maddalena, the nearest town. His sole form of transport was a dinghy, which liked a calm sea.
Yet none of this outweighed the compensations. The first was the sunrise over the sea, which it was a sin to miss. He would get up when he heard his two hens stirring, go down to his armchair above the beach, and watch. He did not know, or care, what the day or the hour was; time moved more serenely here. Breakfast, of barley coffee and half an apple, was followed by his first cigarette of the day. As the sky grew bluer, he liked to see the white smoke curl against it. Only gulls disturbed the all-pervading silence. Even during storms he was content, cosy by his fire with his library of books, reading of other adventures while in the middle of his own.
He also learned self-reliance. Working slowly, since he was no mechanic, he rigged up more solar panels and brought his dead dinghy motor back to life. His grand armchair, a sort of throne from which he supervised the Spiaggia Rosa or simply gazed at the horizon, he had made himself out of hard, knotty juniper wood. Cleverly he avoided cuts, hard knocks and doctors; most wounds, he found, needed only disinfectant and a plaster. Otherwise, he never caught as much as a cold. Something about Budelli, with its salt-and-juniper air, kept them away.
As for his work on himself, it became submerged in his passion for the place. His mission in life was now to preserve that beauty and that peace, which had taken him over. He disliked the word solitudine, which suggested he shunned people or was missing something, when his mind was full of new birdsong, the characters of winds, the pattern of the tides, and everything else Budelli could teach him. What he had entered was isolamento, isolation, a positive state of being alone on an island, and wanting its undamaged survival as keenly as his own.
In truth, too, he was not so solitary. He knew the grocer, baker and butcher in La Maddalena, and had a few friends there to share a glass of red and a smoke. He took odd weeks off to visit his family in Modena. For the first few years his girlfriend, Silvana, stayed for parts of the summer. Budelli in the season was crowded with visitors who came to swim and sunbathe on the Spiaggia Rosa. Although in 1994 the park authorities had closed off the beach, day-trippers still came to marvel at it. From his cottage Mauro could hear the guides talking about it, and about him.
At first he kept well away from them. But then his attitude changed. Dostoevsky had written that only beauty could save the world; now only humans could save beauty. He had to get them on his side. He encouraged tourists to come to his veranda, under the shady awning, and talk about anything—free will, religion, love problems—but especially the destruction of Nature and the urgent need to save it. They heard his plea to be viaggiatori consapevoli, conscious travellers, to see beauty deeply and respect it. The same message went out to the 100,000 followers he acquired on Facebook and Instagram, once Budelli had WiFi.
Eventually, though, he had to leave. The park authorities had tried to dislodge him since 2016, wanting their own way with Budelli. He had fought them hard, but in his 80s his health was fading anyway. He was given a one-bed apartment in La Maddalena where cars and motorbikes roared past all night, but at least he had a balcony and the sea. There he went on gazing at the horizon, and sometimes wondering, too, whether his own tiny Polynesia had been real, or just a dream. ■