In Sardinia

Sardinia Blues

In 1979, renowned Sardinian artist Maria Lai was summoned by the mayor of her mountain village of Ulassai. She was residing in Rome. They had raised funds to commission a war memorial. Having lived away from Sardinia for decades, conflicted with her village over the murder of her brother, Lai turned down the town councilors. “I was convinced I would never return there,” she wrote. Lai suggested a monument “to the living by the living,” as part of a celebration of a resurgent Sardinian culture. If you want to make history, she declared, you must create history.

The villagers agreed. Lai’s sculpture and textile work drew on Sardinian traditions of weaving and storytelling; in secondary school, she had been a student of author Salvatore Cambosu, whose poems and stories had taught her how to “follow the rhythm.”

On a fall day in 1981, Lai led the entire village in wrapping Ulassai with sixteen miles of blue ribbons, lacing the doors of houses and balconies of apartments, church spires and shops, winding up the warrens until they reached Mount Gedili, a craggy ridge that overlooked the valley. Some neighbors tied a knot of friendship among themselves; others left it straight. But all were connected. The blue ribbon recalled a folktale of a young girl who had survived a mountain landslide by following the trace of the ribbon. Legarsi alla montagna—Binding oneself to the mountain—turned into an internationally recognized avant-garde work of performance art that sought to heal divisions in the village and reconnect the residents to their rugged natural habitat.

“A town far from the fashionable cultural circuit was able to give the world a fresh insight into what art can be,” Lai mused.

It also brought Lai back to the island.

Lai’s neighbor in Rome was acclaimed Sardinian novelist Giuseppe Dessí, whose work Lai would embroider into canvas in her exhibition of “sewn books,” her art functioning as a way to connect the island to the world. For Dessí, Sardinia was a state of mind, a “land of permanence, and not of travel.”

Travelers and islanders alike, Sardinian author Marcello Serra once declared, shared a longing to return to the island—a kind of “sortilege” that runs in your veins with a “sweet and bitter languor.” In 1956, Serra named it in his travel guide as mal di Sardegna—the Sardinia blues—as real for native islanders as those who visit. It wasn’t simply nostalgia; it was more like an unyielding yearning to return.

When you leave “the island of the Sardinians, with dense memories of fabulous encounters, of landscapes timeless and ancient,” Serra wrote, “then the heart, overseas brother, will weigh you down like a ripe fruit.”

Not every visitor, of course, feels this longing. Cicero, the ancient Roman statesman, once displayed his oratory skills: “Sardinia was a bad island, everything in the island was ugly and even its abundant honey was bitter.”

Yet, it was that special honey, miele amaro or miele di corbezzolo, bitter honey from the strawberry tree, that gave Sardinia its special flavor, according to Cambosu and other writers, for those wishing to see the reality of the island.

Three Maps and a Photo

The work of Lai and Cambosu, among so many other writers and artists, returns to me now as I look at three maps of Sardinia on the wall of my office, as if some boat awaits me outside.

One map, titled “Mediterranean Without Borders,” by French cartographer Sabine Réthoré, turns our view ninety degrees to the right, the “west” facing up—imagine North Africa to the left and Europe into Turkey to the right with equal stature, the Levant stretching to Egypt at the bottom, and the Rock of Gibraltar at top. Our perspective shifts, the Mediterranean Sea unfolding almost like a lake, the shores mirroring each other along these ancient corridors dotted by islands and waterways. It’s a busy thoroughfare. The Mediterranean is “probably the most vigorous place of interaction,” as eminent historian David Abulafia observed, “between different societies on the face of this planet.”

There in the upper reaches, the island of Sardinia sits in the middle, a focal point of entry and inspection. Instead of being on the periphery of empires or a nebulous island west of the Italian mainland, Sardinia is central to the Mediterranean story, and a nexus for navigators heading in any direction. The idea of isolation, as one medieval historian would note, no longer appears “tenable.”
The second map is of Sardinia itself, the main island with its many islets. It is not a floating green mountain with a defining valley that splices along the south by southwest, as a topographical map would show. Instead, this map is as colorful as a neon strip of nightlife you might download on a cell phone for the latest cultural events. In fact, devised as a geoportal and online app by a volunteer organization called Nurnet in 2013, the map pinpoints the thousands of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments across the islands with the fanfare of an open museum.

As part of Nurnet’s mission to “promote a different image of Sardinia in the world,” the map is nothing less than astounding. If you actually illuminated all of these ancient monuments, from the Neolithic array of Stonehenge-like dolmens and menhir stone formations to the thousands of burial tombs, Bronze Age towers and complexes called nuraghes or nuraghi, the entire island would light up like a prehistoric hotspot. The vastness of the uninterrupted cycles of civilizations and their architectural marvels still standing today would be incomparable with any place in Europe on that first Mediterranean map.

The Sardinians call it the “endless museum.”

The third is a wine map of Sardinia, at least the official “DOC” (designation of controlled origins) varieties that make it into the official registers. The unmarked bottles of wine in the secret cellars of connoisseurs, Cannonau or Vernaccia or Vermentino or Semidano, have their own registry for the fortunate, but this map displays the five provinces on the island that don’t vary too much from the original kingdoms or judicadus that ruled in the Middle Ages with a degree of independence. The names have changed or been consolidated; the wine remains the same, in the north of Sassari, the west of Oristano, the central Barbagia mountains and east of Nuoro, the south of the Sulcis and Campidano valley. The fifth province is the capital city of Cagliari.

