Chapter Six

Sardinia

SPAGHETTI ALLA MARINARA ALLA SARDEGNA

400 grams dried spaghetti

Copious amounts of cold-pressed olive oil

As many wild mussels as you can find, scrubbed

4 handfuls of wild sea plants

2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

1 bucket Mediterranean water

Special equipment: vintage forty-foot sailboat, guide to wild Sardinian herbs, bathing suit, Michelin-starred chef

INSTRUCTIONS:

Load the sailboat with bottles of white wine, olive oil, fishing rods, and yeasty, dark-crusted bread. Work your way carefully out of the narrow channels of the Cabras port on the western shore of Sardinia. Set sail for the open seas.

Navigate carefully around the archipelago of small boats fishing for sea bass, bream, squid. Steer clear of the lines of mussel nets swooping in long black arcs off the coastline. When you spot the crumbling stone tower, turn the boat north and nuzzle it gently into the electric blue-green waters along ancient Tharros. Drop anchor.

Strip down to your bathing suit. Load into the transport boat and head for shore. After a swim, make for the highest point on the peninsula, the one with the view of land and sea and history that will make your knees buckle. Stay focused. You’re not here to admire the sun-baked ruins of one of Sardinia’s oldest civilizations, a five-thousand-year-old settlement that wears the footprints of its inhabitants—Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans—like the layers of a cake. You’re here to pick herbs growing wildly among the ancient tombs and temples, under shards of broken vases once holding humans’ earliest attempts at inebriation. Taste this! Like peppermint, but spicy. And this! A version of wild lemon thyme, perfect with seafood. Pluck a handful of finocchio marino, sea fennel, a bright burst of anise with an undertow of salt.

With finocchio in fist, reboard the transport vessel and navigate toward the closest buoy. Grab the bright orange plastic, roll it over, and scrape off the thicket of mussels growing beneath. Repeat with the other buoys until you have enough mussels to fill a pot.

In the belly of the boat, bring the dish together: Scrub the mussels. Bring a pot of seawater to a raucous boil and drop in the spaghetti—cento grammi a testa. While the pasta cooks, blanch a few handfuls of the wild fennel to take away some of the sting. Remove the mussels from their shells and combine with sliced garlic, a glass of seawater, and a deluge of peppery local olive oil in a pan. Taste the pasta constantly, checking for doneness. (Don’t you dare overcook it!) When only the faintest resistance remains in the middle, drain and add to the pan of mussels. Move the pasta fast and frequently with a pair of tongs, emulsifying the water and mussel juice with the oil. Keep stirring and drizzling in oil until a glistening sheen forms on the surface of the pasta. This is called la mantecatura, the key to all great seafood pastas, so take the time to do it right.

Serve with a bottle of ice-cold Vermentino. Pat your belly. Fight over who gets to fare la scarpetta with the dregs of sauce from the serving bowl. Say something vague and fuzzy and warm such as “bella Sardegna” that nobody at the table can possibly disagree with.

This is what we do the first morning I meet Roberto Petza. I roll out of bed in a stranger’s house in Cabras, a small fishing town on Sardinia’s west coast, and find him sitting at the kitchen counter, slicing cheese. I don’t know much about Petza, only that he’s the only chef to have held a Michelin star on the island in the past thirty years and that a close consigliere of mine in the Italian food world, the kind of guy who knows every trattoria in Trieste and where to buy ’nduja at midnight in Calabria, told me that the only way to fully appreciate the island is with Roberto Petza and subsequently made the introduction via email. I have been given only vague instructions about what my wife, Laura, and I will be doing while on the island by Roberto’s right hand, Domenico Sanna, a man whom I have been emailing for weeks in hopes of extracting a few details about the week ahead. Thirty-seven emails later, I still know nothing. “Don’t worry. We take care of everything.”

Well, not quite everything. When Laura and I show up the day before the mussel pasta feast at the mysterious rendezvous point, a house down a tiny street in Cabras, Daniela, a tall, tan blonde, greets us with a look of abject confusion. She doesn’t know any more than we do about the itinerary. The three of us stand there stupidly blinking into the light until Daniela suggests that we drink some wine and slowly piece together the plan. Daniela is a cook at Roberto’s restaurant. Daniela has a boat. Daniela will be taking us and Roberto out on the boat tomorrow morning. But first we need to eat dinner, so after our wine she drives us down to Ristorante i Giganti, a local seafood restaurant, and tells the owner that I am a food writer and he should feed us accordingly. “It doesn’t look like much,” Daniela says before peeling off in her van, “but trust me. This is where you want to eat tonight.”

As soon as we take our seats, a sequence of six antipasti materialize from the kitchen and swallow up the entire table: nickels of tender octopus with celery and black olives, a sweet and bitter dance of earth and sea; another plate of polpo, this time tossed with chickpeas and a sharp vinaigrette; a duo of tuna plates—the first seared and chunked and served with tomatoes and raw onion, the second whipped into a light pâté and showered with a flurry of bottarga that serves as a force multiplier for the tuna below; and finally, a plate of large sea snails, simply boiled and served with small forks for excavating the salty-sweet knuckle of meat inside.

As is so often the case in Italy, we are full by the end of the opening salvo, but the night is still young, and the owner, who stops by frequently to fill my wineglass as well as his own, has a savage, unpredictable look in his eyes. Next comes the primo, a gorgeous mountain of spaghetti tossed with an ocean floor’s worth of clams, the whole mixture shiny and golden from an indecent amount of olive oil used to mount the pasta at the last moment—the fat acting as a binding agent between the clams and the noodles, a glistening bridge from earth to sea. “These are real clams, expensive clams,” the owner tells me, plucking one from the plate and holding it up to the light, “not those cheap, flavorless clams most restaurants use for pasta alle vongole.”

