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.
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.