Lifestyle
Mauro Morandi, Italy’s Robinson Crusoe, Dies at 85
Mauro Morandi, whose 32-year sojourn on an uninhabited Mediterranean island led to his being known as Italy’s Robinson Crusoe, died on Jan. 3 in Modena, Italy. He was 85.
The cause was a brain hemorrhage, said Antonio Rinaldis, who wrote a 2023 book with Mr. Morandi about his life on the island.
Unlike Daniel Defoe’s hero, who was shipwrecked and fervently hoped to be rescued, Mr. Morandi chose his life of solitude.
He said he had fallen in love at first sight with Budelli, a pristine, undeveloped island off the northern tip of Sardinia. He arrived in 1989, somewhat by chance, he said in interviews. He left — against his will — in 2021, writing on social media that he was tired of “fighting against those who want to send me away.”
Mr. Morandi’s singular choice to live in solitude spawned at least two books, at least one song, short documentaries and countless interviews. As the world turned inward during the coronavirus pandemic, reporters sought Mr. Morandi’s insights on isolation.
“I read a lot, and think,” he told CNN in 2020. “I think many people are scared of reading because if they do, they’ll start meditating and thinking about stuff, and that can be dangerous. If you start seeing things under a different light and be critical, you could end up seeing what a miserable life you lead.”
Budelli, one of the main islands that make up the Maddalena Archipelago, is a dab of paradise occupying less than two-thirds of a square mile. It is known for its pink sand beach surrounded by turquoise water. The island has no running water, is not connected to an electrical grid and is accessible only by boat.
Mr. Morandi lived in an abandoned World War II hut, tacking up canvas tarps in an open area in front. He created sculptures from branches, cooked on a propane stove and read voraciously, buying books and supplies on trips to La Maddalena, the largest town on the archipelago. Visitors also brought him food and water. He used car batteries and solar power to charge his cellphone and his tablet.
It was, he said, “a simple life made up of big and small pleasures.”
“The most important thing,” he added, “is that I have a serene relationship with time.”
For years he was the island’s designated guardian, hired by the Swiss-Italian real estate company that owned it.
His main task was to protect the island’s habitat from unruly tourists, who are allowed only on certain paths, part of an effort by Italy’s environment ministry to protect the rare pink sand. He told people about the marvels of the island, and how fragments of coral and shells had turned the sand pink. He picked up trash from the beach, cleared the island’s paths and carried out light maintenance.
Mr. Morandi initially chose to live as a hermit, he said in an interview at Genoa’s maritime museum, but he ultimately welcomed select people as part of his mission to make them “understand why we need to love nature.”
He said he did not miss human contact. “He didn’t like what humanity had become in the 21st century — consumeristic and individualistic — especially with regard to nature,” Mr. Rinaldis said. That was why Mr. Morandi cared about protecting Budelli.
When he finally got an internet connection, he used social media to showcase the island’s untamed beauty.
In 2016, after a protracted legal battle over the island’s ownership, it was turned over to the state and became part of Maddalena Archipelago National Park. Mr. Morandi was asked to leave.
The park’s president, Giuseppe Bonanno, acknowledged Mr. Morandi’s unique position. “Morandi symbolizes a man, enchanted by the elements, who decides to devote his life to contemplation and custody,” he told reporters. But there were other issues, including whether Mr. Morandi would be able to survive a medical emergency alone, not to mention his shack’s failure to meet code.
He fought back. He campaigned against his eviction on social media. He gave interviews to the news media. An online petition drew nearly 75,000 signatures.
“We do not want Mauro to leave the island because we think first of all that if Budelli has remained a wonder of nature it is also thanks to him,” the petition said. “And second, because we are convinced that the park has everything to gain from his presence: Mauro has lived on Budelli for a quarter of a century, he knows every plant and every rock, every tree and every animal species, he recognizes the colors and scents with the changing of the wind and the seasons.”
