The right book in the right place.
* * *
WE’RE OUT EARLY to see Nora, near Pula. First finds indicate Nuraghi settlers from 1500 to 700 B.C. Later came (possibly) the Iberians, then (certainly) the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, and finally the Romans. What great town planning. The siting is brilliant. The ancient town spreads across a splayed and irregular spit of land jutting into the water. A stretch of beach, and a sudden hill where there once was an acropolis. The peninsula used to be bigger; parts of the town lie underwater.
You can’t wander here; you must join a guide. Ours is succinct and very good. Most intact is the amphitheater, constructed not for games but for performances. Somehow they know that cloth sails were rigged overhead to protect the viewers. Events are still held here; folding chairs are set up in front of the tiers of stone seating. Much of the structure of three thermal baths is still discernable. We can identify areas where the frigidarium, tepidarium, calidarium once were, and also changing rooms, benches, steam rooms. The mosaics on the floor of the frigidarium show a pattern of waves.
The guide points out which structures were residences and which were stores. Water came by aqueduct from over a kilometer away. A ridge in a threshold shows where the shop owner slid shut the door. Homes are ranged around courtyards. He points out sewers visible in houses and streets. So much remains that it’s easy to imagine life here—the forum, cisterns to catch water, niches for storage, street drains, stone manhole covers. Miraculously, four columns of a house survive, as does a public latrine with marble seats and channels for running water that join the sewer. Sitting on the toilet was evidently a chance to socialize; the seats are close together. (I remember a similar setup at Ephesus.) Looking at the House of the Tetrastyle Atrium, I flash on Palladio. This ancient house was built around a covered atrium with a hole in the middle of the ceiling, like the Pantheon. Rain collected into a cistern and the rooms were arranged around this large central entrance. Extrapolated, Palladian villas follow exactly this plan. At La Malcontenta, you enter directly into a large circular room with six rooms around it. No opening in the ceiling but the concept is the same.
We’ll get to see the vessels, masks, stele, busts, sculptural stones, and votives found here—some date to the second century—when we go to the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Cagliari.
* * *
OVER A QUICK bite in a bar, I read this to Ed, who was amused by the public bathroom at Nora. From Sea and Sardinia:
We went up a little side-turning past a bunch of poor houses towards a steep little lane between banks. And before we knew where we were, we were in the thick of the public lavatory. In these villages, as I knew, there are no sanitary arrangements of any sort whatever. Every villager and villageress just betook himself at need to one of the side-roads. It is the immemorial Italian custom. Why bother about privacy? The most socially-constituted people on earth, they even like to relieve themselves in company.
Ed laughs. “That was, what, a hundred years ago.”
“It hasn’t stopped—you still see men on the side of the road.”
“Not like when we first came to Italy.”
“Right. End of era.”
We stop to pick up grapes and apples, then turn back, following the gorgeous meandering coastal drive with changing colors of water—lucid blue, turquoise, emerald, pale aqua—and tempting slivers of beaches and small coves. We then set off into the hills, inland.
NOTE:
Guttiau is another version of pane carasau.
On our friend Cristiana’s advice, we visit Santadi for a particular reason: to eat at the agriturismo La Grotta del Tesoro. Tesoro means treasure. Not sure what the treasure is but we’re hoping it’s the dinner because this is a detour.
On the drive inland, the landscape changes dramatically from jagged hills covered with rock outcroppings to bucolic rolling farmland. We pass through small towns of low buildings along a straight one-road-in-one-road-out. I admire the houses’ paint combinations of russet, turquoise, and squash yellow. In the countryside, the wheat has been cut, leaving pale stubble. The harvest over, the grape leaves already shrivel and brown.
* * *
LA GROTTA DEL Tesoro is a few kilometers outside the hilly town of Santadi. We turn into the driveway at a big not-old, not-new farmhouse. Paola, the owner, is watering plants. She’s tiny and wiry but obviously strong. An ancient relative in the old-school black dress and kerchief tends her birdcage, which seems to have way too many birds in it. Then she starts to sweep with one of those witches’ brooms made of dried ginestra (yellow broom) twigs. I love those and haven’t seen one in Tuscany in probably five years.