Just as I’m ready to wave the white napkin of surrender—stained, like my pants, a dozen shades of fat and sea—a thick cylinder of tuna loin arrives, charred black on the outside, cool and magenta through the center. “We caught this ourselves today,” he whispers in my ear over the noise of the dining room, as if it were a secret to keep between the two of us. How can I refuse?

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Roberto Petza, wild sea fennel, and the ancient ruins of Tharros.

Michael Magers

It is a staggering display of the Sardinian sea from a little town with no one to feed but its own—a glimpse of what everyone keeps telling me about this island, that there are very special things happening in every corner of Sardinia.

But what Roberto offers the next afternoon out at sea is a different taste of Sardinia entirely: raw, spontaneous, simultaneously rustic and refined. A dish I’ll use as a decoder ring to better understand this island and this man.

“People love to talk about kilometer zero,” he says as we’re scraping up the ghost of lunch with heels of bread. The boat sways gently with the swells. Seagulls glide above, eyeing our crumbs. “You can’t do kilometer zero in Barcelona. You can’t forage in New York. This is kilometer zero. This is foraging. It’s not a trend—it’s part of our DNA.”

This is the first of a dozen meals we will eat together and the beginning of a thesis he builds mysteriously but effectively to answer one simple question for me: What is Sardinia?

This is not just his Sardinia; this is the Sardinia of the cheese makers and bread bakers, the foragers and shepherds, the fishermen and wine hounds. And he wants to share it all with me. And you.

* * *

As the ancient Greeks once told it, when the gods were done creating the world, they scrounged together the leftover scraps—inhospitable mountains and barren soil—tossed them into the middle of the Mediterranean, then stepped down on the resulting mass. They called it Ichnusa, Greek for “footprint,” a dark and difficult impression in the middle of a brilliant sea.

Despite being surrounded by water, Sardinia does not have a storied Mediterranean history. The sardi have long looked at the sea with suspicion, as a source of disease, invasion, and other existential threats to the island’s survival.

They had good reason to worry. Beyond being a breeding ground for malaria, the Sardinian coastline became a welcome mat for pirates, miscreants, and would-be conquerors. The first recorded civilization remains one of Europe’s most mysterious, the Nuragics, a Bronze Age tribe who built more than seven thousand stone settlements, among the oldest known man-made structures, that still dot the island today. The Phoenicians touched down in the ninth century B.C., hoping to tap into some of Sardinia’s rich mineral deposits. They were more interested in trade than in conquering, but they found the Sardinians immune to both. The Carthaginians faced a similar challenge three hundred years later; they controlled the coastline but had no one to rule but themselves. Everyone came—the Romans and Byzantines, Goths and Saracens, Genoese and Pisans—but nobody stayed, finding Sardinia devoid of many resources to extract and populations to govern.

The only thing this diverse body of Mediterranean misfits had in common was how little of an impact they had on Sardinian culture. The sardi were too busy living in the mountains and the central plains to be bothered by the coastal visitors. Unlike Sicily to the south, where the impact of its invaders can be felt everywhere in the island’s multicultural milieu, as the Sardinians stymied one would-be conqueror after the next, their native culture remained largely intact. When Italy finally emerged as a country in 1861, the newly unified government did what nearly everyone else before them had done and what too many continue to do today: it let Sardinia be.

Today the population has begun to fill in around the coastline—from the 150,000 living in the capital, Cagliari, to the gilded resorts of the Costa Smeralda, where the rich and beautiful of Europe come to be rich and beautiful when the mercury rises.

But twenty years of shifting demographics can’t unravel thousands of years of hardwiring, especially on an island as obstinate as this one. The soul of Sardinia lies in the hills and mountains of the interior and the villages peppered among them. There, in areas such as Nuoro and Ozieri, women bake bread by the flame of the communal oven, winemakers produce their potions from small caches of grapes adapted to the stubborn soil and arid climate, and shepherds lead their flocks through the peaks and valleys in search of the fickle flora that fuels Sardinia’s extraordinary cheese culture. There are more sheep than humans roaming this island—3 million in total—and sheep can’t graze on sand.

On the table, the food stands out as something only loosely connected to the cuisine of Italy’s mainland. Here, every piece of the broader puzzle has its own identity: pane carasau, the island’s main staple, eats more like a cracker than a loaf of bread, built to last for shepherds who spent weeks away from home. Cheese means sheep’s milk manipulated in a hundred different ways, from the salt-and-spice punch of Fiore Sardo to the infamous maggot-infested casu marzu. Fish and seafood may be abundant, but they take a backseat to four-legged animals: sheep, lamb, and suckling pig. Historically, pasta came after bread in the island’s hierarchy of carbs, often made by the poorest from the dregs of the wheat harvest, but you’ll still find hundreds of shapes and sizes unfamiliar to a mainland Italian. All of it washed down with wine made from grapes that most people have never heard of—Cannonau, Vermentino, Torbato—that have little market beyond the island.

Roberto grew up in San Gavino Monreale, a small industrial town forty-five kilometers north of Cagliari. One of six boys, he had a knack for building things with his hands, leading his mother to enroll him in a master carpentry school. But Roberto turned his talent for tinkering to the kitchen, secretly taking cooking classes at a local trade school until his future was written. At seventeen, he knew he wanted to be a chef, but he also knew that Sardinia didn’t have the kind of restaurant infrastructure to match a man of his ambition. “I took my beat-up suitcase and set out in search of something. I remember coming out of the subway and seeing the Eiffel Tower and thinking ‘Holy shit, I’m not in Sardinia anymore.’” He started in Paris: two years cooking everything from classic French to Chinese to Mexican cuisine. He spent those early days in a hostel, one of sixteen bunked up in a small dormitory. “Every night all sixteen would say good night in their own language: German, Spanish, Taiwanese. Bello.”

