Notes from Marettimo

Authenticity is a word that gets bandied around a lot these days. Travel agents make the perennial promise to provide customers with an ‘authentic experience’ while travel writers describe how they found the ‘real [insert country]’ or the ‘true side of [insert well-known country]’. Its meaning is, of course, entirely vacuous, but that is precisely why it is used: a stop-gap between what the writer wants to see versus what they actually experience. In the same vein as Christopher Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of America in 1492, western travellers (they are always western) lay claim to hitherto unexplored territory as if they…