“Cristiana sent us. She says you’re one of the world’s great cooks!”
“Ah, la giornalista Cristiana. How is she? What would you like tonight, the pork or the kid?”
We choose the pork. She’s amazed that we are American. “Not German?” she asks twice, as though we might be mistaken.
She shows us to our room, which is plain as can be, and says “Eight o’clock.”
* * *
WE TAKE A walk around the farm. Pork, we ordered. Huge pens of the donors to the meal are arranged by age. They are clean. Some gargantuan pigs with those prehistoric darting eyes, some medium Three-Little-Pigs ones, who might want to build a brick house, and lots of small ones, like Toot and Puddle. “Dio, Ed, I remember that Paola said maiolino.” That’s one of these little ones. I walk on before he can tell me that if you eat meat, you have to…And before I tell him once again that I could be a vegetarian, and he tells me that I’ve always said that, but I have not become a vegetarian. We let it go and drive in to look at Santadi.
* * *
EVERYTHING’S CLOSED. NOT sure why, as it’s only six. Supposed to be open, the archeological museum is shut tight. We’re on its steep street and the sun is low, sending a benison of sweet light over three women talking in a doorway. They don’t know they are illuminated. They are beatific, as though they might be angels announcing to someone beyond the door a new coming. We quietly stare.
To their right, a house the color of butterscotch, no—lighter—marigolds. Old rosy roof tiles scallop along the top. Beside the closed, recessed door, a trumpet vine has been trained into a Y. I take a photo and when I look at it, I think: This is why I came to Santadi. The delicate leaves of the vine cast a filigree shadow. The golden color of the plaster looks as if light surges out from inside. Benign luck! Or, the gods who made the three women into momentary angels tapped my camera with a wand and gave me a gift.
* * *
OTHER PEOPLE, NINE, I count, have checked in. Germans! Everyone fresh and ready at eight, when the dining room opens. Overlit. The table is set with blue paper tablecloth and napkins. Again, plain as can be! Already, the antipasti are waiting. Prosciutto, fried bread, roasted peppers and eggplant, cheeses, salume. Ordinary but extraordinary because the prosciutto, thin as tissue paper, has the salty-sweet balance just right, the vegetables were picked this afternoon and roasted in good oil, the salume made at home, and the two goat cheeses fresh today, while the pecorino is crumbly and well aged. Fried bread, which is so much better than it sounds, needs a light touch with the batter. Paola has the magic.
Santadi is where some of Italy’s best wines come from. We order Rocca Rubia Carignano del Sulcis, 2014, made eight minutes away from where we sit. The simple tumblers on the table are replaced with proper glasses. Paola’s son congratulates us on a good choice. Ed takes a long sip and pronounces it sound and fantastic. “Tastes like dry stalks after rain, and violets crushed under a boot.” Poet! It’s a lusty, full, juicy wine with lots of stamina.
Out comes the pork. Crusty, crunchy skin all bronzed and shiny. The succulent meat needs no knife. Chicory, zucchini, roasted potatoes, salad. Just what you’d cook but squared and cubed because of the quality of the ingredients. Talk about terroir
!
* * *
BACK TO THE room. Why does it feel spooky? It’s clean. Bathroom light makes me look like fresh goat cheese. Bed is okay. Roosters crow all night. Are they crazy?
We leave early. Grazie, Paola!
We’re catching a ferry to Isola di San Pietro.
A last-minute deviation, a confusion about where to buy the ticket, and we almost miss the car ferry from Portoscuso to Isola di San Pietro. The ramp rattles up just as we pull in. We park down in the hold, squeeze out, and abandon the car, ascending to a low-ceilinged room with benches along the windows.
Something about a ferry suspends time. In a way that planes and trains are not, a ferry is Limbo. The coast recedes. I try to read. The high churning sound is not unpleasant. We walk up on deck. People on benches face the sun like rows of seabirds on telephone wires. There’s espresso, also pastries for this ten-kilometer journey.
