An excuse to run away. The courage to stay.
When everything stopped, Andrea began. In Ponza
Hearing him talk, it would almost seem he didn't do anything. Just an ordinary guy, he would say. He was fine in Milan, with friends, bars, his bike to go everywhere and take-aways on every corner. After high school, he had found work in a museum distributing audioguides. A quiet job. A contract. A badge.
Milan has everything. Even the queue to get into the gym at six in the morning. It has the navigli, avocado brunches, calls from coworking spaces with fake views of Central Park. Beautiful Milan, right… but how can you compare that to waking up with the smell of the sea and your fins still wet by the front door?
Everything seemed fine. Except it wasn't. Not at all.
Because if you've spent the summers of your youth between one diving certification and a sunset, with your wetsuit still damp and hands that look like dried apricots, with that mix of neoprene and salt under your nails that won't come off even in September.
It inevitably stays inside you. It stays in your gestures. In the way you look at the horizon, even in the city.
In 2019 he had taken a plane to Thailand. He had found a diving school that, in winter, trains instructors in warm seas. He had started as a kid, almost as a game, with his first certification. Then another and another. And at a certain point he never stopped. He doesn't even know why. Maybe simply because the sea doesn't ask you for explanations: it takes you, and that's it.
In Milan he helped a local diving center in the lakes. He did his thing, without great pretensions.
Then Covid arrived and everything stopped. Being locked in an apartment, alone, with the city motionless? Someone like him? It was out of the question.
He felt something inside move like a long wave. And he understood. He had to escape.
Where? Where the sea had been calling his name since he was a child.
To Ponza.
His family's summer destination was there. His memories too. That father who took him underwater as a child. The work-study placement done at a diving center that today is the competition. A house. A dinghy. Some equipment left on loan. And an excuse to leave Milan: "I have to open a diving center." He said it almost laughing, just to see if it would work. And it worked. To the point that now he has a compressor and ten wetsuits hanging in the sun.
He started calling his friends, the usual ones, those who stopped by Ponza every summer. Little by little they arrived. Someone helped him, someone got a certification, everyone stayed a bit longer than expected.
And in the summer of 2020, when everyone was looking for "Covid-free" islands, Andrea found himself at the center of a small miracle. Odissey Diving Ponza was no longer just an excuse that smelled of freedom. It was a dream becoming concrete. With his feet in the water and his heart full.
Today the diving center is small, yes. Groups of maximum ten people at a time. But if needed, he organizes. A double shift, a second dinghy to recover, a few phone calls to the right friends.
So much beauty. There's Michela helping him, at first she didn't want to dive with tanks, she feared they would take away that feeling of freedom she had always found in freediving. Then she discovered that, even with equipment on, you can breathe slowly and feel light.
A nature lover, today she guides groups with calm and curiosity. Where others see only sand or rock, she spots a miniature world: a hidden shrimp, a growing posidonia, a small balance worth observing. And in the briefings she tells every detail with the enthusiasm of someone who lives the sea, more than explains it.
Every now and then students or already trained biologists arrive, often for a thesis or a specific study. He gladly accompanies them, takes them to the right spots, helps them observe. He likes that the diving center can serve this purpose too. And in the future, he would like to give more and more space to projects related to marine biology and conservation.
Because what saddens him most is seeing the sea treated only as a bank from which to withdraw money. In Ponza there isn't yet a protected marine area, and too often beauty is used without being understood. He dreams of changing this perspective. One dive at a time.
In the meantime, he organizes everything: even to accompany groups of freedivers, when needed. There are apartments affiliated with the diving center, with a large outdoor space where people can gather in the evening, cook something together, share their day. Because in the end it's not just about the sea.
There are those who work in exchange for a certification. Those for an idea of a different future. Those just to spend a summer in company, with busy hands and a light soul.
In the evening they have dinner together outdoors. They laugh, they talk. They give advice on what to see, where to walk, with what wind to leave.
They tell about Ponza.
Because, here with them, work isn't just water. It's also land, people, slowness. And a sense of community that, in the city, you sometimes see only on weekends, here instead is every day.
Andrea is 24 years old. He built everything one piece at a time.
And he hasn't stopped at all, on the contrary he's only at the beginning. He doesn't yet have a big boat or a large staff. But he has a philosophy: people first, real human relationships first and then the rest.
He says you don't earn much. That it's hard, that resources are scarce, that each year only one small piece is slowly added.
But when I ask him to tell me something, he doesn't talk about numbers. He talks about the day he saw whales. About dolphins jumping next to the boat. About children screaming with excitement as soon as they put their heads underwater. Or about that eighty-year-old man who, for the first time, decided to dive.
And then you understand everything. Because those who see him come back from the sea, with wet hair and eyes full of light, know it's not true.
He, here, is gaining everything.
Maybe, without Covid, he wouldn't have done it. Maybe he would have stayed in Milan, comfortable and orderly. But the sea calls in strange ways. And sometimes it takes a pandemic to truly breathe again.
At first on the island they called him "the Milanese." They still call him that today. And maybe they'll always call him that. Not everyone has truly accepted him. Some still look at him as if he were "passing through." But he doesn't care. He continues to tell about Ponza with every dive, every video, every word.
He takes comfort, he says. Because after all, even if they still call him "the Milanese," something is changing.
Little by little, in fact, his accent is fading. And perhaps, he has already become part of the island. Like salt on rock. Like the silent emptiness of winter, that only islands feel. Like the cries of happiness that explode in summer.
And you understand that the sea never really left you. It stayed there, hidden under your skin. Making itself felt every time life squeezes you too tight. Reminding you that there's a place where you truly breathe.