He kept moving. Corsica. South of France. Catalonia. England. Switzerland. The Isle of Man. Dozens of restaurants, each one a memory and a lesson. In northern Italy, at Osteria della Bullera, he found his mentor in Stefano Rigoni, who taught him perhaps the most valuable lessons of his world tour: how to work within the seasons; how to make salumi, cheese, wine. How to do things right. How the restaurant is a bridge between the land and its people. “My experience there gave me the ability to understand a way forward.”

Thirteen years, twenty-eight restaurants, and tens of thousands of miles later, he returned to Sardinia with a plan. “I knew two things: I wanted to open my own restaurant before I turned thirty. And I wanted to call it S’Apposentu after the room in my grandma’s house I could never enter in as a kid.” Because of the Sardinian bureaucracy, he missed the first goal by five days. In 1998, he opened S’Apposentu in San Gavino Monreale, his hometown, before transferring it to the grand Teatro Lirico, an opera house in Cagliari.

The dawn of the twenty-first century wasn’t an ideal moment to open an ambitious restaurant in Sardinia. The mining industry that had fueled much of the island’s economy during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries—coal, zinc, silver—ground to a halt. Factories closed. People fled en masse to mainland Italy in search of opportunity. While many Sardinians lost touch with the island, Roberto was busy trying to reestablish his connection to his homeland. “I left when I was seventeen. I had to repatriate. I had to relearn my island.”

Despite the challenges, S’Apposentu slowly bloomed into one of Cagliari’s most important restaurants. Roberto brought with him the hundreds of little lessons he had learned on the road and transposed them onto Sardinian tradition and terreno. He turned roasted onions into ice cream and peppered it with wild flowers and herbs. He reimagined porceddu, Sardinia’s heroic roast pig, as a dense terrine punctuated with local fruits. He made himself into a master: of bread baking, cheese making, meat curing. In 2006, Michelin rewarded him with a star, one of the first ever awarded in Sardinia.

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Michael Magers

But success breeds contempt and suspicion in small communities like Cagliari, and S’Apposentu’s ascendance to the top of the totem pole gave birth to a group of vocal detractors—restaurateurs and chefs who resented the sudden rise of the young chef and his radical cuisine. Roberto’s enemies went to work, pressing political friends to exert their power over problematic outsiders. In 2002, claiming a handful of building and licensing violations, the local government shuttered S’Apposentu.

With his name and his pedigree, Roberto could have taken off for the mainland—the “continent,” as they call it here—and opened up an ambitious restaurant in Rome or Florence or just about anywhere else his travels had taken him. He could have spread the Sardinian gospel through fancy, high-concept dishes to an eager audience of international diners. Instead, he chose to move his restaurant to Siddi, an hour north of Cagliari, a town of 350 people.

Siddi was once home to a well-known pastificio, a factory making artisanal pasta, but when it shuttered in the 1990s, many local people lost their livelihoods. Village life has been stripped down to the basics: a church, a post office, a single bar that lures the town’s drinkers like a honey trap. It’s the kind of place where watching the arrival of an unknown vehicle is a spectator sport, where stares of skepticism and bewilderment follow you as you walk the streets, looking for signs of life.

The restaurant name remained, but the concept evolved. For starters, Roberto traded the fancy Teatro Lirico location for a chic farmhouse once owned by the Siddi pasta barons. But more than the chance for a face-lift, the decision to move from a coastal city to an inland village came down to location: “I chose Siddi because it allowed me to create something more than a restaurant.” Found in the area called Marmilla, a name given it by the Romans because the rolling hills reminded them of breasts, Siddi puts Roberto into direct daily contact with the people—the farmers, foragers, winemakers—who fuel his food.

Turns out that Roberto’s enemies unwittingly gave him exactly what he needed: a new home in which to articulate an even more ambitious vision of Sardinian cuisine.

* * *

Day 2 of the unknown Sardinian adventure begins in the Mercato Civico di San Benedetto, an imposing two-story market in the center of Cagliari. San Benedetto doesn’t have the infectious chaos of Palermo’s Ballarò or the watercolor beauty of Bologna’s narrow market alleys, but you’ll find three hundred vendors selling everything the island eats under one roof, along with a thicket of local cooks hunting for dinner. Having made market runs with chefs around the world, I skipped breakfast, and Roberto quickly confirmed my choice: We navigate the produce stands, plucking palms full of cherries from every pile we pass, chewing them and spitting the seeds on the ground. We eat tiny tomatoes with taut skins that snap under gentle pressure, releasing the rabid energy of the Sardinian sun trapped inside. We crack asparagus like twigs and watch the stalks weep chlorophyll tears. We attack anything and everything that grows on trees—oranges, plums, apricots, peaches—leaving pits and peels, seeds and skins in our wake. Downstairs in the seafood section, the heart of the market, the pace quickens. Roberto turns the market into a roving raw seafood bar, passing me pieces of marine life at every stand: brawny, tight-lipped mussels; juicy clams on the half shell with a shocking burst of sweetness; tiny raw shrimp with beads of blue coral clinging to their bodies like gaudy jewelry. We place dominoes of ruby tuna flesh on our tongues like communion wafers, the final act in this sacred procession.

Everyone in San Benedetto has been waiting for this moment. Around every corner Roberto incites a cacophony of pleas and provocations and disappointments: How much do you want to pay—how about twelve euros a kilo? Che cazzo, Robi! What do you expect from me? Where’s my gift? Robi, Robi, over here, over here!

At the butcher counter, Roberto surveys the impressive spread of sheep meat splayed before us. “Sheep has always been the most important protein on the island,” he says. We move to a stall specializing in viscera. “What the rich don’t eat, the poor figured out how to cook.” He buys a lobe of calf’s liver, a thick femur bone caked with marrow, and a whole sheep’s leg. I ask him if he’s reconstructing some local frankenmammal. He winks.