We were late because I spotted an intriguing line of block-shaped buildings along the road, with a white wall in the foreground. Shades of buff, pearl, honey, and stone, rooflines of varying heights, and windows that looked cut out by a knife. Jagged hills formed a background. “What is that? Looks like a painting by Morandi—all volumes and subtle colors. Let’s go see.”
We’d found the abandoned village of Tratalias. Eerie empty piazza with a well, houses with balconies not festooned with flowers, a thirteenth-century church built of stone and volcanic limestone. Inside (door open—okay, eerie again), simple, with three naves and odd, scary cantilevered steps leading up to the belfry. No railing. (You could not pay me any amount to climb those stairs.) The village moved away, a water issue. “The town looks like the rapture has just occurred,” Ed says.
“Is there no one? I haven’t seen even one face peering out a window and yet it looks like each house is cared for. What a pity.” One abandoned lot is strewn with magic: wild and overgrown with white datura. Ghost faces, poisonous but lovely.
“It would make a great artists’ colony. You know what? We are going to miss that ferry to San Pietro.”
* * *
LEANING ON THE rail, sipping a macchiato and looking down into the wake, I feel a sweep of exhilaration. The island looms into sight, a strange place coming toward us. An island off an island, the bottom of Sardegna. We get in our car and roll into the only town, Carloforte.
We park nearby and check into Hotel Riviera. Our junior suite has two balconies. The front one faces the sea, albeit with a parking lot—there’s our rented gray Fiat 500—between us and the water. Never mind, we disregard cars and look out at sailboats and choppy water. The airy room has a round table perfect for writing, a contemporary four-poster king bed, and a sofa. With terrace doors open, the sheer curtains lift and I am suddenly aware of being on an isolated island with three days to love every inch.
* * *
THE MAIN STREET stretches along the marina crowded with fishing and sailboats. Shaded by trees and almost uninterrupted café umbrellas, via Roma pulses with life and tropical atmosphere. All the buildings along this pedestrian boulevard are pastel watercolor shades with iron balconies and pale shutters.
This doesn’t look Sardinian at all and there’s a strange reason why. In 1541, a group of Ligurians from Pegli, near Genova, were resettled by a powerful Genoese family on Tabarka, an island off the coast of Tunisia, to fish and harvest coral. They remained until 1738, when the Savoy king of Sardegna Carlo Emanuele III moved them to uninhabited San Pietro. They brought their tabarchino dialect, a heritage from Genova, their skills in fishing and trading, and their love of couscous. They named the town they built Carloforte, strong Carl, in honor of the king who’d saved them from pirates, servitude, and degraded opportunities.
In 1798, a thousand of them were kidnapped back to Tunisia by pirates, but, thanks to Carlo Emanuele IV paying a ransom, within five years their captivity was reversed and they returned to live ever after on the island, bequeathing to their descendants light hair, a genetic tendency to be myopic, skills of bread- and focaccia-making, and a love they never lost for Liguria’s sea-foam-green, persimmon, rose, and biscuit-colored houses.
Near the center, I look up at a statue of strong Carlo with one arm broken off and the other cracked. Wigged and benevolent, he’s shown in a metaphorical act of freeing the people from slavery. Two grateful subjects sit beneath him.
The broken arm happened when the local people were trying to hide the statue from the invading French. Supposedly, they’ve left him like this in memory of that violence. The other injury came from soccer fans.
Lunch at a café under trees full of singing birds, surrounded by the island’s youth hanging out together, high-fiving and drinking Cokes and beer. What a lot of kissing as people jump on and off bikes, come and go. A couple of older tattooed dudes roar up from the side street on massive motorcycles. We order big salads and eavesdrop on their conversation. Some are speaking the Genovese dialect, others standard Italian, sometimes a mix. Fascinating that the archaic form of dialect spoken in Genova has endured these many centuries and across cultures. The man in the map store tells us that around 87 percent of citizens know tabarchino.
Normally, the hotel staff can arrange sail or motorboat trips around the island. Because the mistral is blowing, we’re left high and dry on land. We don’t see much wind on this side of the island but it’s whipping about on the other side. Also, we’re told, it’s mid-September; some of the services already are shutting down.
