Read Alouds - Red Sails to Capri

by Connie
(Canton, OH)

Red Sails to Capri is special to me because it was the first read aloud we did as a homeschool family. It's also a wonderful book if you get into doing the voices of the characters. It's definitely a classic that should not be missed. Don't forget to look into the Blue Grotto as an educational experience on its own merit.

Author:Ann Weil

Review by Christina Connell on Amazon

Red Sails to Capri is about a fourteen-year-old boy named Michele Pagano who lives on the island of Capri with his parents, who run a small mountainside inn. His best friends are Angelo, a fisherman, and a goat herder named Pietro. One day, three rich visitors-Lord Derby, Monsieur Jacques, and Herre Nordstrom-arrive on the island on a boat with red sails. Though each has come for different reasons-one for adventure, one for beauty, and the third for peace and quiet-all three become obsessed with the mystery behind a cove that the islanders fear so much they will not even speak of it. Despite the fears of Michele's mother, the three visitors, her husband, Michele, Pietro, and Angelo eventually visit the cove and discover, not monsters or cutthroat pirates, but a beautiful blue grotto.

I am so glad I read this book. I finally took a look at it because of the Newbery Honor award-and because the cover asks, "Can three strangers, each on a separate quest, solve the mystery of the island?" I'm always hooked by the word "mystery," and Red Sails to Capri proved to be an unusual one. Weil had me dying to know what the mystery of the cove really was, but the book is short and I found myself wondering if it would actually be revealed as the number of pages left to be read grew smaller. She brings the book to a satisfying conclusion as the cove is discovered to be the site of a beautifully tinted grotto made by the light passing through the blue waters outside the cave's entrance.

Weil does a lovely job of bringing her characters to life, but her most successful has to be Signora Pagano, Michele's "Mamma." She is excitable; she looks upon Angelo the fisherman with disdain because he likes to spin tales; but her trademark is the way she cooks-by talking to the food: "There, there," she says to some fish, "cook slowly now. Do not hurry yourselves." As Michele's father best explains it, "Does she cook by recipe? No. Does she cook by taste? No. Does she cook by smell? No . . . She takes a few fish, and she talks to them, and argues with them, and scolds them, and flatters them, until finally she talks them into cooking the way she wants them." Mamma Pagano is known as the best cook on Capri, and her characterization is charming. She "cooed to the fish, spoke harshly to the soup when it boiled over, and begged the figs to keep themselves juicy." Her cooking skills are illustrated in this way throughout the text, including her "soft-boiled-egg song." The song, performed correctly, yields perfect eggs. This is important, because one of the three guests has eaten two soft-boiled eggs every morning for nearly fifty years, and Signora Pagano makes perfect eggs for him. Later, when the men decide to discover the secret of the cove, Mamma wages the most powerful protest she can think of: she refuses to cook for them. This leads to a crisis at the inn, as Michele and his father attempt to duplicate her unusual cooking methods but only achieve disastrous results. Signora Pagano is a truly unforgettable character in a story dominated by male figures, and she ends up playing a pivotal role at the end when she manages to convince the angry, superstitious islanders of the truth about the cove.

The Blue Grotto really exists, and Weil apparently based her novel on the real people who discovered the cave in 1826: fisherman Angelo Ferraro, notary Giuseppe Pagano, and two German travelers. I was unprepared for this outcome, having expected a simple mystery when I began reading and ending with an almost magical geological wonder known to the ancient Romans, rediscovered a millennium later, and used as the basis for a compelling narrative.

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