But after battling the authorities for five years, Mr. Morandi relented. He was 82 and no longer in good health. “Part of his resignation was tied to his fragility,” Mr. Rinaldis said, “but he was also disappointed because he had been forced to leave by the authorities.”
Mr. Morandi left the island for good in March 2021 and moved to a small apartment in La Maddalena. “I’ll leave hoping that in the future, Budelli will be safeguarded, like I’ve been doing it for 32 years,” he said.
Mauro Morandi was born on Feb. 12, 1939, in Modena. His father, Mario Morandi, was a gymnast who won the national championship for artistic gymnastics in 1936 and was later the caretaker of a school. Mauro’s mother, Enia Camellini, worked for a tobacco company.
Mr. Morandi studied to become a physical education teacher and taught at a middle school in Modena through the 1970s, when he was able to retire early. He had three daughters during a marriage that ended in divorce.
They survive him, as do a brother, Renzo, and six grandchildren.
In a 2016 interview with the Turin daily La Stampa, Mr. Morandi said that after reading Richard Bach’s 1970 best seller, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” he “took flight,” discovering the sea. In 1989, he said, he decided that he was “tired of society and seeking a different life.” He bought a catamaran with some friends, with the idea of sailing to Polynesia.
To raise money, they scouted locations for charter cruises and came across Budelli. There they met Budelli’s caretaker, who had recently decided to leave. He offered them his job, and Mr. Morandi took it. He was paid at first, but he stayed on even after he was no longer receiving a salary; he then lived off his teacher’s pension. On rare occasions he returned to Modena for short holidays to visit his family.
At one point he read a study by the University of Sassari showing that Budelli’s flora and fauna were similar to those of the Polynesian islands he had once hoped to reach. “It was almost as though Budelli wanted me, made sure I got here, to the only beach in the whole Mediterranean Sea, which is almost similar in composition to the islands where I wanted to go,” he said in a 2016 interview with the photographer Claudio Muzzetto.
After Mr. Morandi’s death, Margherita Guerra, one of his many thousands of followers on social media, wrote: “Safe travels. Finally no one will ever be able to send you away from your beloved island.”
Sunday Puzzle
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On-air challenge
As you probably know, the N.B.A. finals are going on right now. Game 3 between the Knicks and the Spurs is tomorrow night. So today I’ve brought a puzzle based on N.B.A. team names.
1. The name of what N.B.A. team is an anagram of PARROTS?
2. The name of what N.B.A. team is an anagram of THRONES
3. The name of what N.B.A. team is an anagram of SCRAPE?
4. Name two N.B.A. franchises that are birds.
5. You can remove the consecutive letters UGG of one N.B.A. team to get another. What teams are these?
6. The name of what N.B.A. team sounds like what they try to do for home games?
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge comes from Mike Reiss, a longtime writer and showrunner for “The Simpsons.” Name a classic song with a two-word title. Drop the first letter. Add an R after the new first letter. The result will be the names of two countries one after the other. What song is this?
Answer: “Piano Man” by Billy Joel –> Iran, Oman
Winner
This week’s winner is Jocelyn Tutak of Portland, Oregon.
This week’s challenge
Rearrange the letters of “NECESSARY MISPRINT” to spell a familiar phrase.
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, June 11 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
When I saw the headlines that flames were ravaging Santa Rosa Island, sadness washed over me.
Many of the news stories highlighted the threat to the unique plants and animals inhabiting the island off the coast of Santa Barbara, from plucky, pint-sized foxes to the rarest pine trees in North America.
To me, the loss wasn’t theoretical. I saw these and many other otherworldly species while on a life-changing backpacking trip to the island five years ago, which I chronicled for this newspaper. Looking at the fire map, I could see much of the path I charted was now seared.
That includes my first wilderness campsite near Ford Point, where a several-thousand-pound elephant seal roused me from slumber with its jarring bark. It wasn’t pleasant moving a tent after hiking for 10 hours, but seeing the behemoth (and his mate) in the gauzy morning light made it worth it.
