* * *
IN THE NARROW streets, restaurants set up outdoor dining under white umbrellas. To walk, we thread through tables covered with bright cloths and rustic chairs painted green, orange, yellow. We want to sit down and eat at each one. Tuna is on every menu, along with big red grilled shrimp and couscous with vegetables. We’re having marvelous food and don’t care at all that there’s little to no “experimental” cooking going on. Fish and more fish. Grilled, raw, roasted, baked. Garden vegetables. Mint, rosemary, basil, fennel. Everything sui generis.
Da Nicolo on the esplanade is in a glass box called jardin d’hiver in French. (They don’t seem to have a name in Italian or English. They’re all along the via Veneto in Rome.) Perched outside a restaurant or just the kitchen, they’re warmed with heat lamps in winter. Da Nicolo gets a mention in the Michelin guide. The food is fresh and prepared with, as Nicolo tells us, passion. Carbonara with swordfish, smoked bass, shrimp, and mussels. Linguine with tuna, capers, olives, pecorino, and lemon peel. Spaghetti and bottarga. Ed is infatuated with bottarga. I love the ravioli filled with purple potato and mint, served with a shrimp ragù and slivers of mozzarella. A grand fritto misto. We try Korem Bovale Isola dei Nuraghi made by Argiolas. A hearty glass. For dessert, perhaps the last taste of summer: lemon gelato with strawberry sauce. Tart and sweet.
At Ristorante Alle Due Palme, a casual place next to the hotel, they grill delicious shrimp served on a salad of greens and tomatoes. And crispy, skinny fries. Something simple and perfect. Outside, two giant palms guard the door. One has lost its top, which is covered with a tarp. The waiter tells us they’re having a problem with palm blight on the island. This venerable one has had treatment and a transplant, and they’re hoping it will recover.
One object reaches back to the burdensome days of Tunisian captivity. I stepped inside the Oratorio della Madonna dello Schiavo, Our Lady of the Slave, on one of the side streets, XX Settembre. The small chapel all blue and cake-frosting white displays a wooden Madonna found, some say, on a Tunisian beach between a date and a lemon tree, by one of the captives. It probably was a figurehead from a ship. He took the gift as a sign and when he was freed, he brought it to San Pietro, where she is revered and celebrated with her own festival. How amazing in a small town to have an open chapel, right among all the shops. You can pop in for a quiet moment, then go on with your day. One of the miracles of Italy: Spiritual life, artistic life remain open to the everyday.
Off the ferry and turning north up the southwest coast of Sardegna, we are entering old mining country—silver, sulphur, copper, barium, zinc, lead. Elisabetta in Teulada told us not to miss Iglesias while we’re on our way to Piscinas. The landscape is dotted with defunct buildings, rusted machinery, wooden chutes, and roads leading off into nowhere.
This former boomtown looks like a stage set. Elegant façades, iron balconies, streets made for strolling. Although mining activity is traced back to the Phoenicians, it peaked in the Middle Ages and finally wound down in the 1970s. In the glory days, Iglesias was a locus for culture, trade, entertainment. I imagine the wives from grim, outlying mining settlements brought to town for bright lights, a chance to mingle, shop for fabric and trims, see a performance. Mining is not near the top of my travel interests; going into dangerous underground tunnels seems like as bad as work gets, but I am interested in the lives led in this far outpost. Iglesias gives a glimpse.
We park near the piazza of the handsome church of Santa Clara. Inside, two astonishing things to admire: a painted, dressed wooden saint (or Madonna) holding a white feather plume. A marble holy water bowl held by an angel, so exquisitely carved that the folds of its robe look real. In the next piazza, we stop for a cappuccino at Antico Caffè Lamarmora, a colorfully decorated art deco building with a bar on the lower floor. Adorning the façade are faded paintings of bottles of vermouth, Marsala, Fernet-Branca. We then stroll on into via Matteotti, the scene of a playful installation. Hundreds of open umbrellas in bright colors hang over the street, shading it and casting shadows.
