My desert island near Grado

Slow Tour

21 August 2018

Slow Tour

My desert island near Grado

Let’s be honest: we have all had the same thought at least once in our lives: “I wish I were far from here on a desert island!” Well, I have to confess that sometimes I go to one… Every time my friend Marco invites me to go fishing, I willingly accept, above all because we always stop at the Banco d'Orio, in the lagoon of Marano and Grado. This is a small strip of land and sand, about 15 minutes by boat from Grado in the direction of Lignano. A taste of paradise. A magical place for long walks on the sand, treading on thousands of shells, always in the company of boisterous seagulls and some small crustaceans. It is an almost uncontaminated and wild place. Here you really feel part of nature, like the small inhabitants of the island. For example, seagulls have found a safe and ideal place here to build their nests and reproduce.

the sea also casts the occasional Pinna Nobilis Peace, tranquility, sand and sea from one horizon to another. The clear blue water with sandy bottom attracts some boaters during the high season and on weekends, but during the rest of the year you will hardly meet any other people. However, you must be careful where you put your feet. The sand in summer can be really very hot and the sea here washes all sorts of things on to the beach. There is plenty of vegetation and some very unusual plants and flowers colour the landscape of this tongue of land in the lagoon. I like walking on the shore, which here is a very long carpet of shells that marks the boundary between land and sea. A border that can move a lot during a day. Marco and I know this very well. At the end of a late-autumn afternoon, Gabry, his boat, remained high and dry, and the two of us (truly ‘castaways’ on the island), could do nothing but wait in the dark beneath the stars for the tide to rise again so we could get back to Grado. The perpetual movement of the sea that caresses this little island in the lagoon of Grado erases my footprints from the sand. I like to think that every trace, every sign of my presence here is hidden, so that we can offer the next “castaway” the same feeling of adventure and isolation that I feel when I come here.