The fire also passed through a grove of critically endangered Torrey pines, which I had hiked up to and gazed down on the island’s crystal blue water. It burned through Water Canyon Campground, where I spent my final night in relative comfort after roughing it in the backcountry. Beyond the sights, the trip brought me closer to my husband, who had transformed into a bona fide outdoorsman during the pandemic.
Crystal clear waters of Santa Rosa Island.
(Lila Seidman / Los Angeles Times)
Now fear clouds the memories: Does the rugged, magical place of my mind’s eye still exist? As The Times’ wildlife and outdoors reporter, I felt immediate concern for the island’s critters and plants. I was a visitor, but this is their home. Would it still be hospitable?
Among the good news is that the fire is now fully contained, after igniting three weeks ago. But before it was vanquished, the blaze chewed through about a third of the island, one of five that comprise Channel Islands National Park. While the cause remains under investigation, the U.S. Coast Guard initially reported a shipwrecked sailor may have sparked the blaze after firing flares for help. Coast Guard images showed the 67-year-old man had carved “SOS” into what looked like charred ground before being rescued by helicopter.
The Channel Islands, an archipelago that includes three additional islands outside the park, are nicknamed the “Galapagos of North America” for the flora and fauna found only there. Fires of such magnitude are rare on Santa Rosa so its inhabitants haven’t evolved with them.
Speaking to fire officials and scientists, the prevailing sentiment is there’s much we don’t know about the fire’s impact and how long recovery will take — or if it will ever even look the same. Starting Friday, specialists will begin assessing where everything stands. Until then, researchers can take educated guesses.
“There will be winners and losers for sure,” said Heather Schneider, director of conservation at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, whose work includes studying and protecting rare plants on the island.
Take the Hoffmann’s slender-flowered gilia, a federally endangered wildflower found only on the island and much of it within the area that burned. It’s possible the blaze incinerated the dainty purple-and-white flowers before they could drop seeds this year. But Schneider and her colleagues believe there’s probably a healthy collection of seeds in the soil from previous years that hasn’t germinated yet that could help it recover when conditions are right.
Some glimmers of hope have emerged from what we do know. It’s believed the island’s Torrey pines are largely intact and much of the campground survived. The pinnipeds that crashed my first night on the island were probably not affected much. Certain areas I visited, like the historic South Point Light Station, were spared.
Greg Pauly, curator of herpetology for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who has researched the island’s reptiles and amphibians for 14 years, highlighted that the web of life is interconnected — and certain effects may play out over time.
“It’s sort of a one-two punch,” he said. “You’ve got to survive the fire, and then you’ve got to be able to figure out how to make a living in a landscape that looks very different than it did a week ago.”
In many parts of the island, the soil’s high clay content causes deep fractures to form as it dries. He expects many animals, like the gopher snake, made it through the fire by hunkering down in the cracks.
When the snake emerges, it should find enough mice to chow down on. But a lack of seeds and other food for mice might mean that prey dwindles over time.
He worries about other ripple effects, too.
Non-native grasses that have taken hold “create a carpet of highly flammable material for much of the year,” he said. In the aftermath of fire, such grasses often spring up quickly and shade out native plants. He expects the acreage to increase.
That’s bad news for the majority of wildlife on the island that relies on native habitat, like woody shrubs.
Yet, as Pauly put it, the island is no stranger to flux. Just within the past two centuries, cattle and sheep brought in for ranching — and then later elk and deer for hunting — ate up the island’s shrubs, he said. Since 2011, he added, the island’s been free of these non-native grazers and native vegetation has rebounded.
He expects even more change. Scientists are clocking an increase in temperature and slight decrease in fog. He also predicts fires will become more common as more people visit.
Emanuel Röhss, the author’s husband, sits amid fog during a backpacking trip to the island five years ago.
(Lila Seidman / Los Angeles Times)
While harrowing, I also found a strange comfort in Pauly’s words. Change is inevitable, whether bad or good. My memories of the island are of a snapshot in time. I went during the height of the pandemic, when my boatmates were masked and socially distanced. All the wonder I experienced notwithstanding, I wouldn’t want that aspect of the journey to carry on.