This main street opens to a park, where the mining wives must have strolled with their own umbrellas to protect them from torrid sun. We buy a hunk of pecorino and avoid the cheese that our favorite waiter at Vigilius in Alto Adige highly recommended. A Sardinian, he was full of enthusiasm for casu marzu. The name means “rotten cheese.” As part of the process of making this pecorino, a core is drilled in the cheese and maggots are placed inside. They’re given a little milk to make themselves at home, then gradually they lay eggs that hatch and they all work their way around the whole cheese, munching and breaking down fats with their digestive outpourings. Both worms and pecorino are then spread on bread with the maggots still alive. And the maggots can jump. We aren’t interested.
“Want to see the mining museum?” Ed pinpoints it on the map.
“I think we should move on and get to Piscinas for lunch.”
“Seems a shame not to explore every nook here.”
“I can’t wait to see those dunes.”
“Can’t see everything. Andiamo.”
* * *
SARDEGNA IS ALL about beaches. If you have no interest in marvelous coasts, blissful clear waters, soft amber sand, food pulled out of the sea this morning, you’d be happier vacationing elsewhere. I love these secluded beaches. I like to walk, take deep breaths, feel silky sand between my toes, take out my book and read a paragraph. Put it down. Remember other times I’ve been beside clear seas, read another page, pick up a rock, let the water chill my legs.
* * *
ON THE WAY, we see more industrial archeology. After the turn for Piscinas, we’re on an unpaved road. Soon we arrive at an abandoned mine.
The ruins seem to emerge from the bottom of a hill. A doorway, an arch, an oculus, rows of square columns. Blast furnace chimneys. The scene looks bombed. Looks ancient, too, the colors blending into the hillside. The sign says from 1900 to 1970 it was a washery, a place where the minerals were separated from “barren material.”
Nineteen seventy! Impossible that the site has gone into ancient history so quickly. A great novel could emerge from these bricks. The Hollow Earth…A few intact houses exist; others have one side missing, showing interiors with scraps of plaster and sagging beams.
* * *
I SAW PISCINAS in a twenty-year-old guidebook. It mentioned a hotel, Le Dune, which I hadn’t seen listed in my research. What luck. We have landed in a unique place on the planet. At the end of the nine-kilometer corduroy road that must become dicey when rain torrents flow, we come to a low, almost Spanish Mission–style building smack on an impossibly wide golden beach backed by rolling, gigantic sand dunes. These are not just any old dunes, these are the tallest dunes in Europe. Formed by the mistral winds, they rise to thirty or more meters. Arid as they look, plants still grow, especially wind-formed olives and juniper. The dunes undulate down the coast. You can almost hallucinate and see a camel cresting over the top.
After a quick salad lunch, we settle into our room. We booked late and are in a small room. Not a problem. We change into our suits and walk the long path across the beach to occupy our chaise longues. The sea is flat today, utterly transparent. On the wide expanse, there are only six people. The German couple near us sprawls in the sun as though they’ve waited their whole lives for this. We walk as far as we can see and back, then walk again. I finish Sea and Sardinia. Too bad old grumpy Lawrence didn’t come here. He’d have to have waxed ecstatic. The sand is so soft I sink to my ankles with each step. The water feels too chilly for me but a couple of young boys chase a ball into the surf, throwing it back and forth.
At sunset, everyone staying here gathers in the courtyard for spritzes and sunset. Some are poised with cameras, hoping to catch the green flash. If you’re ever going to see it, that would be now.
* * *
WHEN IT IS dark and the stars are burning holes in the sky, we go inside to dinne
r. The restaurant is green and eco-conscious, which must not be easy in this remote locale. We will always order cardoon when we see it. With a glass of prosecco, we have a salad of the tender stalks cooked in green tea and served with edible flowers. As our secondi arrive, Ed orders a wine made of a grape new to us: Nieddera Rosso, 2015 (nieddu, black in dialect), native of the island. Dark it is, rich, too, with a sensuous wild cherry flavor. Tannins, but not enough to worry me. The waiter recommends crisp red mullet with Jerusalem artichokes, salted lemon, and chicory. For me, pork belly with apple and ginger chutney and potato croquettes. All that, plus stars over the sea.
