Isola di Pantelleria

Pantelleria sits alone in the Sicilian channel, seventy kilometres from Tunisia and a hundred and ten from Sicily, a black volcano rasped by wind on every day of the year. Italy made it a national park in 2016 — the newest until Matese, and the first in Sicily — and drew the boundary around a human landscape as much as a natural one: the terraces, dry walls, and sunken vineyards with which islanders learned to farm inside the wind. Their signature practice, training zibibbo vines as low bushes in individual hollows, became in 2014 the first agricultural technique ever inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list; its product, the amber passito di Pantelleria, is the island in a glass, raisin-sweet with the smoke somewhere behind it.

Everything built here answers the same two masters, wind and heat. The dammusi — lava-stone houses with white shallow-domed roofs that catch and channel dew — stand in every contrada; the giardini panteschi are roofless stone cylinders each sheltering a single citrus tree, orchards of one; capers, the island's other export, grow like a crop and are picked like a secret. The volcano is dormant, not done: steam sighs from favare in the rocks, the Benikulà cave on Montagna Grande's flank is a natural sauna with a sunset view, hot springs seep into the harbour pools at Gadir, and the Specchio di Venere — Venus's Mirror — is a turquoise crater lake rimmed with white mud that bathers wear like a uniform.

The coast is lava sculpture rather than sand: the Arco dell'Elefante dips its basalt trunk near Cala Levante, the cliffs at Balata dei Turchi drop from maquis straight into indigo water, and swimming happens off ledges, with shoes. On the Mursia plain, Bronze Age sesi — black funerary towers — mark five thousand years of people finding this rock worth the trouble; the migrating birds that raft over every spring and autumn were here first.

What's worth knowing before you go

Flights arrive from Palermo and Trapani (plus summer routes from the mainland); the ferry from Trapani takes most of a night. Rent a small car or scooter — one ring road serves everything — and book a dammuso rather than a hotel; that is the island's own form. June and September are ideal; in August the wind is the only thing keeping tempers. There is no sandy beach anywhere: pack reef shoes and recalibrate.

The connoisseur's afternoon is a cellar visit in the Khamma or Scauri contrade for passito straight from the family barrel, then the Benikulà sauna at dusk — free, ancient, facing the sunset — with a last swim off Gadir's warm pools in the dark.