No Sardines in Sardinia

Sardinia's Extreme Coastal Event turned into a Wind Event, which was as loud as a hurricane in our 8th floor room but not actually problematic. In the morning we walked into Alghero to the St. Francis church and monastery, Romanesque with a lovely cloister and campanile. We also admired the mosaic dome of the Church of San Michel, though it was closed. 

Then we headed out in our Audi for the town of Bosa, 30 miles to the south, where there was a ruined castle and brightly colored houses -- colored, so they say, so the fishermen coming home could tell where their homes were. I found that odd. Why wouldn't they know which one was their house, even if it wasn't painted lemon yellow or orange orange?  The drive was glorious -- miles of windy roads with cliffs dropping off to a very nearly wine-dark sea. Our GPS was so precise, so accurate, so polite that we named it Sue, after the most precise, accurate, polite person we know. (It always said "please" when it asked us to make a turn! We really just wanted to make her happy and felt terribly guilty when we made one of our frequent errors and forced her to recalculate.) 

We drove up to the castle, which was closed (ah, the dangers of sightseeing in the off-season), so we walked all over the town, had lunch, and visited the Church of the Virgin Mary of Mt. Carmel, a Piedmontese Baroque structure. We chanced on a funeral, where the entire town stood solemnly at attention as the priest blessed the casket.

We strolled along the river, admiring the tanneries that lined it (how it must have stunk back in the day!). Then we drove back and had cocktails in our rooftop bar, trying the local specialty mirto, which comes in red (from myrtle berries) and white (from myrtle leaves). 

Then we went into the Old Town for Sardinian paella, which is made not with rice but with a form of pasta called fregola, along with shellfish and rabbit. (The island, after the conquest by the Genoese in the 11th century and the later conquest by the Spanish in the 16th century, was forcibly populated with thousands of Catalans. The food there is a mix of Spanish and Italian -- thus the paella.)

Sunday we drove north to the island's most beautiful site, the Capo Caccia cliffs and sea caves. The  caves, which usually can be viewed either by boat or by descending 500 steps, were closed due to the ECE. I was not entirely sorry to forego either the boating or the steps. 

We walked around on the cliffs admiring the views, and went to the  landing where usually the boats come in. I tried to test the waters to see how cold they were, and a rogue wave swept me off my feet, and then swept Phil off his. We regained our footing if not our dignity and were damp for the rest of the day. (The water was quite cold, btw.)

Then we drove another 50 miles to Castelsardo, another town boasting a ruined castle. We parked in town and walked up to the ruin only to find that its ramparts were closed due to the ECE. We looked around it and then visited two churches, one the small Romanesque church of Santa Maria Grazia and the other the Cathedral of San Antonio Abate, with spectacular views of the ocean.

After that we descended to the car -- only it wasn't there. I had pinned it on Googlemaps, which had worked once before, but the internet was iffy in Castelsardo and it erased my pin. Or that was my excuse, anyway.

An hour later, we were still looking. Desperation was growing; the light was fading; our feet were soggy.

At last I remembered that maybe we had parked near a trattoria, so I looked up trattorias on my phone and we investigated them all. At the last one, there the Audi was, looking warm and inviting and as if it had never been lost at all. Nobody wept or yelled or blamed anyone else. We considered it a win.

"If one travels, one eats," says D.H. Lawrence in Sea in Sardinia, which Phil has of course been reading. So when we got back to 

Alghero, after a change of shoes and socks and a well-earned cocktail, we ate smoked swordfish carpaccio and two enormous plates of pasta. After dinner we discovered Cardinal Mendoza brandy, which we sipped on our balcony, since the wind had finally abated.

Our last morning in Sardinia, we wandered again through the Old Town, visiting the Alghero anthropology museum that held objects from dinosaur times to prehistoric peoples to Roman mortuaries to medieval remnants. We were quite prepared for our one-hour stopover in Rome to be an absolute disaster, but everything was on time and we arrived back in Venice at the dinner hour, so we ate at a new place down the street. A short, adventure-filled trip! 

As for the name of the island: there are claims that Sardinia comes from Sherden, meaning Sea People, or from the mythological god Sardus. Plato thought it was named after Sardo, a woman from Turkey who founded cities there. But I prefer the source that claims it was originally named for sardines, though thousands of years of overfishing has left the waters pretty much sardine-free.