And change doesn’t need to be taken lying down. Some are already gearing up to get the island back on track.
The Santa Barbara Botanic Garden has seeds for all of the rare plants in the burn area, a sort of fail safe if they need help recovering. Additionally, just this March, it opened a conservation grove of Torrey pines grown from seeds collected on Santa Rosa. The Channel Islands National Park Foundation is on hand to raise money for the park.
“It’s going to be an all hands on deck situation to understand, assess and plan the recovery,” the garden’s Schneider said.
If I go back to Santa Rosa, I hope to embrace it as it is: transformed.
Clockwise from top left: Little House on the Prairie; Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs. That’s The Weight Of The World); Cape Fear; House of the Dragon; The Bear; Ted Lasso.
Netflix; HBO; Apple TV; HBO; FX; Apple TV
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Netflix; HBO; Apple TV; HBO; FX; Apple TV
Summer is when people are trying to get away from screens — headed outside to enjoy weather and time off.
But in the modern age, TV never sleeps, so streaming and premiere television outlets have lined up a slew of attention-getting new and returning shows competing with vacations and sunny days over the next few months to pull in viewers and attention.
Fans can choose from remakes of classic films and TV shows like Cape Fear and Little House on the Prairie, the final season of FX’s fading dramedy The Bear, Larry David’s intriguing new HBO project made with Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground productions and the return of a series many fans thought was over and done with — Apple TV’s hit comedy, Ted Lasso.
Here’s a look at what’s coming when, and why it matters:
Cape Fear, Apple TV, June 5
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It’s tough to imagine an actor who could bring a creepier vibe than Robert DeNiro in 1991’s film thriller Cape Fear — playing a wiry, pathological felon who blamed his public defender for purposefully tanking his case. But Javier Bardem is that actor, raising the stakes for Apple TV’s modern streaming series with a deliciously wily performance as Max Cady — a man exonerated after serving 17 years in prison for murder. Amy Adams is Anna Bowden, the former public defender who defended Cady, but wound up marrying the prosecutor that put him away, raising all kinds of suspicion over how she handled his case. Lots of it is preposterous and heavy-handed, but Bardem plays Cady with more intelligence and sophistication than DeNiro’s version, dismantling his former lawyer’s perfect life with horrifying glee. Toss in as executive producers Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese — who directed the 1991 version, itself a remake of a 1962 classic — and you’ve got a powerful combination.
Earth, Wind & Fire: (To Be Celestial vs That’s the Weight of the World), HBO and HBO Max, June 7
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R&B stars Earth, Wind & Fire provided the soundtrack for Black America in the late 1970s — a hit machine which cranked out classics like “Shining Star,” “That’s the Way of the World” and “September,” courtesy of driven bandleader Maurice White. Tonight Show bandleader Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson — who has made a name as a Oscar-winning documentarian with groundbreaking films on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, the music of Saturday Night Live and Sly Stone — offers a relatively traditional look at the band’s story. He covers all the bases in the arc of White’s own story, from his roots as a drummer for jazz legend Ramsey Lewis, to his eventual death in 2016 due to complications from Parkinson’s disease. But with on camera sources ranging from Barack and Michelle Obama to Stevie Wonder — who reveals how “Shining Star” inspired the writing of his hit, “I Wish” — Thompson still manages an enlightening, compelling story.
House of the Dragon Season 3, HBO and HBO Max, June 21
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This feels like a make-or-break season for HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff, following a lackluster collection of episodes last year which some critics — OK, me — lambasted for too little forward motion. Based on events in the Game of Thrones prequel novel Fire & Blood, this season focuses on a bloody civil war between two factions, the Blacks and the Greens, for rule over the fictional continent of Westeros. Early press indicates this season will feature lots of dragons and epic battle action, which seems necessary. It’s been two years since the second season, so that level of spectacle might be needed to remind viewers about this long-running franchise.
