Dolphin photo op

Galli Islands, Italy

We don’t typically go somewhere just for a photo op, but after seeing a picture of Italy’s Dolphin Island, Li Galli, we couldn’t resist. Off the Amalfi Coast, Li Galli is a small, private archipelago made up of three atolls between Capri and Positano.

The island is also known as Le Sirenuse, the Islands of Sirens, because of its mythological background. It is believed that this is where Odysseus from Homer’s Odyssey escaped the voices of the Sirens who would lure sailors to their death.

Circe warned Odysseus in Book 12:

“You will come to the Sirens, who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them. Therefore pass these Sirens by, and stop your men’s ears with wax that none of them may hear; but if you like you can listen yourself, for you may get the men to bind you as you stand upright on a cross-piece half way up the mast, and they must lash the rope’s ends to the mast itself, that you may have the pleasure of listening. If you beg and pray the men to unloose you, then they must bind you faster.”