If you have summer travel planning on your mind, think about Sardinia. A full-page ad for the Italian island in the New York Times reminded us of all the wonderful things we saw and did on our trip to Sardinia before the pandemic. We reposted our stories for 2023, and one will lead you to the next.
It all began when Nick got the results of a 23andMe DNA test. It surprised him to learn that he was .02 percent Sardinian. The analysis showed that one of his 17th or 18th century ancestors came from Sardinia.
The DNA discovery opened up a new window into Nick’s family history and immediately got us thinking about a trip to the island.
A casual internet search showed a spectacularly rugged coast, green water and a mountainous interior both lush and stark. Suddenly we felt eager to visit and discover this offshore part of Italy.
We did some reading and things began to add up. It turns out that the English under Queen Anne teamed with Hapsburgs to route the Spanish from Sardinia. Admiral John Leake, leading the Mediterranean Fleet, invaded Sardinia in 1708. This opened commercial trading in the Mediterranean for Great Britain.
Ah. Nick’s father was British. DNA says he’s 34 percent English and Irish. His father’s father was a sailor and his business was importing fruits and vegetables to England from Africa. So somewhere along the way… You get the picture.
Our research suggested we start in Cagliari. That’s where the British invaded and the city is also far from the mega-yachts and super rich on the Costa Smeralda. Getting to Cagliari meant a 55-minute flight from Rome, or a ferry that took ten hours. We chose Alitalia.
A taxi brought us from the airport into the port city and we quickly discovered that everything goes uphill.
Photo by Larry Koester, via Flickr, Creative Commons
Through Booking.com we had reserved at Palazzo Dessy, a guesthouse in the Marina District. The taxi driver explained that he couldn’t go into the pedestrian zone where it was located. He dropped us on the main drag across from the harbor. So we rolled our suitcases uphill to the first narrow cross street and discovered the Palazzo Dessy there on Via Sardegna.
A family called Dessy had owned the palazzo, then new owners converted it into a guesthouse. Francesca, the housekeeper cum concierge, was waiting for us when we arrived. She led us to a small elevator and then to the second floor and a charming triplex, one-bedroom apartment, with a sitting room, a terrace off the bedroom that overlooked rooftops, and a fireplace that we wouldn’t need in the summer heat.
Comfortable, un-hotel-like and cozy, we found it a perfect start to our adventure. We also quickly learned Palazzo Dessy was perfectly situated to explore Cagliari.
When we mentioned lunch Francesca asked, “You want pizza?” Apparently American tourists are as pizza-mad in Sardinia as they are in the rest of Italy. But we said no, we wanted to eat seafood. “Ah,” said Francesca. “Su Cambido. To the left, then the right. Very good.”
And so true.
We were late. Restaurants stop serving lunch at about 2:30 and we missed the mark. “Antipasti only,” the waiter said. That was fine with us.
Barbara ordered tuna tartare, a luscious pink mound of fresh fish. And Nick ordered his traveling favorite, octopus salad and Caprese salad. Perfection.
Looking uphill as we ate at our table on the street, we could see the steps leading to the hill and still more steps to Il Castello, the castle-fortress that watches over Cagliari.
Cagliari’s been around a long time. Phoenicians from the coast of what’s now Lebanon and northern Israel founded the city in the 8th century B.C. But even before that, scholars think Greeks from Mycenae sailed to the island and traded with the Bronze Age indigenous people, the Nuragi, maybe starting in the 13th-14th centuries B.C.
Sardinia’s location off Italy’s east coast, south of Corsica and north and west of Sicily, made it a target for any power that wanted to control trade in that part of the Mediterranean.
Image by EmjeR, Creative Commons License
Carthage conquered it in the 6th century B.C. and then the Romans, who ruled for hundreds of years until the Vandals invaded. Then came Arabic Muslims in the 7th and 8th centuries. They conquered Cagliari and several other coastal towns.
Later the Pisa Republic claimed it.
Image by -kayac- at Italian Wikipedia
Then the Genoans took control until the Spanish crown of Aragon conquered the island in 1324. We mentioned the British invasion in 1708. They helped the Hapsburgs extend their empire and then the Dukes of Savoy gained power and ultimately, Sardinia became part of the united Italy in 1861.
Much of Cagliari and other cities had to be rebuilt after Allied bombings during World War II.
Bombing of Cagliari Airport by Allied Forces
Somehow through all of this the Sards kept their own language. They do speak Italian. But everything carries a touch of Sardo. Names of things, for example, go by Su, an article meaning “the.” For the feminine, it’s Sa.