* * *
IN THE MORNING, we’re back on the beach. It’s cooler today but still no bite of winter.
The desk clerk tells us this place used to be an outdoor camp for miners’ children. Another possible novel: The Lead Miners’ Children. We drive away, imagining their fun and laughter on the beach.
Only eight days since we flew into Cagliari from Rome. We’ve traversed the southwest coast, dipped down to Isola di San Pietro and up to Piscinas. The sea, the sea! The constant and vivid presence of the sea. Even inland in the adamant, rocky landscape with scrubby vegetation, you sense the nearness, and soon you come upon a sudden sweet beach where you could pull over and run down for a dip in transparent water. My dreams of travel usually feature wild beaches and here they are, empty and pristine.
* * *
MY PRIMAL ATTRACTION to beaches goes back to earliest memories: digging in the sand and—marvelous—the ocean filling the hole, walking out with my father at Fernandina Beach to watch the sunrise, dripping sand castles over my feet, riding back to the water’s edge on the rough back of a giant turtle who’d laid her eggs in warm sand under the moon, reading in bed, eating damp saltine crackers, and listening to the shush-shush of waves not far from the window. Belonging to all that, I see now, was the relief of escape from ordinary life, which in my childhood had a background beat of chaos. I’d recite John Masefield dramatically to myself as I ran along picking up shells. I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky/and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.
“You had your beach time, Franny.”
“I did.” Must go down to the sea again…
“We have one more night—make the most of it. The hotel I booked is on Poetto, Cagliari’s best beach.”
We turn in the car at the airport. A half-hour drive and the taxi turns into a pedestrian road running in front of pretty houses and small inns. How smart to close off traffic along the sea. People are out jogging, pushing the stroller, power walking. Palm trees, bougainvillea, pink hibiscus flowers as large as a baby’s face. Ah, the ferny jacaranda trees with lavender plumes! La Villa del Mare must have once been a home, then something else, then an inn. Our room faces a garden. Airy white and on the sea, touches of turquoise, a desk—thank you—and a crisp duvet. We drop our bags and ask for a taxi to town.
“No need for that. The bus stops a block away.” The desk clerk, Michele, walks us up a little lane and gives us passes. We’re dropped off on the harbor and turn up the street into town. Fantastic jacarandas line Largo Carlo Felice, a shaded boulevard of small shops and cafés as well as computer stores and Max Mara, always a tempting stop. Still, there’s a nineteenth-century feel: iron balconies, flower stalls, kiosks, a fruit seller, women arm-in-arm going out for afternoon coffee, a drift of pale petals.
We’ve already scoped out Fork for lunch. Under tall trees, we contemplate an intriguing menu. Sardinian ingredients but tweaked and played with and served forth with élan. We love the classic culurgiones, an agnolotti- or ravioli-type filled pasta. A circle of dough is wrapped around potatoes and mint, then pinched closed in such a way that it resembles a plump tassel of wheat. They’re poached, then served with tomato and basil or sometimes a nut sauce. Different areas have other preferences. The one we’re served, listed as in the style of Jerzu, a cannonau wine center, has butter and sage with olives. This pasta takes a light hand; imagine how that potato filling could sink if not fluffy and freshly made.
When I see quail on a menu, I usually order it. Theirs is a salad of quail confit—never had that—with figs, and cucumber salad. Ed is a bit jealous, though his merluzzo, cod with mussels, squash flowers, cherry tomatoes, and bottarga, couldn’t be better.
Dessert? We choose goat’s-milk gelato with crunchy almonds and pineapple syrup. In Sardegna and Sicilia, the foreign conquerors’ influence is often tasted in the cold desserts: cinnamon, jasmine, cardamom, rose water, almond, saffron. Limone comes from Arabic Laymun. Arancia comes from al-naranja. Fork’s menu offers licorice gelato with almonds, surely a whiff of some invader.
