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 reserve 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.