It’s a crash course—a rapid-fire survey of the farmers and flavors behind the island’s food chain that stretches my taste buds and imagination like a rubber band. It’s also a test. Roberto’s not looking for canned plaudits about the glories of Sardinia. In truth, he buys most of his vegetables closer to home, from an experimental farmer adjacent to the restaurant. He’s looking to see if I can distinguish between the good and the bad, to make sure we’re speaking the same kitchen language. There are pockets of brilliance scattered throughout the market, but not everything we eat is worthy of Italy’s towering reputation for next-level produce. Some of that is due to the inherent challenges of Sardinian soil—historically a tough place for growing fruits and vegetables. But for Roberto, it’s part of a systemic issue at the heart of Sardinia’s food chain: lack of organization. “Sixty-five percent of the farmable land in Sardinia is untouched. Eighty percent of our produce comes from off the island. It’s absolutely insane.”

Two hours later, I’m seated at a table in the S’Apposentu dining room as Roberto and his team set about transforming our market haul into lunch. The work is a curious mix of surreal and prosaic kitchen detail. A stagista from Mexico covers roasted pigeon bones with water to boil for stock. A young man from Verona fills sun-dried tomato leather with horse tartar. Roberto debones sea anemones (did you know that sea anemones have bones?). Daniela, ruffled sailor’s shirt traded for a crisp chef’s jacket, peels and cleans the last of the season’s artichokes until they’re no larger than walnuts.

The quiet elegance of the dining room is a long way from the rough churn of the market: modern art on the wall, Billie Holiday on the speakers, brut rosé in the glass flute before me. My camera and notebook have their own stool. Domenico, my pen pal and the master of ceremonies, emerges from the kitchen in a cobalt suit bearing a plate of bite-sized snacks: ricotta caramel, smoked hake, baby artichoke with shaved bottarga.

The first course lands on the table with a wink from Domenico: raw shrimp, raw sheep, and a shower of wild herbs and flowers—an edible landscape of the island. I raise my fork tentatively, expecting the intensity of a mountain flock, but the sheep is amazingly delicate—somehow lighter than the tiny shrimp beside it.

The intensity arrives with the next dish, the calf’s liver we bought at the market, transformed from a dense purple lobe into an orb of pâté, coated in crushed hazelnuts, surrounded by fruit from the market this morning. The boneless sea anemones come cloaked in crispy semolina and bobbing atop a sticky potato-parsley puree.

Bread is fundamental to the island, and S’Apposentu’s frequent carb deliveries prove the point: a hulking basket overflowing with half a dozen housemade varieties from thin, crispy breadsticks to a dense sourdough loaf encased in a dark, gently bitter crust.

The last savory course, one of Roberto’s signature dishes, is the most stunning of all: ravioli stuffed with suckling pig and bathed in a pecorino fondue. This is modernist cooking at its most magnificent: two fundamental flavors of the island (spit-roasted pig and sheep’s-milk cheese) cooked down and refined into a few explosive bites. The kind of dish you build a career on.

Roberto invites us into the kitchen to watch the cheese course take shape. He boils forty-six liters of sheep’s milk in a massive steel pot. An assistant, the young cook from Verona, stirs in rennet, and when the coagulant takes effect, he dips in plastic baskets and packs them full of soft curds. “This is why I came here,” he tells me. “You won’t find raw ingredients like this except in one or two kitchens in all of Italy.”

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A few dozen of the three million sheep that roam Sardinia.

Michael Magers

Roberto goes through and marks each basket of fresh cheese. “Like good Catholics, we make the sign of the cross each time.” Later he moves the cheese to a cellar, where the chef ages it for as little as a few weeks or as long as four years.

The cheese selection changes with the seasons—could be a spunky, bouncy one-month wedge with the faint whisper of wild herbs and flowers. Or a dense, four-year cheese that crumbles on contact and delivers wave after wave of electricity. There aren’t many restaurants that make and age their own cheese, but there aren’t many restaurants of this quality that have sheep farmers a few kilometers from their back door. You can smell their diet as you squish the salty granules between your fingers.

Pecorino made weekly from the neighbor’s flock. Flatbread baked in a wood-fired oven. Surf and turf as only a sardo can imagine. Yes, each dish is a story—all food is a story. Sometimes it’s prose, sometimes it’s poetry. Sometimes it’s not worth the plate it’s written on. The story Roberto is telling belongs to another genre entirely—one in which he’s both the author and the protagonist, straddling two distant worlds, one as old as fire, the other as fresh as today’s batch of cheese.

* * *

For all its untamed beauty, Sardinia is an island of cars. There’s no other way to go about traversing a land as vast and sparsely populated as this. If you want to dip your toes in the crystalline waters of the Costa Smeralda; if you want to see the sheep negotiate the sharp cracks and crevices of the Gennargentu range; if you want to take in the fifty-seven murals of political strife and artistic angst that wallpaper the buildings of the hilltop town of Orgosolo; if you want to taste the microregional cuisine as it shifts from Sassari to Nuoro to Oristano; if you want to experience this island as it’s meant to be experienced by an outsider, moving from sand to stone, peak to valley, cove to crest, staying and feasting at one amazing agriturismo after the next, you’ll need to settle into the driver’s seat and take to the open road.

On a broad level, your best strategy is to commandeer a vehicle as soon as you land, set your coordinates for an interesting village or idyllic stretch of coastline, and put your foot to the pedal. Like all driving in Italy, the first moments on the highways and back streets of Sardinia will stir consternation and helplessness in driver and copilot alike. Normal traffic laws are mere suggestions; directions appear contradictory; roundabouts transform into merciless gyres. But as the hours turn into days and the stream of mistakes into a static of white noise, a calm washes over you behind the wheel. Wrong turns become opportunities. Strangers become momentary friends. The highways lined with wildflowers flash by you in a blur of colors: red yellow white, yellow white yellow, red yellow white pink yellow red. From time to time, a vehicle parked on the side of the road proffers a concentrated taste of the season: a truck bed of cherries, a cargo van of peaches, an old Panda packed with tiny golden apricots. To truly taste Sardinia, be prepared to pull over at any second.