Wine, of course, makes any journey a delight—or an adventure. Plutarch invoked Gaius Gracchus’s words that the Romans drank wine in Sardinia and returned with their amphoras filled with gold and silver. In Sardinia, wines are also a portal into the island’s cultures, like the popular berry-tone Cannonau, with its high level of flavonoids and artery-scrubbing antioxidants, make it the drink in the holy grail of the Blue Zones’ research on the island’s phenomenon as the home of the most centenarians in the world. This was an old story; in 1639, Sardinian historian Francisco Angelo de Vico noted the extraordinary number of islanders that lived until one hundred years, or more. In fact, evidence of the oldest wine-making press and cultivation of domestic grapes in western Europe was discovered in recent excavations at Nuragic sites, dating back to 1,500 b.c.

Aside these maps, I also have a framed photo of a young boy in shorts and a beret, probably from the 1890s, sitting with his legs dangling off the thick walls on the medieval bastion in the northern port of Alghero, Sardinia, reading a book. Fishing boats line the shores below, dwarfed by the mainmasts of three ships, the sails folded, the walls of the city’s fortress in the background.

There on the bastion walls of Alghero, I imagine the young boy reading a travel story, for some reason; in the photo he’s watched over by two other kids who don’t seem to know what to make of the scene. I see the wonder of this boy turning the page on the story of the first European crossing of the Mississippi River in North America by Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in 1541, where it took a bad turn. In the end, it was thanks to a Sardinian boat maker who fashioned caulk from hemp to rebuild a new vessel to descend the great river in 1543, that the crew survived to tell Europe the story of this other world.

I have sat on those same walls in the morning, gazing out at the sea and the spellbinding cliffs of Capo Caccia in the distance, over many years. In 2017, my wife Carla and I packed up our two young boys (twelve and fifteen, actually) and moved to Alghero, as part of a university sabbatical from our work and lives in the United States. We had no plans other than to rest and explore the island and its fabled beaches, travel the winding back roads into its mountains and villages, and sample the varieties of food and wine; we were still dealing with the last details of a particularly grueling year of assignments, deadlines, and demands. Having raised our children as Italians and Americans, our main goal was to give them another chance to experience a school system in Italian, and an opportunity to live in a different part of Italy.

But something almost unexplainable happened in Sardinia. The island had its own plans, as if a traveler couldn’t simply pass through its confines with a little sand in one’s shoes. We arrived as Sardinia was on the cusp of “re-storying” its history in a ruckus debate, undergirded by an extraordinary range of poets, writers, musicians, artists, historians, and everyday storytellers. The formal recognition of some huge archaeological discoveries in the last half century was forcing scholars from around the world to reconsider a certain narrative about Sardinia and rewrite the history of the Mediterranean.

Picking up D. H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia one day, the defining book on the island in English over the past century, I opened the first pages to this passage: “Sardinia, which has no history, no date, no race, no offering.” Lawrence’s legendary provocateur role aside, that seemed like an incredibly outdated notion. The rest of the book, based on his six-day tour, seemed equally antiquated. One hundred years after its publication in 1921, Sea and Sardinia still remained on the bookshelves as the main window in English into one of the most beguiling and complex regions in Italy.

While Sardinian authors, like Giuseppe Cossu in 1799, had been lamenting the oversight of the island’s history and “unfaithful geographic maps” for centuries, there still seemed to be a lingering narrative of historical ambivalence, as if the island had been an empty stage until the arrival of Phoenicians and Romans; as if Sardinians had no ancient civilization or role in their own destiny—or, more importantly, as if they had no role in shaping Italy and the worlds beyond their island. I couldn’t help but wonder if we were missing the most vital parts of the island and its history; that perhaps we needed to understand Sardinia, if we were to truly understand the rest of Italy.

In fact, it might be more accurate to speak of “le Sardegne,” as in plural, instead of “la Sardegna,” a singular entity, with a singular culture or set of ways. The “fundamental misunderstanding” in the Mediterranean, as historian Abulafia wrote in The Great Sea, was the illusive search for some sense of unity and clarity in such a place. Instead, he suggested, “we should note diversity,” among the shores in a “constant state of flux.”

When we arrived in Sardinia, festivals of all types abounded across the island—food, folk, dance, music, literature, theatre, sports, and archaeology. The range of political parties joyfully clashed, with the independence party now aligned with the right-wing parties on the Italian mainland. (We heard a frequent refrain in every town: Emilio Lussu, the great Sardinian patriot of the twentieth century, would be turning in his grave.) The traditional processions and events continued to grow, including those that had marked Sardinia’s unique cultures for centuries, such as the extreme S’Ardia horse race in Sedilo, recalling a battle under the Byzantine Emperor Constantine or the elaborate Sant’Efisio procession that re-walks a forty-mile journey from Cagliari to Nora, celebrating the end of the plague in 1656.

Along the shores, plains, and mountains in Sardinia, that fine line between unity and diversity had been an old rub on the island, we would find out. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, legendary jazzman Paolo Fresu, the son of a shepherd who grew up in the village of Berchidda, referred to an old adage of Sardinia’s factions and feuds: centu concas, centu berritas, a hundred heads, a hundred caps. But Sardinia was an island, he added. “Despite the sea, it is mainly one of land, and that forges us together.”

Sardinian singer Claudia Aru, from the southern town of Villacidro, who sang like a mix tape of Bessie Smith, Lila Downs, and Maria Carta, added her own version of that theme during the pandemic, releasing a single entitled “Centu Concas,” as a hymn to multiculturalism. She was joined by iconic Sardinian singer and comic entertainer Benito Urgu. She called her song “a critical reading of a certain Sardinian identity that is too dusty,” because “Sardità,” the identity or state of being Sardinian, was not a given concept, or acquired with birth, “but is rather a choice of life, a fruit of behavior. Sardinia is, for me, an act of love.”