So we had a lot to investigate after we ate.
We climbed the first set of steps, and they took us up to a broad street lined by houses and shops.
Photo by Stephanie Albert, Courtesy Pixabay, Creative Commons License
That street led to another narrower street, which twisted right to another which twisted left and up and up we went until we reached the Il Castello fortress wall.
Photo by Stephanie Albert, Courtesy Pixabay, Creative Commons License
We found a hodgepodge of towers and domes and narrow streets that rose ever upward and tried to explore as much as we could.
Photo by PJT56, Courtesy Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0Courtesy Pixabay, Creative Commons License
Now and then the overlooks gave us panoramic views across the city’s tiled rooftops to the blue waters of its seaport. But more than the appealing bars and shops we passed, we wanted to dig deeper into the history.
Photo by Stephanie Albert, Courtesy Pixabay, Creative Commons License
So we made our way beyond Il Castello to the Museo Archeologico Nazionale. The beautiful small museum is a must-see and seemed like a bargain at nine euros apiece to get in.
Anthropologists and archeologists continue to debate exactly when and how people first came to the island. Human remains have been found that date back 20,000 years. It’s thought that the original Sardinians came from France or Italy, maybe over a crossing from Corsica to the north. Others may have come from the Balearic Islands to the west.
But the Nuragi were the first people to leave traces of what they built and how they lived, and the museum’s exhibit gave us fascinating mini-course in the Nuragic period. It began in the Bronze Age about the 18th century B.C. and lasted until the 2nd century A.D. during Roman rule.
The Nuragi were miners, metal workers, builders, sailors, traders and artisans. They left no written records. But they did craft small bronze figures and jewelry that tell some of their story. We learned here that the Nuragi traded minerals, copper, and lead with the Greeks from Mycenae who called the island Ichnusa, or foot-shaped. The Nuragi not only mined metal, they smelted it and crafted weapons and tools that apparently were in demand by traders. The Phoenicians became the Nuragis longest and most important trading partners.
We spent a lot of time looking at small bronzes: archers, swordsmen, a mother with an infant, two men fighting, boats with deer heads at the prow.
Some larger stone statues looked like they were plucked from New World pre-Columbian sites. And one later figure, dating to the Phoenician era and traced to Egypt, looked like the original garden gnome.
What we learned at the museum helped prepare us for a trip we planned for the next day, to the most famous and complete of the 7,000 Nuraghic sites on Sardinia.
The exhibit left us ready for a cool glass of prosecco.
On our way back down through Il Castello, we tried to explore what had been the Jewish section before the 1492 expulsion and purge of Jews from Spain and other Catholic countries.
A sign said the Ghetto degli Ebrei, but that was it.
Music drifted up to us outside the walls of Il Castello, and soon we bumped into a military marching band playing in the middle of a pedestrian street. We stopped with the other passersby, a mix of tourists and locals, to enjoy the show.
Then we continued the downhill walk to Via Sardegna. Our suite’s mini-bar provided the prosecco we were thirsty for, and we enjoyed it on our terrace. Later, we discovered that the restaurant we had chosen was only three or four streets down on Via Sardegna.
Fortunately, we had booked in advance at Antica Cagliari, a popular local destination. We learned that good restaurants in Sardinia book up quickly and — like good restaurants everywhere — it’s best if you reserve.
We ordered a bottle of Vermentino, Sardinia’s best-known white wine, and a frittura mista. Barbara ordered trofie sepphi, zucchini e bottarga, a small shaped pasta with cuttlefish, zucchini and bottarga, and Nick enjoyed grilled fresh sea bass.
Sated and stimulated by the day, we sauntered back to Palazzo Dessy ready for part two of discovering Sardinia. We expected Riccardo, a private tour guide, to pick us up at the palazzo early for our visit to Su Nuraxi at Barumini.
We piled into a spiffy little Renault SUV called a Captur, a diesel with an automatic shift that we rented from the Hertz office in Cagliari. Nick put the Renault in gear and we found the road west and the beginning of a spectacular road trip around Sardinia.
First stops: Sant’Antioco and Bosa.
On a map, Sant’Antioco looks like a fly speck off Sardinia’s southwest coast. But at 42 square miles it is Italy’s fourth-largest island, after Sicily, Sardinia and Elba.
We came across it when we were planning our trip and it looked interesting, not least because the prolific Sardus Pater winery was there.
Remains show the Nuragi were the first inhabitants, then the Phoenicians arrived and put down stakes in the 8th century BC. Then came Carthaginians and then Romans, who built to stay in this mineral-rich region of Sardinia.