Roberto Petza spends a lot of time in his Citroën Nemo. To build his world and support his people, he sweeps across the island like a searchlight, driving from farm to vineyard to fishing port to any dusty corner where good food is happening.

Each new day in our Sardinian sojourn begins with a fresh sense of confusion.

“Where we going today, chef?” “Oh, you’ll see . . .” Eventually I stop asking and surrender to the idea that we’re victims of a benevolent kidnapping. The sardi have a long, tragic history of using kidnapping as a tool for intimidation and enrichment. Roberto and Domenico use it as a means of showing me as much of the island as possible without the interference of expectations. And they pull it off to dramatic, dizzying effect. We spend the week oscillating between confusion and elation, from quiet contemplation to giddy revelation—a roller-coaster ride that serves to heighten the impact of everything we see and taste.

One by one, we meet the links in Sardinia’s food chain, a nose-to-tail tour of the people—the grandmas, the butchers, the young apprentices—who give the island cuisine its DNA. In a more just world, this book would be about nothing more than Sardinia: Bread, Sheep, Sea.

We drive ninety minutes north to visit Panificio Sapori della Tradizione, a small bakery in the mountain town of Mamoiada. “It’s a long way to go for bread,” says Roberto over a gas-station espresso, one of ten he drinks a day to keep his engine running, “but this is serious stuff for Sardinia.”

Flour and water, the foundations of Italian cooking, are what keeps this island fed. Sardinia was once called Italy’s molino, the mill from which a bread culture of amazing depth and breadth originated. Slowly most of the mills have shuttered, and the local grain production has been replaced by imports shipped across the Mediterranean. But even if the industry of bread has dwindled, the culture remains paramount in the Sardinian diet and the island way of life.

If one food defines Sardinia, it is pane carasau, the flat, paper-thin, oven-baked circle of crispy wheat you find stacked high, casting shadows on market floors and kitchen counters the island over. Born more than three thousand years ago, it’s not just a flatbread but a lifeline for shepherds, a pantry staple for bolstering soups and pastas, a fork for conveying the flavors of the island. Also known as carta di musica, it looks like an oversize communion wafer and eats like a cracker of divine provenance, and it sits at the center of any self-respecting Sardinian table.

Traditionally, this was a bread that brought the island together, its laborious production reason enough to join mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces as they kneaded and shaped and baked their way through another week’s batch. But as the story goes with so many threatened food traditions, the time demands are too stiff for the modern family, and an island of family bakers has been reduced to a few large producers who keep pane carasau at the center of the Sardinian diet.

Daniela Gregu, the owner of Panificio Sapori della Tradizione, is a keeper of the flame. Her day begins at 4:30 A.M., hours before the first light hits the craggy peaks surrounding Mamoiada. She combines flour, water, yeast, and salt, working it by hand from a slurry to a paste to a shaggy heap to a smooth, resilient ball of dough. The mass is hoisted onto a long wooden baker’s bench and sliced into individual pieces. Two women set up in front of opposing ovens and work small pieces of dough into flattened rounds with wooden dowels. In the heat of the oven the pockets of dough bubble like blisters before the cloud of hot air trapped inside escapes. Once removed, they’re bisected horizontally while still hot, the two resulting disks stacked again for another round in the oven. Whereas the first pass in the oven produces a swollen sphere of dough, a puffy pitalike vessel, the second crisps the halved rounds into crunchy flotillas ready to withstand the days and weeks between conception and consumption.

Like all serious bread baking, that of pane carasau is about rhythm, repetition so precise that you could keep time by it. All morning and into the early afternoon the women work, producing tower after tower, a city of crunchy carbs, two hundred pounds in total, each piece marked with the restaurant or the family it is destined for. Every piece is slightly different: some have perfect outer rims toasted a gentle shade of caramel; others come out pale and oblong. Beyond the individual idiosyncrasies, the general shape and structure are remarkably similar for a product of pane carasau’s rustic roots: twenty centimeters in diameter, a quarter centimeter thick, with a gently toasted complexion and a crunch that keeps for months. By lunchtime, the bakery is filled with a metropolis of carasau towers enveloped in gentle wisps of woodsmoke. “It’s time to move on,” says Roberto, gently freeing me from the trance I fell into watching the women work the ovens.

Daniela packs up a box for Roberto, some to be taken back to the restaurant, where his team will heat the disks gently, crack them by hand into craggy triangles, drizzle them with peppery olive oil, and shower them with flecks of fresh rosemary and coarse salt. The rest will travel with me back to Barcelona, where weeks from now I can console myself with little bites of Sardinia.

One afternoon, Roberto and Domenico take us to a neighboring village to meet with Gianfranco, a local wine producer who grows Vermentino and Cannonau—the island’s most ubiquitous grapes, both capable of thriving in rocky soil. Oenophiles often dismiss Vermentino as too one-dimensional to make great wine, but Roberto isn’t the type to solicit popular opinion. Vermentino needs another grape to add perfume and structure, but the chef doesn’t like the options most winemakers have turned to. “It hurts to see people plant chardonnay on this island.”

Together with Giuseppe Pusceddu, an experimental wine producer from the Costa Rei, they are working to create a new project with these stubborn grapes—a wine refreshing enough to drink on a summer afternoon but with enough character to serve to a guest at S’Apposentu. At 1 P.M., under a blazing sun in the middle of a row of Gianfranco’s fruit, the two hold an impromptu meeting. “We’ll do some tests, check the sugar and acid levels of the grapes, and work from there,” says Roberto. The consensus: two experiments. First in the beginning of September, when the grapes are younger, more vibrant. Then a month later, when the fruit is more mature. Both bottles fermented with unknown potential and questionable market value.