Meanwhile, the day feels blissfully warm as we drive around the island, stopping constantly to look down from rocky heights into clear lime-green waters, coves where spray hits, sending up slow-motion white spume; inaccessible, inviting coves with crescents of beach give rise to fantasies of lying under the mellow sun and letting the water wash away all troubles. Roads are few. Cuboid white houses have about them a whiff of North Africa. With four-wheel drive, we could have explored more of the inland, but I am happy turning in whenever there’s a beach sign—there are many—and walking in the warm sand. The water is bracing but not impossible even for a wimp like me. A few souls are in up to their waists. Some beaches are rocky. At the hotel, they gave us a good map, circling the sand ones. I like both. The main attraction: the blues of the water shading into the dark green of malachite. The clarity!
At most beaches, we must park in a lot and walk. We pass small farms, hippie beach shacks transformed by invasive magenta bougainvillea, craggy holm oaks, defunct restaurants, and scrubby landscape of lentisco, white blooming cistus, and juniper. Often no one is on the beach at all.
Far on the other side of the island, which is only fifty-one square kilometers, a tower-lighthouse stands guard. Now an astronomical observatory, the structure occupies a wide vantage point. Paved trails snake along the dramatic coast. South of town, my favorite walk is above the water that leads to two dramatic chimney-like rock formations, Le Colonne, rising tall from the sea.
* * *
ISLAND TIME. WE do the same thing every day. Strike out in the car. Get out and walk. Wade. Pick up pretty rocks. Breathe in the scents of Aleppo pine in wooded areas. Keep an eye out for flamingos and for the sparrow hawks that have nested here for centuries. Myrtle and heather, wild orchids, scrubby bushes—a Mediterranean paradiso and shockingly undeveloped considering how idyllic it is. Only about sixty-five hundred people live here. Hotels are few. How long will this seclusion last?
Resting in the afternoons, I look online at houses for rent. It would be heaven to come here with the whole family. We would have to have a boat at our disposal. Snorkeling, scuba diving, sailing, finding secret coves and grottos—such pleasures to share, easy here, would be unforgettable.
In the twilight hours, we cover every narrow street branching off via Roma, all the small shops, the panificio with its array of farro, oat, semolina breads, tender focacce; a bookstore, ceramic studios, and gelato stands, where the preferred flavors are lemon and
pistachio. In an antique shop, I find an ex voto for my collection. The subject, no surprise, the miraculous rescue of a ship at sea. The owner tells us about her daughter studying in Cagliari. She is about to close her shop for the winter and return to the mainland. When Ed asks about winter, she says, “It’s lovely but many things are shut. No tourists at all.” And in August? She shakes her head. “Oh, yes, tourists. But there are so many beaches it never feels crowded. Only the restaurants and cafés at night.”
What an enchanted island! Carloforte—deliciously pretty but still a real place. Piazza Repubblica is the beating heart of the town. Four venerable ficus trees are ringed by benches. If you live here, you must come to the piazza every day: Your friends and relatives are here, your nasty cousin, too. Boys obliviously kick a soccer ball into groups of women with their shopping bags, girls on phones, and men playing cards. An antique market of only three tables sells little junk by the church. A man in a wheelchair rolls himself from group to group, chatting and moving on, dodging a boy doing wheelies on his bike. The trees simmer with birds. Maybe the sun is harsh in summer but now it’s tamed and the light filtered through the giant trees gives everyone a vivid presence, as though we see each other underwater. We stop every time we pass this way for the vivid life, for the momentary feel of joining a community.
* * *
I HAVEN’T MENTIONED food. Or tuna. Turns out they’re the same. We’ve seen the abandoned tuna processing plant on one edge of the island. Tuna was king. After all, Saint Peter, namesake of the island, is thought to have come here in A.D. 46 and stood in the waves teaching the natives how to fish. Tuna still reigns, but not as completely. Fishermen still practice the mattanza here, that spring ritual when scores of tuna are herded into a netted trap and bludgeoned to death, turning the sea red. This I can skip.
See You in the Piazza Page 34