‘In Sardinia’ Review: Mediterranean Crossroads
The island, once a coveted prize for competing empires, is now a luxury tourist destination.
By Dominic Green
May 26, 2023
D.H. Lawrence wrote that the Italian island of Sardinia has “no history, no date, no race, no offering.” This was a typically grand Lawrentian statement, and typically wrong. Sardinia has more history than most places in Europe. The Sardinians are a particular people among the Italians. And their small, green island has a lot to offer, especially if you need to berth a yacht or, like ex-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, you wish to add an underwater entrance to your villa so that it resembles the lair of a Bond villain.
For the Italians of the mainland, Sardinia is Italy’s New Hampshire or Maine: an idyll where they can get away from it all while remaining at home. For everyone else, Sardinia has become synonymous with the yachts, villas and luxury hotels of the Costa Smeralda, the “Emerald Coast” of the island’s northeast. In the 1960s, the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of a branch of the Ismaili Muslims, dropped anchor by these pristine shores. The sea was almost turquoise, the sand almost white, the climate balmier than in the South of France. The beaches were less crowded, too, because the area was one big malarial swamp. With liberal applications of DDT and concrete, the Aga Khan created a playground for the international rich.
The writer Jeff Biggers came to Sardinia the traditional way, by sea, across the Strait of Bonifacio, which divides northern Sardinia from the southern shore of Corsica. This is how James Bond arrived in “The Spy Who Loved Me,” though Bond used an amphibious Lotus sports car. Similarly unconventional, Mr. Biggers moved his family to Sardinia. He left the beaches for the hills, villages and Neolithic ruins of the rocky interior. He studied its history and learned Sard, its language, so he could understand its people and their culture. Like “Mani,” Patrick Leigh Fermor’s exploration of a Peloponnesian peninsula, “In Sardinia” discovers historical depths in a remote and rocky place.
Mr. Biggers upends Sardinia’s Eurotrash image by adopting the French cartographer Sabine Réthoré’s method. Her map “Mediterranean Without Borders” rotates the region 90 degrees clockwise from its usual alignment. The Levant now sits at the bottom of a long corridor, with North Africa on the left and Europe on the right. Sardinia, usually an overlooked outpost of Italy, now sits at a watery crossroads in the map’s upper-middle.
NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
Books
Be the first to find out what's new and what's good. Get the weekend book reviews before the weekend.PreviewSubscribe
A second map, an online geoportal created by local volunteers, shows what Sardinians call their “endless museum”: thousands of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments. If these ruins were illuminated, Mr. Biggers write, “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.”
Sardinia’s location made it one of “the cradles” of Mediterranean Bronze Age civilization, rich in wine, wheat, charcoal and cork, its people skilled in metalwork and tanning. The Carthaginian empire conquered the island around 500-480 B.C., ending the Nuragic civilization and its “decentralized forms of governing.” The Romans came in the late 3rd century B.C. Their conquest was so brutal that by 174 B.C., a tablet in Rome’s Temple of Mater Matuta recorded the killing and capture of 80,000 Sardinians in a single campaign. The Roman slave market was glutted with Sardinian captives, and the Romans coined the term Sardi venales, “cheap and worthless as Sardinians.”
After seven centuries as a Roman colony, Sardinia was conquered by Vandals in the 5th century A.D. and by Byzantines in the 6th. When the Arab conquest of Sicily in the 9th century severed Sardinia from the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople, the Sardinians recovered some self-rule in four petty kingdoms, though their coasts were regularly pestered by Arab raiders and polyglot pirates. The Aragonese conquest of the early 1300s was followed four centuries later by the island’s 1720 transfer to the House of Savoy in Piedmont. Feudalism survived the change of ownership. When the local barons visited their estates, a British visitor reported in the 1840s, they “frequently called on their peasants to get on all fours,” to be used as human chairs.
Sardinia was conscripted into the new Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Rule from Rome after 1870 was not as bad as the first time around, but it came at a price. Sardinia received railways, roads, schools and electricity, but it surrendered control over its resources. The “shareholders in Turin fatten their portfolios with dividends crystallized from the blood of Sardinian miners,” the Sardinian-born Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1919. Mussolini attempted to standardize the island’s brew of dialects and built a “fascist experiment” in modern industrial life called Carbonia (Coaltown).
The Sardinians voted for monarchy in 1946 but received a republic. The island’s revival began soon after. Designated an Autonomous Region, Sardinia recovered more control over its affairs than at any time since the Aragonese conquest. This political change was accompanied by an economic shift, from mining and exporting raw materials to construction and importing tourists. As in ancient times, the greatest disturbance was on the coasts. Up in the hills, the traditional island pursuits continued: dancing, weaving and kidnapping. “We were happy, apart from the folly of killing each other for irrelevant reasons,” wrote the Sardinian novelist Sergio Atzeni.
If maritime geography shaped Sardinia’s fate, its internal geography has shaped its society. Sardinia, Mr. Biggers writes, is “a floating green mountain with a defining valley that splices along the south by southwest.” The main highway, built with EU cash, follows this valley. Even today, half of Sardinia’s 1.6 million people live in rural areas. The rest live in coastal cities built to face outwards. Cagliari, the capital on the southern coast, could be in Sicily. Alghero in the northwest, badly bombed by the Allies in World War II, could be a university town in Spain. Olbia, with its ferry link to Genoa and an airport serving the Emerald Coast, could be anywhere on the Italian mainland.
There are more than 7,000 Nuragic sites in Sardinia. The four Moors on the Sardinian flag are migrants from the standard of the Crown of Aragon. The medieval Aragonese language survives in Alghero as Algherese Catalan. In 2006, Sard became Sardinia’s official language. But the island’s distinctiveness is everywhere under threat of erasure. A Sardinian friend tells Mr. Biggers that the ebb and flow of postwar emigration to northern Europe and the summer stampede of luxury tourism has created a “sort of third culture on the island,” neither fully urban nor fully rural, yet both Sardinian and globalized.
The jets disgorge the vacationers at Olbia, the regiments of camper vans pour off the ferry from Genoa, and the superyachts squat serenely in the bays. Yet the seasonal tourist economy leaves many Sardinians straddling a “precarious line” between summer jobs and an “off-season hustle,” especially in rural areas. The American nuclear submarine base at La Maddalena closed in 2008, but the Italian military conducts “more than 60 percent” of its training on the island, including annual war games with other NATO members. Sardinia is, as ever, a captive of the world beyond the seas.
Mr. Biggers is an enthusiastic and erudite guide. Seeking out the past in local lore and in Sardinia’s long and overlooked literary tradition, he returns the island to the center of our imaginative map of the Mediterranean. He finds a kindred spirit in Andrea Loddo, an “experimental archaeologist” and performance artist who has taught himself to smelt Bronze Age-style figurines. D.H. Lawrence would have appreciated this neo-Neolithic endeavor, with its promise of “the rebirth of the Nuragic culture.” In the flying sparks from Mr. Loddo’s hammer, Mr. Biggers detects a “cultural revival” that may yet return Sardinia to the Sardinians.
Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society