With the parameters of their partnership set, we return to the farmer’s house, where three generations of sarde—Gianfranco’s mother, wife, and daughter—serve us a lunch of pure sardo stock: celery and artichokes in agrodolce; chickpeas stewed with garden vegetables; roasted snails covered in garlic, parsley, bread crumbs, and tomatoes sun-dried in the front yard; rabbit alla cacciatora with oven-roasted onions.

Today’s spread paints the picture of abundance, but each dish is a different expression of Sardinia’s cucina povera, recipes developed during a history of poverty. The snails come from the garden, a free source of post-rain protein; the tomatoes were picked last summer and sun-dried to last through the cold winter season; lorighittas, little twists of dried pasta strewn throughout the chickpeas, were traditionally made from the leftover wheat given to the poor at the community grain mills and added to soup to extend its impact on empty stomachs. “Zuppa is synonymous with poverty,” says Roberto, “it’s a way to hide what you don’t have. That’s why you’ll find it in every sardo household but almost never in a restaurant.”

More than defined techniques, these are rhythms developed and sustained season after season, from generation to generation, absorbed into the island at a molecular level. Put them all together and you have a cuisine of depth, diversity, and abiding deliciousness with only a passing resemblance to the food of mainland Italy.

“Sardinia doesn’t have a deep restaurant culture,” says Domenico. “It’s a culture of eating in the home. And home cooking here doesn’t change from one region to the next but between one village and the next. Sometimes from one street to the next.”

Gian Piero Frau, one of the most important characters in the supporting cast surrounding S’Apposentu, runs an experimental farm down the road from the restaurant. His vegetable garden looks like nature’s version of a teenager’s bedroom, a rebellious mess of branches and leaves and twisted barnyard wire. A low, droning buzz fills the air. “Sorry about the bugs,” he says, a cartoonish cloud orbiting his head.

But beneath the chaos a bloom of biodynamic order sprouts from the earth. He uses nothing but dirt and water and careful observation to sustain life here. Every leaf and branch has its place in this garden; nothing is random. Pockets of lettuce, cabbage, fennel, and flowers grow in dense clusters together; on the other end, summer squash, carrots, and eggplant do their leafy dance. “This garden is built on synergy. You plant four or five plants in a close space, and they support each other. It might take thirty or forty days instead of twenty to get it right, but the flavor is deeper.” (There’s a metaphor in here somewhere, about this new life Roberto is forging in the Sardinian countryside.)

“He’s my hero,” says Roberto about Gian Piero. “He listens, quietly processes what I’m asking for, then brings it to life. Which doesn’t happen in places like Siddi.” Together, they’re creating a new expression of Sardinian terreno, crossing genetic material, drying vegetables and legumes under a variety of conditions, and experimenting with harvesting times that give Roberto a whole new tool kit back in the kitchen.

We stand in the center of the garden, crunching on celery and lettuce leaves, biting into zucchini and popping peas from their shells—an improvised salad, a biodynamic breakfast that tastes of some future slowly forming in the tangle of roots and leaves around us. Finally our reverence is interrupted by a few unexpected guests in the garden. “Right now I’m locked in a battle with the grasshoppers. Maybe the chef would like to add a few to the menu.”

One afternoon, between a massive lunch and an even larger dinner, Roberto takes me to visit a man he considers to be his greatest inspiration. When we pull into the town of Gonnoscodina, a dramatic hairpin drive up and over the hill from Siddi, Delfino Porcu (sardo for “pig”) is sitting on the curb reading a magazine about saffron. There are shady spots all around, but he has chosen this exposed swath of cement, undaunted by the angry June sun pouring down on his bare, bronzed scalp. He shakes my hand, crunching my digits with his iron grip, then says matter-of-factly, “I’ve been reading about better ways to pick the stamens from the crocus.” A pause and a grin: “The stamen is the part that counts.”

He’s dressed in military green from head to toe, with a silver eagle belt buckle and a tight V-neck shirt that strains to contain his chiseled upper body. “It’s important to never stop reading. The mind needs to feed on new information every day. It’s how I stay young.” As an eighty-one-year-old who looks not a day over sixty-two, he should know.

Foraging was once a fundamental part of the Sardinian food system—both a necessary resource for a hungry island and an edible illustration of the deep connection between the people and the land. Delfino is one of the last of a dying class of foragers, who works the land not as a hobby or a weekend pastime but as a means of survival—physical, spiritual, and otherwise. He once fell in love with a woman who didn’t love him back. Beyond that, his life has been dedicated entirely to the natural world—to learning as much about the flora and fauna of the island as possible. “When we were young, we took all of this for granted. Everyone knew what to do with these plants. We’re losing our patrimony.”

We follow him in his tiny Fiat back to his house, stopping every few hundred meters to sample one wild herb or another. He has lived on these fifteen hectares all by himself for decades. Not alone, exactly: there are five beautiful sardi dogs gathered near his shack, a dozen or so pigs over the hill, and a small but intensely beautiful sunken garden at the foot of the property. “Back before the weather started changing, this was like the Garden of Eden. Absolute paradise.”

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Delfino Porcu, master of the Sardinian soil.

Michael Magers

As we walk around the property, Delfino treats his land like an old-timer treats a photo album, offering an anecdote or piece of intel for every plant we pass. “They used these leaves to numb teeth in the old dentist offices. . . . When you’re feeling a bit off, add a handful of these seeds to a glass of hot water, wait ten minutes, and you’ll sleep like an angel. . . . Doctors tell us to eat fish for the omega-3 fats, but this herb has even more. . . . Portulaca oleracea, this used to be the salad green of choice of the Romans. Then it fell out of favor.” Delfino could explain the history of the world through a small patch of weeds.

Every few days, Delfino arrives to make a delivery to S’Apposentu, an ever-shifting selection of nature’s menu du jour: thin, sweet stalks of wild celery, spicy dragoncello (tarragon), bitter bunches of dandelions. Whatever Delfino brings, Roberto folds into the day’s menu. “There are lots of great farmers and producers around the island, but there’s only one Delfino.”

