Just off the western point of Sicily, the Italian island fantasy embodied by the likes of Capri and Panarea becomes raw and wild amid spawning bluefins and North African winds. The Egadi archipelago, composed of three main islands named Favignana (the largest), Levanzo, and Marettimo, is a feral landscape of phantasmagoric rock set within Europe's biggest marine reserve.

Bohemian Sicilians come here to hide out and reset: The Egadis are just 93 miles from Tunisia's Cape Bon, and the closeness to somewhere so culturally distant from Europe makes them feel even farther from the Italian mainland. Below the water, Neptune grass writhes like cilia, bringing up shipwrecked relics—Phoenician, Roman, Norman, Arab, Aragonese—that are so common the locals use them as paperweights.