Dear friends of mine organize a yearly festival celebrating the European Union on a tiny island, Ventotene, two hours by ferry from the Italian city of Naples.
Natalonga for Europe — 2026 is the eighth edition — features a 1.7-kilometer swim from the islet of Santo Stefano to Ventotene.
It was on Santo Stefano that in the early 1940s, Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and others were imprisoned in very harsh conditions by the government of Benito Mussolini but managed to smuggle out a manifesto that became the framework for the European Union.
For festival attendees, the swimming event represents liberty both in a sporting and political sense.
The festival also features Q&A sessions on politics and the EU, which is more fun than it sounds, mostly as they were staged outdoors in a beautiful piazza in front of the wonderful Ultima Spiaggia (“Last Beach”) bookstore and next door to the Zi’ Amalia bar and restaurant.
The other setting for talks and presentations was the 19-room Hotel Lo Smeraldo.
Ventotene has a length of 3 kilometers and a width of 800 meters.
The local population never exceeds 400, and the tourism season is becoming extended from initially three summer months to six or seven now. Independent, boutique-style hotels number five or so, and there are several family-owned lodgings and other pop-up accommodations in islanders’ houses, some of which are decidedly “off the books.”
I stayed at a lovely little spot, the seven-room Le Parracine, the highlight of which is breakfast on a shaded promontory overlooking the one village that wraps around a small harbor and zigzags up to that piazza above the one beach.
The family owners make all the breakfast cakes and delicacies themselves, and as it was already in the mid-90s Fahrenheit at 8 a.m., it was a joy to dawdle over the final crumbs.
During the swimming event, I was given the task of taking photos from a small dinghy of the competitors — I was the only one to have a 600mm lens with me, essentially for my passion for birding — as they swam back to Ventotene from Santo Stefano.
As I was snapping away, another dinghy sidled up to mine, off which jumped the most celebrated participant in the festival: the Russian filmmaker Pavel Talankin, who made the documentary “Mr Nobody Against Putin” that chronicled over two years the weaponization, brainwashing and control of school curriculums and pupils in Russia following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Talankin worked in a school in the remote Russian town of Karabash, which has a population of less than 20,000, as a teacher-organizer and videographer. He had the ability and equipment to film without people becoming suspicious him — at least at first — but even so his activities required courage and integrity.
He fled Russia in 2024.
At the most recent Academy Awards, Talankin won the highest award for Best Documentary Feature Film, and when Talankin jumped on the dinghy to sit next to me, so did his Oscar.
It is heavy.
That experience felt a little surreal, but we were close to Naples, where different rules seem to apply.
Later that day at Lo Smeraldo, Talankin took part in a Q&A, with an Italian translator, which was followed by a screening of his documentary. I was glad I had already watched pre-vacation with English subtitles, not Italian ones. I watched that on the BBC, and I did not know of of his festival participation until I arrived in Ventotene.
Talankin stayed on the island for several days, and I often glimpsed him peering into the sea or looking at the piazza. I assume he was happy to be there but, so I felt, detached and appearing introverted due to language barriers, his refugee status, his disconnection from Karabash and its people, which he dearly loves (he says so in the film), and the magnitude of his recent experiences.
We had a chat in the piazza about the novel "The Good Soldier Švejk" by Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, which we learned is a joint favorite.
He is someone to be admired, and the island is somewhere to be loved.
The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of CoStar News or CoStar Group and its affiliated companies. Bloggers published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concern.