Roman bridge in Sant’Antioco. Photo by Carole Raddato,Courtesy Creative Commons License[/caption
The island takes its name from an escaped Roman slave who hid in the catacombs and became Saint Antiochus.
We turned south off the westbound highway and drove past Carbonia, built by Mussolini to house workers in the local coal mines that are now tapped out.
[caption id="attachment_43865" align="aligncenter" width="1490"]Elevator towers that lead to the Serbariu coal mine, Carbonia, Sardinia, Photo by Alex10, Creative Commons license
Soon the hills and weary industrial scenes dropped to the shoreline and Sant’Antioco — the town and the island — appeared across the water a short bridge away.
Fishing boats bobbed on moorings and seagulls wheeled overhead.
When we checked in at the Hotel del Corso on the tree-shaded main street, we got our first lesson on parking in Sardinia.
The young man at the desk explained that you had to park in a blue-lined space on the street or in a lot. White-lined spaces were for locals. Parking was free from one to four in the afternoon, when the shops were closed. Then you had to pay from four to midnight, and again in the morning, except on Sunday, which was free
Oh, and since this was Saturday, the whole street became a pedestrian zone from five to midnight, so good luck.
Back at the hotel, we walked past its outdoor cafe,
through the gelateria-pasticcerria, filled with tempting treats,
to the hotel elevator. Four young, pleasant staffers, happy to practice English, helped us check in and get situated in a large spotless room, and great value, that overlooked the main street. When we came down later, they were hunkered over books studying for their high school final exams.
We strolled down to the harbor front and found the I Due Fratelli restaurant run by a local fishing cooperative. We were almost too late for lunch, just at the 2:30 p.m. cut-off. But they agreed to serve us antipasti only. Just fine with us.
After lunch we went looking for the winery that had lured us to the island. Barbara had emailed to ask if we could take a tour. They didn’t respond, but we were curious and, being persuasive, thought we’d give it a visit anyway.
The Sardus Pater Enoteca sits on one side of a parking lot that faces a supermarket at the edge of town. When we pulled into the parking lot, we saw an African migrant lying under an awning that covered the shopping carts. He was caught up in a conversation on a mobile phone and ignored us. It seemed cruel to take a photo.
So we just headed into the wine shop. “No. No tours. The winery is closed,” said the man who seemed in charge. “Please look around here.” So much for our persuasive skills.
Sardus Pater is a cooperative winery that’s been around since 1949. It specializes in reds produced from Carignano, a clone of the French grape Carignan. The Sardinian grapes come from vines planted seventy to eighty years ago and, unlike their French counterparts, were never touched by disease. And they almost all come from small family vineyards.
They get high marks from enthusiasts for the intense taste of red and black fruits.
Sardus Pater also produces a Vermentino, another Sardinian specialty, with a linear palate that white wine drinkers like.
But the real kick for us came as we watched a fellow, in shorts, sleeveless shirt and a baseball cap, fill up plastic jugs of wine from machines that looked like gas pumps.
The prices even clicked off as the wine flowed. You pumped your choice of red, white, or rosé from a hose for a euro and a half per liter. Watch the video at the end of the post.
But since Sant’Antioco is an island off of an island, we decided to skip filling up our plastic water bottles and went looking for the beaches and cliffside retreats that make it a tourist draw.
We skirted low hills and entered a town, Maladroxia, that overlooked a beautiful sand beach filled with swimmers and sun bathers on a sunny Saturday.
We turned west across the island and back north, past the catacombs that hid St. Antiochus.
Olive groves and vineyards lined the roadsides, and the Mediterranean shone blue to the horizon.
Back in town, Barbara went ahead while Nick followed the rules to park the car. She sat down on a bench in the square next to a stylish man who introduced himself as Roberto.
When she told Roberto she was from New York, he asked, “Why are you here?” with a clear tone of incredulity. She explained that Nick had Sardinian ancestors way back.
“Mmm,” he responded and leaned back into the bench. And then Barbara asked, “What’s your favorite place in Sardinia?” He smiled and said, “Right here.”
When Nick ambled along, the discussion turned to Roberto’s straw Borsolino. “Where did you get it?” Nick asked
“Milano,” he said, his tone adding an unspoken, “of course. Where else?”
That evening we returned to I Due Fratelli, the cooperative fish restaurant, for dinner: pasta with bottarga, grilled swordfish, grilled sea bream, and the house bianco.