Delfino has turned his backyard into his pantry, his classroom, his pharmacy, his love. As I watch him move from one plant to the next, crushing the leaves below our noses, telling stories about dramatic confrontations with one species or another, and offering prescriptions for cholesterol problems and back issues, I keep coming back to the same thought: this man knows more about this patch of earth than I’ll ever know about anything.

* * *

There’s an old sardo parable that goes something like this: A farmer is working his land one day when his plow strikes something hard beneath the earth. He digs it out to discover a dusty gold lamp, and after a few rubs, out pops a genie, ready to grant him a single wish. “The only condition,” says the genie, “is that whatever you wish for, your neighbor will get double.” The farmer puts down his plow, wipes his brow, and, after a minute or two, looks at the genie and says, “I’ll have you take one of my eyes.”

Brutal. But any sardo you meet along the way will be all too happy to load you down with anecdotal evidence: the farmer who poisoned his neighbor’s soil; the rival shepherd who kidnapped a few sheep from the next guy’s flock; the restaurant owners who had their rival shut down. Italians say the Sardinians are more guarded and suspicious than their compatriots on the mainland.

Keep in mind, these aren’t my judgments or even based on any extensive observation. In fact, every moment in Sardinia confirms exactly the opposite: that the Sardinians are possessed of a near-boundless generosity, that if they invite you over for a snack and a glass of wine, they mean a spit-roasted animal and a long afternoon of drinking, and if you’re in the market for a new shirt, the ones right off their backs are there for the taking. Time and again I’m blown away by the hospitality of the sardi—Angelo, the rental agent from Europcar who calls around to his buddies at rival agencies to negotiate a car for us; Giovanni Montisci, the cult winemaker, who soaks us in a series of bold, funky reds and stuffs us with porceddu, wood-fired suckling pig, one of the heroes of the Sardinian kitchen; the farmer’s mother, Angelica, who walks me through each step of her family recipes with patience and pride in equal measure. People who I meet for minutes send messages asking when we’ll be back. Any day now!

More and more, those dusty genie anecdotes speak to the island’s past—when limited resources and a contentious history turned neighbors into rivals—but not to its future. The innate challenges of life on Sardinia are substantial. Physically and politically isolated from the rest of Europe, the sardi have made a history of figuring things out on their own. Enlightened locals have come to realize that no man is an island, that Sardinia is the kind of place that needs everybody to push in the same direction.

Roberto embodies this spirit down to his marrow. A dozen years and a million miles of wandering the globe stirred in him a connection to home that you won’t find in a sedentary chef. The more he saw of the world, the more he recognized the riches of Sardinia, until it became as clear as the turquoise waters of Porto Giunco that he wanted to dedicate his life to supporting this island in whatever small ways he can.

Turns out those ways aren’t so small. With each visit to a cheese producer or farmer or forager, I see why people talk about Roberto the way they do—about someone who is “much more than a chef.” The word chef doesn’t mean what it once did—a general who leads a team of cooks into battle every night. In our increasingly food-mad world, chef means philosopher, politician, author, entertainer.

For someone of Roberto’s polished pedigree and prodigious talent, it would be easy to decide that Sardinia simply isn’t big enough; on the contrary, he has calibrated his ambitions to the perimeters of this island and set about working fiercely within them. More than a celebrity or an iconoclast, he positions himself as a middleman, a catalyst for small, steady changes around Sardinia—the type that will have a lasting effect on how this island feeds itself for decades to come. He is a creator not just of dishes but of communities.

In 2010, not long after transplanting S’Apposentu to Siddi, Roberto opened Accademia Casa Puddu, a culinary school designed to educate young Sardinian cooks and to keep the next generation of culinary minds on the island they call home. Classes include the typical tent poles of a culinary education—sauce making, meat fabrication, stock theory—but extend deep into the local DNA of the island, from foraging wild herbs to learning to work within Sardinia’s microseasons.

One night, I eat dinner at S’Apposentu with Gianfranco Massa, the director of the Accademia. Bald head, strong jaw, broad chest, he looks like Hank Schrader, the DEA agent from Breaking Bad, only with a mission decidedly more benign than meth enforcement. “Our job is really about support. How can we convince the young kids to stay and work the land?”

When I ask about government support, he reaches over his shoulder and pats himself on the back. “Bravi! Bravi! That’s all they do. They love to talk about us during an election, but then they’re quick to forget.”

There’s an Italian term used to describe people like Roberto—rompiscatole, people who break structures, crush schemes, and, amid the wreckage and the rubble, build something entirely new. “Sardinia needs Roberto,” Gianfranco says. “And more like him.”

At this point Roberto delivers a dish—tiny ravioli stuffed with smoked eel, another little love letter. The chef pretends not to hear, but the blushing cheeks betray him. (So reticent is Roberto to talk about himself that after seven days traversing this island together, he fails to mention Sa Scolla in Baradili, his newly opened pizzeria, which serves pizzas built with seasonal Sardinian ingredients and washed down with local microbrews—an opening I only discover later online.)

“For us, it’s all about virtuous cycles,” Roberto says. “Plant a seed here in one part of the island, help to water it, and watch it grow.”

Talk of preservation and regeneration echoes across the island—from Gianfranco’s Vermentino vines to the aquaculture operations off the coast of Cabras. Usually it’s applied to cheese, bread, wine; sometimes it means an entire community.

Nughedu Santa Vittoria is a town looking for a second chance. Located 100 kilometers north of Cagliari in the dead center of Sardinia, every turn through the village offers staggering views avross the island’s rolling topography.