The Bear Season 5, Hulu, June 25
FX’s towering dramatic comedy will present its final season here, dropping its last eight episodes at once. It’s an opportune moment to conclude the story of driven chef Carmy Berzatto’s bruising efforts to build a Michelin starred restaurant from his family’s humble hole-in-the-wall Italian beef shack in Chicago. The show has a maddening habit of presenting standout episodes even during mediocre seasons. But critics have cooled on a show where the number of unspectacular episodes has grown and the latest plot twist — Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy deciding to leave the restaurant, forcing the family of workers he assembled to seek that Michelin star without him — feels perilously close to a Hail Mary pass thrown by writers running out of ideas.
Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness: An Almost History of America, HBO and HBO Max, June 26
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Higher Ground, the production company founded by Barack and Michelle Obama (Rustin, Leave the World Behind), takes its biggest swing yet here — producing a sketch series from Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David. The show celebrates America’s 250th anniversary a little differently, offering seven episodes filled with sketches lampooning key historical moments, featuring David — whose history as a failed writer for Saturday Night Live might not inspire loads of confidence. Still, the Obamas have assembled an impressive track record as producers and David remains a quirky, effective comedic voice who could have easily sat back on his Curb laurels, rather than offering a bold counterpoint to the official celebrations of America’s history.
Little House on the Prairie, Netflix, July 9
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Gen Z viewers likely don’t know the original series which dominated ratings back in the mid-’70s and early ’80s, featuring Michael Landon as the patriarch of a family struggling to establish a home in Minnesota during the late 19th century. Netflix’s series returns to the largely autobiographical books written by novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder as inspiration, featuring the family struggling to stay together after moving to Kansas not long after the Civil War. The initial series debuted on NBC back in 1974, when family-oriented shows like The Waltons were still popular. But will today’s streaming audiences embrace a series which brings a modern lens to questions of slavery and white people moving into the American west?
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4, Paramount+, July 23
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It’s one of TV’s longest-running science fiction franchises, celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. But the future of Star Trek remains uncertain, as Paramount finishes production on two live action Trek series, with no new iterations yet planned for TV or film. This season of Strange New Worlds — centered on the adventures of the Starship Enterprise before the days of Captain Kirk depicted in the original series — is the second-to-last batch of episodes for the series, which will end with an abbreviated fifth season. Strange New Worlds has a bit to prove, coming off a third season largely considered a disappointment by many fans. Ultimately, producers have admitted the show will conclude with Kirk taking the captain’s chair — but it’s going to take a lot of attention-getting episodes to get there.
Ted Lasso Season 4, Apple TV, Aug. 5
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Many fans thought this series effectively ended after its third season back in 2023, when the show’s folksy lead character returned home to America after leading a British soccer team to success. But never underestimate TV’s urge to keep tapping into a hit — star and executive producer Jason Sudeikis found a new story to tell about Coach Lasso, who returns to lead a second division women’s football team in Britain. Over its first three seasons, the show emerged as one of Apple’s most successful series, with a slew of Emmy, Golden Globe and Critics Choice awards. This fourth season will have to answer a new question: Can lightning strike twice for the same series?
Lanterns, HBO and HBO Max, Aug. 16
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This series offers a chance to reinvent one of DC Comics most beloved superheroes for today’s TV scene, casting Friday Night Lights alum Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan — a grizzled hero with a power ring capable of creating any construct from the energy of his will. Jordan is a Green Lantern, part of a corps of intergalactic space cops handed the rings by a powerful group of immortal beings. That all sounds like a lot for a streaming TV series; initial teasers for the show focus on Jordan’s work training/vetting new Lantern candidate John Stewart, played by Aaron Pierre. The two will work to investigate a murder on Earth in an uneasy alliance which feels an awful lot like the first season of HBO’s True Detective — balancing a gritty, authentic environment with a ring that allows flight, space travel and lots of superheroic adventures. This superhero nerd absolutely cannot wait to see where it all goes.
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