We talked about the earliest choices we make as children and whether they foretell one’s course in life. We tried to remember what might have happened to two toddlers that encouraged their mutual lust for history, travel, road trips and off-the-beaten-track locales and, years later, brought them to Sardinia.
The next morning, we headed for Bosa, up the coast and over serious mountain roads, for the real start of our road trip around the island.
We plunged into densely forested mountains that pulled us around one hairpin turn after another as we climbed and climbed. Now and then we’d break out of the trees and be treated to spectacular long views that stretched to the horizon. Then the forest would close in again.
Up high in the mountains along the west coast, the sky was moody and gray, threatening rain that never came.
We drove through ghostlike towns dotted with abandoned mines and skeletons of factories that once made this area a thriving industrial center. And the history of mining goes back to the Bronze-age Nuragi, the Carthaginians, the Romans and the Pisans who tapped the veins for silver, lead and zinc.
The real ramp-up in mining came in the late 1860s with the unification of Italy.
Then the island had more than 460 mines and produced about 10 percent of the zinc in the world. Mining continued in Sardinia through the 1990s and included gold, bauxite, industrial minerals and semi-precious gemstones. But in the 21st century, Sardinian mines and factories closed.
Abandoned mine at Montevecchio, Photo by Sextum, Courtesy Creative Commons license
Now the Sardinian tourist bureau promotes the mining region for sightseeing, combined with trekking in the forests and enjoying the beaches on the coast. UNESCO designated the area as part of the Parco Geominerario della Sargegna.
Eventually we descended and emerged and reached a hillside where we could look down on Bosa.
Bosa appeared just as the guidebooks had described it, a “pretty little river town,” its pastel houses with red tile roofs rising from the river to a hill surmounted by a Medieval castle.
We found our hotel, the Palazzo sa Pischedda, on the south side of the river opposite the main part of town. It had a Sardinian rarity, its own parking lot (dirt, with about a dozen spaces).
We checked in to our small room with a bonus, a view from the small private terrace overlooking the town, the castle, and the river,
Our need for food, late again for lunch, took us over the one-lane bridge across the Fiume (River) Temo, the only navigable river in Sardinia. We found a restaurant in the Piazza Constituzione and Nick ordered his usual octopus, shrimp and calamari salad and Barbara chose a simple carponata with carrots, celery and peppers.
Salvatore Ledda, an enthusiastic Bosa native and one of the three owners, talked proudly about his town. He was happy to be back after stays in the north of England and then the Canary Islands.
He explained that most of the architecture in this old part of the city was truly historic and hadn’t been rebuilt. Under Aragonese rule, Bosa had been northwest Sardinia’s major sea and fishing port and it pretty much stayed that way until the advent of the airplane. Bosa had no land flat enough to build an airport and so development shifted to Alghero to the north.
That saved Bosa from Allied bombing during World War II, and kept things as they always were. That reminded us that the town, the island and Italy had been very much on the wrong side of World War II.
Digesting that a bit, we started the climb to Il Castello Malaspina, named for the Genoese family that built it in the 12th and 13th centuries. It became a fortification to fend off the Aragonese, who fortified it further when they took over under Alfonso the Magnanimous in the 14th century.
None of its occupants made it any easier to get to. We followed the town streets asking directions until one of the locals grinned sympathetically and pointed to a set of stone steps that seemed to rise forever. “The stairway to heaven,” he said. “Only longer.”
We reached the top to find more climbing lay ahead. We asked each other if we were up for it, but it was too late. You can’t go halfway up a hill and turn around. We kept climbing, and eventually reached the castle wall where we paid four euros each to enter.
A 14th century church and an ancient olive tree sit in the courtyard under the ramparts.
When we mounted the ramparts, our reward stretched out before us.
We saw the roofs of Bosa and the Temo River, sinuously winding through the town and spilling into the Mediterranean three kilometers away.
We shunned the steps on the way down. It was easier on the knees to descend through sloping back streets and alleys and we came out close to where we’d started, near the bridge back to the hotel.
View across the Temo River toward Palazzo Sa Pischedda
We booked in the restaurant at the Palazzo sa Pischedda, which was operated separately from the hotel, and found it surprisingly wonderful.
Local families filled the modern restaurant and the wood-oven pizza seemed like the draw for most of the crowd.
But we ordered real food and felt instantly rewarded when the starters arrived — thin-sliced swordfish carpaccio came over fennel with just oil and lemon — exquisite!
Zuppa di cozze with mussels and clams.
Nick enjoyed ricotta ravioli with rabbit tidbits spooned over the top.
