Back to Sardinia

Huge ferries take people and vehicles to Sardinia from the Italian mainland (which the Sards call "the Continent"). From Livorno to Olbia the journey takes six hours, plus the loading and unloading periods, which are long because there are many vehicles. We departed from the port of Livorno at 8 a.m. with the early morning sunlight glinting on the ships and bastions and the lighthouse winking rhythmically as we left it behind in the haze. For a long time, the rocky coast of Corsica was visible to starboard, hazy blue and distinguished by its jagged peaks. Eventually the Emerald Coast came into sight and we docked at Olbia with the red and orange rocks of the Tavolara rearing up shear in front of us and the city sprawling out behind them and glinting in the sunshine.
In less than an hour's drive we arrived at Santa Lucia, a small fishing village in the municipality of Siniscóla and the Province of Nuoro. On one side the granite mountains of the island's interior stood massive and imposing, while on the other a beach of white sand and a swathe of umbrella-pine trees marked the coast. An ancient, circular lookout tower stood on a promontory in the centre of the village. We settled into a bungalow amid the pines, collected our gear and headed for the adjacent beach, which was sparsely populated, as by the second week of September the season was almost over. There is something particularly enjoyable about the first swim of the summer. In this case I had had to defer it until 8th September, but two hours after setting foot in Sardinia I was in the water, which was warmed by the sun and beautifully clean.
A short distance down the coast from Santa Lucia there is a nature reserve, a long strip of coastal land with dunes, granite tors, long stretches of white sand beach and Mediterranean macchia (or in French, maquis) vegetation. Under the warm sun of late summer we walked along the paths through the macchia admiring the rich variety of plant species, the aromatic xerophytes, whose qualities provoked the famous naturalist David Attenborough to write a book suggesting that this was the original Garden of Eden. The oak trees had the bark stripped from their trunks to harvest cork. Myrtle bushes, fragrant shrubs, fig and olive trees, orchids and hibiscus plants abounded. Everywhere there were spiny, cactus-like bushes of the Indian Fig, Ficus indiana, and in September they were all vigorously sprouting succulent oval fruits, whose red, pink and yellow skins contrasted with the light green of the fat, spiny leaves.
At Capo Comino a series of small beaches is bounded by outcrops of granite that stretch into the sea. They are deserted and one can strip off all one's clothes and dive into the limpid water, which is a sparkling green-grey colour exactly like the finest lead-crystal glass. Beneath the surface there are white ripples of sand or rocks covered with seaweed and sea urchins, whose fronds wave gently in tiny currents. Nude bathing is not encouraged in Sardinia, but young women who are vain about their bodies can often be seen on the beach without their bikini tops, for there is a sense of liberation about the place.
The language of Sardinia is quite unlike Italian, although it has gradually been modernised through receiving many words from the mainland, mostly as a result of contact with the mass media. Sard is a tongue that shows evidence of Latin and Spanish, but there is also something older and less distinct that has much less to do with modern Romance languages. Unlike Italian, in Sard there is the letter 'X', and there is the "shch" sound that can be found in Turkic and Slav languages.
The towns of mainland Italy tend to have euphonous names, but many of those in Sardinia are dissonant in the extreme: Budus , Orgosoli, Arbatax. This was my third visit to the island in twenty years and I was keen to notice the changes wrought over time. The roads were less treacherous, the towns more prosperous and developed, and a fashion had grown up to have two nameplates on the outskirts of each settlement: the older one in Italianised writing and the newer one in pure Sard. Thus our local point of reference said it was Siniscola, just as the map did, but there was a new sign saying "Thiniscola"--and Italians cannot pronounce the 'th' sound.
We went to Orgosoli and Oliena in the Barbagia mountains at the centre of the island. These were once towns inhabited by shepherds and goatherds, people who were rough, violent, uncouth and desperately poor. As the populations of the Gennargentu Mountains developed in the 1970s, curiously they developed a taste for Latin-American style political murales. We noted that they had kept it going to the present day, although many of the large, gaudy paintings on the sides of houses referred to political events that were now historical and, in many cases, are now seen in a different light to how they would have been interpreted thirty years ago.
At Oliena, a festival was in progress. The houses were open to visitors and in them men and women in colourful historical costumes were selling local produce: elaborately embroidered shawls (black with floral designs in gold, red and white), jewellery, food, wine, agricultural produce such as almonds, wood-carvings and ceramics. The Barbagia once had a reputation for extremes of brigandage and kidnapping, but now it is more renowned for the cordiality of its people. Naturally, the festival concluded with a display of Sardinian dancing, which is a curiously sedate, dignified and symmetrical procedure, executed in costume and in strict formation to the sound of music played on the piano-accordion.
People who go to the seaside expect to eat fish. Paradoxically, although it is surrounded by water, Sardinia is not a major producer of seafood. Instead the main products of the island are cheese (of sheep's milk, and superb), meat, honey, grapes and Mediterranean vegetables. But there is also good fish: grilled John Dory (a fat, white fish that is common in the Tyrrhenian area); sea-bass cooked in sharp, white Vernaccia wine, and mullet. The Cannonau and Vernaccia wines are extremely good, although the hot, dry climate of summer makes them particularly strong in both taste and alcohol.
After some experimentation, we found a pleasant new restaurant in the countryside around Siniscola that served excellent food at prices that were about half those to be paid in Florence. The tagliolini with squid ink and mussels were particularly good, the fish was fresh and they made the traditional Sard desert seadas, a sort of pancake with sweet cheese in it and honey on top.
It was not entirely a holiday, as I had some teaching to do for the Italian Association of Disaster Managers. It was nice to be surrounded by emergency management people and feel a sense of brotherhood, belonging and common purpose, while at the same time being able to swim in the sea, eat glorious meals and perfect a suntan.