It’s Sunday morning on the Aeolian island of Salina, and Giuseppe Mascoli is cleaning mushrooms with his friend Sergio. “We’ve got about 5kg of porcini from the forest,” he explains. “I’ll freeze them so we can eat them through the winter.” Mascoli has slowly been giving up a life in London as the co-founder and now brand director of pizza chain Franco Manca in favour of a slower pace of life on Salina. North of Sicily, the island is known for its lush volcanic landscapes and the bounty this fertile earth delivers, from grapes to olives to its world-class capers. “I came here originally to buy the capers for Franco Manca,” says Mascoli. “At first, I tried to communicate with people over the internet, but that didn’t work, so I came myself, and made friends.” Home here is a farmhouse dating back to at least the 17th century that Mascoli bought in 2014. The house itself was in a poor state – “It just about had the roof on” – but was surrounded by vineyards that had been much better cared for, as well as a space for winemaking, which was the real draw. With the help of friends, he spent four months making everything habitable, renovating the four-bedroom main house and creating three adjacent apartments. It’s quite the social hub of the island now, with an open-door policy for visiting family and friends, as well as for neighbours stopping by on a whim. “It’s like an unofficial restaurant. People just drop by to see what’s going on.” Mascoli has not been too precious about the architectural accuracy of his restoration work. He says the house is “a historical fake, made in the name of authenticity”. New elements include a brick fireplace in the living room for the winter months, and moulded concrete basins in the bathrooms. The accoutrements of winemaking have been remade as appealing design features, with grape-collecting crates repurposed as bookshelves in the study and green glass demijohns that are now colourful outdoor lights. Non-wine-related objects have also been playfully reimagined. Friends made the swirling sculptural light fitting above the dining table, created from a couple of old hunting horns and some brass tubes, while Mascoli’s daughter came up with the idea for converting the front of a vintage TV set into the frame for a mirror. The interiors are a snapshot of Mascoli’s life and family history. Some pieces are from London, such as the Arts & Crafts chair that sits amid mismatched neighbours around the dining table, and others from his former home on the Amalfi coast. Small paintings by his artist great-grandfather Arturo Rietti are grouped on the living room wall, while the large dining table – which took 12 people to carry inside – is, according to family folklore, from a ship’s deck, recovered from a wreck by a relative at the beginning of the 20th century. Plenty of other things here have been made on site from what was lying around, or even collected off the streets in the case of the faded rattan chairs around the outdoor dining table, which itself is an old door sitting on an iron workbench. In the kitchen, the island is another workbench, this time in timber, given to Mascoli by a carpenter. “There’s a ‘gift economy’ here,” he explains. “You have to give something back at some point, but it’s very important that what you give back is not the equivalent thing.” Mascoli’s taste is for the informal and the mismatched – there is barely a coordinating set of anything, from the Victorian patterned plates to the patchwork of old tiles on the floor (some are original to the house, others are similar antique ones from Naples). He cooks on the original tiled coal-fired stove, with a gas cooker balanced on top, while coffee comes from one of a row of coffee pots, including a traditional Neapolitan cuccuma. This being the Mediterranean, the outdoor living spaces are just as important as the indoor ones. There are bougainvillea-draped tiled terraces with sea views, and an outdoor working area where Mascoli meets locals to do business – he grows vegetables as well as making 6,000 bottles of wine a year, including two simply called Vino Uno and Vino Due because no one knows quite what some of the ancient grape varieties are (“I am my own appellation,” he states). The wines are made in traditional terracotta amphoras, a technique that is thousands of years old, which allows some oxygen to reach the contents, adding to the complexity of flavour. Mascoli says he never expected to end up here, as a “playboy turned farmer” – but then he never expected any of his other careers either. He was an academic before he opened a Soho private members’ club in London, Blacks, in the early 1990s, and then founded Franco Manca in 2008. “I became an entrepreneur by chance, so for me it was important to move closer to something I can do. Which is basically nothing,” he jokes. In fact, he has 3.5 hectares to farm, and is planning to open an agriturismo next year with Franco Manca co-founder Bridget Hugo, to welcome paying guests. For today, though, there are mushrooms to clean, books to read and the sea to swim in – and that’s plenty.