Barb had calamaratta — pasta shaped like calamari rings — with cream of pepper sauce and gamberetto (shrimp)
We drank a bottle of Sardinian Vermentino and ate dessert for a change — tiramisu for Nick.
As we enjoyed our meal, the lights dimmed and the whole staff gathered at a table to sing Happy Birthday to a highly embarrassed teenager seated at a long table with her mother and father and grown-up brothers and sisters.
The next morning, we explored Bosa’s coast.
And stopped to see the beach.
And then we headed north to Alghero. Spectacular is an overused word, but our road trip around Sardinia was shaping up that way.
Our COVID staycation in New York City has us longing for places we visited. If we could safely get on a plane we would head for the mountains and beaches of Sardinia. And as you read on, you’ll see why.
In the middle of our stay on Sardinia we left the city of Alghero and headed to Su Gologone a resort that promised mountain luxury near Oliena on the way to Sardinia’s east coast.
Our route that Tuesday took us through farm and sheep country. Neat, tightly-rolled hay bales lay strewn across cut fields.
At one point we heard this strange sound even through rolled-up car windows.
We looked to our right and saw hundreds of sheep apparently herding themselves. We didn’t see dogs, or herders, just the sheep moving in an eerie flow toward some unseen point.
The road took us higher in the mountains and the first thing that struck us as we neared Nuoro and the turn south to Oliena was the slab of sheer rock mountain that walled off the horizon to the east.
Mount Corrasi is the highest peak of the limestone massif called the Supramonte that attracts climbers and hikers to a part of Sardinia once known as a hotbed of banditry. The mountains of Sardinia provided good cover.
At Oliena we skirted Corrasi’s north end and then the Supramonte’s rock walls rose on our right.
A few miles east we found the turnoff to Su Gologone and drove into the resort.
What started as a country restaurant in 1967 has transformed into a lavish “experience hotel,” as the resort’s website puts it.
Our second-floor room
gave onto a covered terrace with set-in upholstered couches
bracketing a huge square bathtub, intended for soaking after a long mountain hike or romance.
Moments after checking in, we were seated at Su Gologone’s terrace restaurant looking out over the swimming pool onto a long vista of rolling hills and olive groves.
In the countryside and the Barbagia region of Sardinia, roasted lamb, pig and goat supplant fish on the menu.
We quickly and happily learned that at Su Gologonne they spit roast the meat and serve seasonal vegetables from their farm and garden. And when we sat down we found a thin pane carasau, a salty flatbread prepared by the hotel bakers on our table. Its name translates as “sheet music bread.”
Nick ordered lamb ribs, Barbara a pasta with tomatoes and eggplant and a zucchini salad with lemon.
The mountains that loomed west of us were part of the Gennargentu National Park.
Just to cover all the bases, Sardinia put the Bay of Orosei to the east into the same park, so whether you hike, bike, climb, swim, dive, go spelunking in caves or practically any recreation in between, you can find it all within a relatively few miles.
But for hikers and trekkers, the Supramonte and the Gennargentu mountains are a wealth of opportunity. Thirty-three trails cover terrain that will take you from canyons to peaks with spellbinding views.
That’s why most of our fellow guests at Su Gologone, whom we had started to meet at the swimming pool, had booked for several days, and barely managed to conceal their pity when we told them we were staying just one night.
But we’d lucked out. That night’s special meal, offered only on Tuesdays, starred Sardinia’s inland specialties of roast suckling pig and roast lamb. Dark had fallen when we followed a candlelit path to the courtyard where we and our fellow diners would enjoy this feast.
Outside Matteo, in a slim black suit, welcomed the guests with almond sweets and Ororosa, a sparkling rose from the local winery Cantina Oliena.
The roasting chef and servers watched from the sidelines, behind them a fire pit where the roasted pig and lamb were resting.
A table in the middle of the courtyard groaned with a dizzying array of locally-sourced starters: ham and sausage from Oliena, bacon with cardoons, coppa with artichokes, Oliena cheeses with vegetable and fruit jams and sauces, pan-fried fresh tomatoes and artichokes, empanadas, casadinas (ricotta and pecorino tarts) with artichokes. As we loaded our plates the multi-lingual Matteo gave us table assignments, grouped according to language.
We sat with a young New York couple, Jordan and Daniel, and an English couple, Dean and Liz. Jordan sells real estate and Daniel is the creative director at a hot ad agency; like us, they live in the Village. Liz, a fashion photographer, and Dean, an actor, were there to celebrate her fortieth birthday.
