Italy certainly has no shortage of beautiful places, and if you were asked to come up with its top ten, you’d struggle to make so short a list. But you’d have no trouble deciding whether Sardinia should be on it. Your only question would be: “Should it be number one, or slightly further down?”
The second largest island in the Mediterranean (after Sicily), Sardinia is one of the most geographically gorgeous places in all of Europe, let alone in Italy. Clean and spacious, it features salt-white and amber-gold beaches lapped by crystalline water, wind-sculpted rock formations, dainty cork forests and pine woods, vineyards and olive groves, sun-blonded plains, dreamy rounded hills and low mountains. Underfoot, and all around, lies a fragrant tangled underbrush of myrtle, juniper, rosemary and lavender. Sardinia’s unspoilt landscapes and coastal waters are home to wildlife so diverse and exotic that the island has sometimes been called ‘the Galapagos of the Med’.
A delight to the senses, Sardinia is also fascinating in its culture and history. The island’s inhabitants are kind and gentle people who speak one of Italy’s strangest dialects. Towns and villages (there are no big cities) feature buildings in a delightful hodgepodge of colourful Mediterranean styles. Sardinia’s most intriguing bits of architecture, however, are its nuraghi – prehistoric stone-built conical towers that are scattered in their thousands across the island. No one knows what civilisation built them (archaeologists just call those people ‘the nuraghic civilisation’) and no one knows what the towers were for. They exist nowhere but Sardinia. Standing silent and enigmatic, in various states of decay, nuraghi can regularly be spotted in fields and woods, on headlands, plains and hills. They are the symbols of the island.