GINOSTRA — The very small primary school in Ginostra, a hamlet on the volcanic island of Stromboli with roughly forty year round residents, reopened this month after standing empty for twenty years. Its entire student body is a six year old girl named Aysha.

Ginostra has no port large enough for a car ferry and no road connecting it to the rest of Stromboli. Everything, including a teacher, now arrives by sea, according to local news reports. Patrizia Muscolino, principal of the comprehensive school in Lipari (the municipality that administers Stromboli and the other Aeolian Islands), authorized a dedicated classroom inside the recently renovated rectory of the San Vincenzo Ferreri parish once Aysha’s family confirmed they were staying through the school year.

One family’s choice

“We are in love with our paradise, with nature, with the sea, even with the volcano looming over our homes, and we don’t want to leave,” said Raffa Bazine and Monica Abbate, Aysha’s parents, of their decision to keep their daughter on the island rather than send her to a mainland boarding school, the usual choice for Aeolian families once children reach school age.

That choice is increasingly rare in these waters. Sicily’s smaller islands have quietly lost much of their youngest generation to Milan, Naples, and the Sicilian mainland over the past twenty years, leaving villages like Ginostra dependent on summer tourism and a shrinking handful of year round households.

A wider petition

The reopening has already reached national politics. Tiziana, a ten year old on the nearby island of Filicudi, wrote to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni this year asking for the same accommodation so she would not have to leave home for middle school. Aysha’s single desk in Ginostra is now the answer other island parents point to when they make that same case.

A UNESCO backdrop

The Aeolian Islands, including Stromboli, became a Unesco World Heritage site (the United Nations’ list of places with outstanding cultural or natural value) in 2000, prized for volcanic activity that also makes year round life difficult. Ferries to Ginostra run only in calm weather, and winter storms can cut the hamlet off for days.

Summer brings a different Ginostra, when hikers climbing Stromboli’s crater and boat tours watching its nightly eruptions push the population into the hundreds. Aysha’s classroom will test whether one family’s decision to stay through the quiet months can keep a school, and the hamlet, from disappearing once the tourists leave.