And they were New Yorkers-to-be for a short while. Dean was featured actor in “The Ferryman,” an IRA-era Irish play that’s conquered London’s West End and went on to win the 2019 Tony Award for Best Play.
Together we had a lot to talk about. It was the first time Donald Trump’s name had come up in conversation since we’d been in Sardinia. And everyone at the table worried about the direction of the United States, its policy of separating immigrant children from families at the border, Trump’s bromance with Putin, and the seething anger and resentment of Trump’s supporters.
And Dean, it turned out, sandwiched a career in dog training in among his acting gigs. Nick asked him if dogs could tell time. “Not really,” he said. “Unless you count the time since their last meal. They know when they’re hungry.” That led to a talk about animal intelligence, especially that of octopi. Dean said they were too smart to eat, so he’d stopped. We’re still thinking about that.
Meanwhile, the food (and wine) kept coming, so much that when a server offered raviolis in tomato sauce on top of the array of starters some of us shook her off to save room for the roast meats and the salads, fresh fruits and desserts to follow.
We all stumbled off to our rooms after a couple of hours and slept soundly. Tomorrow, while the others stayed on, we headed for the coast.
We left Su Gologone reluctantly, the tastes and conversations of our meal the night before still on our minds.
But every day revealed something new and we wanted to explore more of Sardinia’s mountains and beaches.
And Orgosolo called to us. The remote town high in Sardinia’s mountains south of Oliena is known for its lawless past. This Sardinian version of Deadwood in the American Wild West, a “legendary bandit village” according to the guidebooks, seemed worth a detour before our drive to the coast. It wasn’t far, about 25 km, but the distance didn’t tell the story.
We followed the signs onto a provincial road and soon had it all to ourselves. Hairpin turns took us up and down hillsides as we drove without another car in sight.
Mudslides had dumped piles of dirt on the road and it dried where it fell with no traffic to disturb or disperse it.
Finally we saw, high in the distance, what had to be Orgosolo, and it winked in and out as the switchbacks led us ever higher. When another car appeared far behind us, I envisioned a village bandit returned from the past to take advantage of tourists on the deserted road.
Orgosolo Photo by Rafael Brix
When we finished the climb we’d reached a mountaintop aerie, with stunning views that went on for miles. But Orgosolo‘s present proved less romantic than its past.
Legend has it that bandit forebears once nailed death notices to the church door targeting their next victims, and its high crime rate earned the nickname “village of the murderers.” Its remote and hard-to-reach location, deep in Sardinia’s mountains, meant pursuers and the law invaded at their peril.
Now the tourist buses we saw in the square spill out visitors to photograph the political murals that adorn town walls
‘
and shop at tired-looking souvenir stands.
Cashing in on the tourist trade seemed like the only banditry going on in this mountain hide-away and that wasn’t so romantic. But more power to them.
Our route east took us back through Oliena and past Su Cologone toward Dorgali. The vivid road signs in Italian that we breezed past without trying to read snapped into focus when we approached a barricaded bridge and had to turn around.
The GPS was spotty and old fashioned Map Reading 101 got us to Dorgali. Just beyond it, a turnoff took us through a tunnel and then descended to the seaside.
We had chosen Cala Gonone because it seemed like a low-key antidote to the glittery Costa Smeralda. We’d read that the sandy beaches on the Golfo di Orosei are among Sardinia’s finest, Through Booking.com, we reserved at Hotel La Favorita, which Barbara kept saying was above a pizza place and we tamped our expectations down.
Signs along the road advertised La Favorita, too. One of them called it “Motorbike Hotel.” That didn’t sound promising, but then a light went on. We’d seen some bike riders and a lot of motorcycle riders on our drive around Sardinia, and Nick remembered from his days driving a Kawasaki in the mountains of north Georgia just how much fun curvy mountain roads could be. Sardinia, if you could keep your eyes from straying to the scenery from the road, was a motorcycle rider’s paradise.
When we wound our way out of the mountains down the hill to the shore at Cala Gonone,
We found La Favorita at the heart of the town’s hotel and restaurant row on a one-way corniche along the water, a 10-minute walk from one end to the other.
Our sparkling clean third-floor room overlooking the Golfo di Orosei dispelled any doubts we had. It wasn’t luxurious, no hair dryer for example, but it was a perfect, simple beach hotel room. Yet it did have a basket of toiletries, some from the Bigelow Pharmacy, our local in New York.
We took the photo below later that evening.
