The Salt Pans – Part 1: White Gold

"Wait," said Andrea. "Five more minutes."

"The light is going."

"That is the point."

Giulia lowered her camera. It was seven in the evening on the western coast of Sicily, and the salt pans stretched in front of her in glittering rectangles, like a patchwork of mirrors laid on the sea. Old white windmills stood along the dyke. Mounds of snowy salt, tipped with terracotta tiles, rose like tiny mountain ranges. The sky was just beginning to blush.

Giulia, thirty-five, a photographer from Milan, had come to shoot an essay on salt harvesting for a magazine. Andrea, thirty-eight, the salt master, was her guide, a tall, brown-armed man in rolled-up trousers, a battered straw hat and rubber boots caked in white crust. His family had worked the pans for six generations.

"Now," he said, quietly, and pointed.

The water in the shallow pans turned from silver to rose, then to deep coral, as the sun slid behind the windmills. The whole lagoon seemed to glow from within. Giulia lifted the camera and pressed the shutter again and again, and when she lowered it, she realised she was crying a little.

"It's the algae," said Andrea. "In the evening, it makes the colour. Every night, the same."

"It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

"I tell visitors the same thing. But this evening I think it is true."

She stayed all week. She learned to rake the salt in long white rows, to carry the baskets, to taste the first crystals still wet from the sea. She shot a thousand frames and kept none of the ones with him in them, because they were too good to show anyone.

On Friday, as the pans turned rose again, she said, "Andrea, I'm leaving on Sunday."

"I know."

"I'd like to know if I can come back."

"Giulia." He took off his hat. "May I kiss you first, so that I do not lose my courage?"

Continue the story: Part 2 – Evening Tide.

Continue the story: Part 2 – Evening Tide.