Cagliari is a great walking town. Baroque houses, palazzi, sunny narrow streets of balconies dripping with flowers, streets branching and climbing up, up, characteristic weathered doors. People. People living their lives outside—with such sun, why stay in? Why not go to venerable Antico Caffè (1855) for an iced orange granita?
We walk—climb straight up—to the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in the old Royal Arsenal. An escalator is supposed to take you up the steepest part but, as is often the case with outdoor scala mobile all over Italy, it’s out of service. The exercise circle on my watch starts spinning.
Worth the climb! Here’s where, at the end of our trip, the artifacts from various parts of Sardegna bring history together. There are finds from Neolithic people. One powerful female, Cycladic Mother Earth–type figure is especially moving. She’s crouched, her hands on her breasts, all volume and abstract features.
Within the mysterious Nuraghi heaps of rubble we saw around Teulada, archeologists found troves of small bronzes, some the size of toy soldiers. The detail is exacting and precise. An enigmatic priest in a cape holds up—what—a loaf of bread? Archers, so graceful, warriors who mean business with their shields. A bowl as small as my cupped hand turns at the end into the head of a stag. A highly developed aesthetic inside those mounds.
The Phoenicians moved in, pushed the Nuraghi aside, colonized and inhabited the region for centuries. At first, in the late ninth century B.C., they were traders with the Nuragic people. By 780 to 750 B.C., they’d settled on Sant’Antioco, the island next to San Pietro. Other settlements came quickly. There are funerary and domestic objects from these ancient sites, red jugs called mushroom jugs, small containers and dishes. The Romans, too; especially precious to see are their artifacts found at Nora. In the excavations, a shield with Phoenician writing helped date their occupations of the site.
I imagine being the one to discover a cache of dozens of lifelike clay hands at the bottom of a lake, or the life-size recumbent male with a snake entwined around his body—some religious ecstasy? Ah! Picking up a pearl necklace out of the dust, the beads around it carved in the shapes of heads.
The museum is choice.
* * *
NOT WANTING TO take the time to walk all the way back downhill, we call a taxi and it promptly arrives. We’re back at La Poetto in time for a good hour on the fourteen-kilometer beach. Few others are out. Golfo degli Angeli, the stretch of water is called. The archangel Michele and his angelic troops fought the devil Lucifer and friends here until defeat. The saddle of the devil’s horse fell into the water, turning into a stony gray hill rising at the end of the beach.
* * *
WHEN THE SUBJECT of dinner arises, I say, “Let’s call Edo.” Edo Perugini is a food-freak Cortona friend who often summers with his family in Sardegna.
Suddenly he’s shouting at the other end, rattling off places we must go. Shall I call friends to pick you up, there’s a place in the harbor, you have to meet my buddies. They will take care of you. Always in Italy, the crucial personal connection.
“No,” Ed says, “another time that would be fantastic. But a quiet place for our last night. Romantico!”
“Va bene.” He tells us he will call and re
serve at Da Marino al St. Remy.
* * *
A SLICE OF a street, a discreet entrance down some steps. We’re welcomed like old friends by Marino, a slim man in super-fitted jacket and pants, gleaming shaved head, and a nice gap between his front teeth. We’re seated in a whitewashed grotto room with three tables. Several amuses-bouches and prosecco appear. Some enchanted evening! He selects the wine for us: Is Solinas Isola dei Nuraghi, Argiolas. Another, there’ve been many now, of these rich and drinkable Sardinian wines.
Spider crab salad. Zucchini soufflé with pine nuts, lobster tagliolini, sirloin with juniper berries—so much to love. Some pristine fruit for dessert, but then Marino brings an almond parfait with strawberry sauce.
At the end, he brings over a bottle of Mirto Dulcore from Villacidro, the myrtle-based after-dinner digestivo. It tastes essential, a juice straight from those scrubby hillsides with the rough bushes. An old taste—bandits and shepherds, farmhouse harvest feasts. We walk out into the last evening in Sardegna.
“What’s it like here in summer?” Ed asks the waiter who sets down two brimful glasses of prosecco.
See You in the Piazza Page 35