Below the rooms, the restaurant-pizzeria occupied a spacious open terrace with a bar in one corner, and the menu looked delicious. A couple of tables at street level were good for people watching over drinks. But we didn’t see any signs of motorbikes. The restaurant also had tables across the street at the water’s edge.
We ate a late lunch there — ceviche for Nick and tuna tartare for Barbara.
The beach, or the Luongamare Palmasera beckoned.
We put on our swimsuits and joined others who had the same idea.
Swimmers and sunbathers crowded the beach, even on a Wednesday. The pebbly and rocky shore meant that we need our jelly shoes to navigate our way to the water.
They weren’t much good for swimming. Even so, the clear cool Golfo di Orosei water gave us a refreshing jolt and we enjoyed sitting out on the beach reading our books.
Walking the corniche afterward we joined an eclectic group, couples old and young, boys on skateboards, girls laughing with their friends, families with children. No people of color though, not even the African refugees we’d seen in other parts of Sardinia.
Cala Gonone Harbour, Photo by Trolvag, Creative Commons license
Beyond the last beach as we walked north, two long concrete piers jutted out and hooked toward each other to protect the town port and marina.
Cala Gonone is a great jumping off point to explore the bays, small beaches, the Grotto di Blu Marino and other caves along the the Golfo di Orsei.
Cave near Cala Gonone, Photo by fradellafra, Courtesy Pixabay, Creative Commons license
Near the pier, expedition companies set up booths and offered party boat trips to the remote beaches.
You could also rent one of the rubber Zodiacs we’d seen moored offshore. They cost between 80 and 280 euros per day, plus fuel, and they carried eight to ten people. Most didn’t have a bimini top and it you went with others, you’d have to stay with the group all day. We decided to do a different kind of exploring the next day.
In the meantime, we pulled up a couple of bar stools at the edge of the beach.
and watched a full moon rise over the Tyrrhenian Sea.
We had made a late dinner reservation at La Favorita. While the hardworking owners, Pierre Luigi and Miriam, bill it as a “pizzeria,” it is in fact an excellent restaurant.
We began with pasta con le sarde. How could we not.
Nick ordered grilled tuna, but Barbara hit the jackpot with sea bass baked in salt. It arrived table side in a white mound that Sandro, our waiter, cracked open with the back of a spoon.
Then he filleted it in an expert display that was brighter than the multiple silver bracelets he wore on both wrists and it landed on the plate mouthwateringly moist and fresh. We helped the fish down with one of Sardinia’s fine Vermentinos, and it was a meal to remember.
The eastern sun hit our eyelids early the next morning, and then came the sound of the surf through the windows we’d left open.
We pulled the curtains and dawdled so we barely caught breakfast before the typical spread of meats, cheeses, yoghurts, breads and fruit was cleared away.
We decided to spend the day exploring Sardinia’s archeology again, and after lunch, the rare sand beaches. So we geared up with a rented umbrella, snorkles and fins and set off to find a tomba di gigante.
Sardinia’s unique archeology includes ancient mass grave sites that, because of their huge and elaborate head markers of assembled and marked stones, have been called tombs of giants. Like the towers we’d seen at Barumini, they were built by the Bronze Age Nuragi. One was near Dorgali.
The GPS on Barbara’s phone took over, and we followed its directions along dirt roads to a desolate looking farm field where the voice said, “You have reached your destination.”
A leaping dog on a chair warned us away from a nearby farm house, but we looked in the field.
Over a little rise and downhill from a bush with pink flowers we saw what we thought was the “tomb.”
and we spent a good bit of time investigating Nick’s ancestors.
We had made this trip to Sardinia, partially because a DNA analysis by 23 and Me told Nick he was 0.2 percent Sardinian. On our early stops to Barumini and Cagliari, we learned the Bronze-Age Nuragi were builders and seemed very precise and detail-oriented. That fit our methodical Nick perfectly.
This mound had what might have been a big headstone, but if this was an archeological treasure it was sadly neglected. Rusted car doors formed barriers to keep looters or maybe the overly curious away, but it looked like a junk site.
It turned out, we later discovered, the GPS misled us to a pile of junk. We missed the tomb of the giants completely.
We found the photo of the real thing on Wikipedia.
Tomb of the giants, Dorgali photo by SehLax, Creative Commons LIcense
We drove through the hills to Dorgali, a jumping-off point for trekkers, hikers and bikers and people who want to combine mountain and beach vacations. We found a small restaurant called Sardegna Finger Food & Wine. It had set up tables in a square across from its entrance.
And we happily took seats under the shade of an old tree.
