Seen from the road that climbs out of the port, the white domes scattered across Pantelleria, the dammusi,look like decoration laid over a black island, the one bright thing in a landscape of lava stone and wind-flattened scrub.
Their dome is a catchment before it is anything else, since rain falling on that curved white surface runs down a channel cut into the roof, the cannalata, then into an underground cistern: for most of the island’s history that was the entire water supply of the household beneath it. Pantelleria has no rivers and no springs, and the people who settled it worked out that if the sky was going to be the only source for water, the house had better be shaped to collect from it.