A small congregation of young, well-dressed men wait for us on the steps of the town church. These are Roberto’s latest partners, a group dedicated to building their town into a sustainable tourist destination. Since the 1970s, as the mineral industry crashed and jobs began to disappear, towns such as Nughedu Santa Vittoria have watched as their youths have fled to the mainland in search of a life Sardinia can’t provide. “Depopulation is an epidemic across the island, especially in the small villages,” says Francesco Mura, the town’s mayor, a man on a mission. “We are tired of watching young Sardinians leave the island.”

We take a tour of the town—down one cobblestone road after the next, a village of picture-postcard beauty unfolds around us. Kids play hide-and-seek in the narrow stone streets. An old man invites us in for a taste of his homemade liquor. A seventy-year-old woman and her ninety-year-old mother take the late-afternoon passeggiata, stopping in front of the church to make the sign of the cross. If this were Tuscany, you’d find an army of Brits and Americans refurbishing villas and preparing to press their own olive oil. But we’re a million miles from Montepulciano, so the residents have turned to Roberto with a plan to revitalize village life.

“We don’t want to be another tourist stop,” says Francesco. “We want to create an experience, share part of our culture, and that’s something you can do only through community.” The chef and the townspeople discuss cooking classes, special dinners in the homes of locals, cheese-making lessons. Through the town center runs a route that locals call the Cammino di Santiago of Sardinia, a system of trails that connect the island’s idyllic villages—a potential path forward for Nughedu Santa Vittoria.

Francesco and the townspeople want to give us a taste of their vision. In the small, spartan community center, a group of men stands around three large pots, beginning the preparations for dinner. This is the interior of Sardinia, where sheep outnumber humans ten to one, and these guys look to be doing their best to narrow the gap. Women do most of the cooking in Sardinia—with one notable exception: sheep, which are raised, killed, and cooked by men.

As we circle the room, one gentleman pulls a knife from his pocket and begins to cut up chunks of leg and shoulder. Another, unimpressed by his buddy’s blade, unsheaths his own. “That’s not a knife. This is a knife.” In Sardinia, everyone carries a knife.

On the other side of the room, a man pushing ninety gives a master class in mutton: he sears large chunks of meat until they are mahogany colored, then stirs in onion, celery, sun-dried tomatoes, and 35 liters of water, skimming the fat as it slowly bubbles up from below. “This will take some time,” he says as the stew settles into a simmer, “but the results will be magical.”

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Tripe and tomatoes, part of the magical home cooking of Sardinia.

Michael Magers

Outside, young Nicolas sits on a chair and plays a soul-stirring melody on an accordion. A handsome couple dances the ballo sardo, a sequence with lots of tiny movements and elaborate choreography. A well-dressed boy approaches on the back of a white horse, clipping and clopping to the groans of the accordion. If at first the scene feels slightly stilted, a coordinated sequence of rural traditions to impress the urban guests, the organic energy of Nughedu Santa Vittoria soon takes over. A soft pink light clings to everything as the village comes to life in the cooling hours of dusk. One by one, the people of Nughedu Santa Vittoria arrive bearing gifts. A man cradles bottles of his latest batch of homemade beer. A woman slices up a wheel of pecorino she makes from her husband’s flock.

We take our seats at a long communal table and the feast commences. Malloreddus—small and chewy, Sardinia’s most ubiquitous pasta shape—come glazed in sheep broth and stained with saffron. Ravioli stuffed with potato and pecorino wear a coat of simmered tomato and crushed parsley. Finally, the stars of the evening: First, sheep boiled with potato and onion offered by a group of younger cooks, resistant but remarkably light. Then the old man’s version, redolent of herbs and wisdom, the fickle flesh rendered defenseless by decades of practice.

Nobody enjoys the meal more than Roberto, who closes his eyes, nods his head, and generally looks as if he’s tasting all of this for the very first time. “People just don’t realize how damn good Sardinian food really is. There’s only one Michelin star on the island, and it’s tucked down a small street in Siddi. And that’s a problem. If we had the five or eight we deserve, we’d have more people, more creative energy, a virtuous cycle we would all benefit from.” A chorus of approval bounces around the table, though it’s unclear whether anyone here knows or cares about Michelin stars.

Someone down the table, a visitor from a distant land, asks for Parmesan and barely lives to tell the tale. “Parmigiano? Niente! Sempre pecorino. Sempre!

Roberto, Francesco, and the rest of the men argue about wine. About local pasta shapes. About a bit of everything. The only point of agreement is the general supremacy of Sardinia in all matters of the stomach and heart, a proclamation the entire village drinks to. Promises are made about the next steps in Nughedu Santa Vittoria’s resurgence, and Roberto looks tickled. “Put talented people in the same room, add wine and some sheep,” he says, “and let them forge a future for the island.”

After the plates are cleared, a bottle of local firewater materializes and the village begins to tilt. Our new friends share the type of sad stories known by too many, sing songs in a dialect known by too few. Someone suggests that I mount a horse. When the bottle is gone, we waddle down the hill to the local bar, the entire village behind us. The idea is to order espresso and be on our way, but nobody here looks ready to budge an inch.

At one point, Francesco catches me scribbling furiously in my notebook and smiles. “You sure you want to leave?” A few minutes later, Roberto comes up from behind, puts his hand on my shoulder, and motions to the scene before us—the dark outline of distant mountains, the crater and the lake lapping below, the piazza full of villagers lost in song and drink. “Questo è Sardegna.”

This is Sardinia. It’s a phrase that follows me like waves of sheep across the island. Lonely shepherd: This is Sardinia. Salty fisherman: No, this is Sardinia. Proud nonna: This is and this . . . and oh, this, too. Visionary chef: Don’t forget about this, my friend. This is Sardinia, the island forged from the scraps of the gods. Hills like supple breasts, plains like cracked cake batter. This is Sardinia. Coastlines of transparent beauty. Rough pyramids of weathered stone. This is Sardinia. Holy bread. Mountain cheese. Altered beast. The island no one could conquer. A footprint in the sea. This is Sardinia. This is Sardinia! This!