Salina also has its share of famous visitors, especially since scenes from the Oscar-winning Il Postino were filmed on one of its beaches, and you could spend an afternoon here cafe-hopping in one of its ports, or splurge on a stay at a smattering of luxury hotels.
But there are plenty of places to escape the crowds and take in its idyllic side, as a low-key haven of reddish volcanic rock speckled with palms, olive and lemon trees, and fuchsia clumps of bougainvillea.
I spent five days last summer at a caper farm in Pollara, a hamlet of fewer than 100 people in the half-sunken crater of a tall volcano that turns pink at dusk and pitch-black at night, unmarred by street lights.
It made perfect sense here to spend an evening listening to a gecko's jaws methodically clamping on its moth snacks, in such utter stillness that the sudden sound of two teenagers laughing down the street lit up the windows of several sleepy households.
Farm owner Giuseppe Famularo took me around the caper fields he inherited when he was 12 from his father - one of the few islanders who didn't emigrate to the Americas or Australia after a bug destroyed the island's crops.
As he told me how his family and half a dozen others started over with the local Nocellara variety of caper, I was struck by how much the resilient, labor-intensive plant is a stand-in for life on this island.
The sweet, compact caper is the early blossom of a bush that rises a foot off the ground before spreading its branches out like fountain splashes under the relentless sun. Typically it doesn't rain a drop here from May through August.