It said its speciality was Genovese pesto, good for Barbara, and Nick stuck with his seafood salad. Both, just right.
After lunch, we set off for the beach. Our little tourist map showed Cala Cartoe just around a hill north of Cala Gonone. A piece of cake! We turned at the sign and anticipated feeling sand between our toes.
Minutes later we were climbing a mountain, not a hill, and I was wrenching the steering wheel from one extreme to the other on the sharpest hairpins we’d seen yet.
Golfo di Orosei_Mountains Coast of Ispuligi, Photo by Gianni Carredu, Creative Commons License
Nothing changed on the way down. After twenty minutes we parked next to other cars along the road, shouldered our rented gear and walked the final distance.
The beach opened up before us, a glorious sand crescent bracketed by steep cliffs at both ends and bright umbrellas and beach towels scattered in between.
It wasn’t Coney Island, or Jones Beach, in the summer, but popular enough that we passed a food truck and a stand renting chairs and umbrellas. A manned lifeguard stand rose in the middle of the beach.
Nearby we bound an open spot to stick our umbrella in the sand and spread out our towels.
After a few minutes Nick pulled on his rented mask and snorkel and took to the water. It was clear in the wide bay, but a clear view of rocks and sand and no fish, no color. And soon he was on the sandy beach to read what Commissario Brunetti was up to over in Venice on the Adriatic. We lazed the rest of the afternoon away.
Back in Cala Gonone — detouring through Dorgali on a longer, straighter, flatter road — we toasted the day with an evening prosecco.
This time for dinner Nick ordered the salt-baked sea bass and Barbara had hers grilled and again accompanied by a bottle of Sardinian Vermentino. We agreed that La Favorita had outperformed our expectations at every level, and we prepared to head south in the morning for our last two days in Sardinia.
We rated Cala Gonone and La Favorita as one of our five-star stops in Sardinia and we hated to leave. But we had so much more to see. Our love of a good road trip lured us from the sea to the scenic road south to see more of spectacular Sardinia as we headed to Nora and Pula.
SS125 Photo by Gianni Careddu, Courtesy Creative Commons license
The SS125 runs through the Monti del Gennargentu, the high country covering much of east-central Sardinia. Southbound, it gave us views to the right of sheer rock mountainsides, the Gennargentu National Park, and La Marmora, the island’s highest peak at 1,834 meters.
Every turn offered a new vista and we kept our eyes peeled for the next good place to pull over and take photos. It was almost a relief when we emerged from the mountains near Santa Maria Navarrese, where the road flattened and straightened out and gave us better time and few distractions.
We paralleled the island’s southeast coast past Villaputzu, then turned inland toward Cagliari. From there we’d head south again toward Santa Margherita di Pula and the hotel where we’d spend the last days of our Sardinian holiday.
The GPS, which we were trying to trust again after its bum steer to the giant’s tomb outside Dorgali led us to a pile of rocks, directed us toward Quartu Sant’Elena and Cagliari’s beachfront.
We’d missed this part of Cagliari on our first days in the city. Actually, Quartu Sant’Elena is a separate but adjacent city, Sardinia’s third largest, with some 77,000 people and quite a few flamingos.
Flamingo Quartu Sant Elena Sardinia- Photo by ajcheyho,Courtesy PIxabay
We followed the long crescent of its beach, Spiaggia del Poetto, as we drove, with wide salt flats on the land side to our right.
Busy traffic on a Friday afternoon promised a crowded weekend to come. At a roundabout, we turned into the La Marinella restaurant. This sprawling place sat just behind the beach, and we ate a lunch of pasta with clams and bottarga as we admired the invitingly wide stretch of soft sand in front of us.
La Marinella Restaurant, Quartu Sant’Elena, Cagliari, Sardinia
On the way to Cagliari proper, we detoured to take in a city park with saline wetlands that attracted flamingos by the dozens.
Flamingos in the Molentargius Pond, Cagliari, Photo by Stefano Marrocu, Courtesy Creative Commons license.
Driving on, we soon entered Cagliari’s familiar Marina District with its pastel houses including the Palazzo Dessy, our first lodging when we reached Sardinia just eight days earlier, rising to our right.
Once we turned south, we hit a series of roundabouts as we passed through small towns near the western shore of the Golfo di Cagliari. Although the rules give cars in the roundabout the right of way, we rarely had to stop. The roundabout is one of the great European inventions. Why we use stoplights almost exclusively in the United States is a traffic-stopping mystery.
We passed Pula and a little below it, just past a Tamoil station, turned left where a small sign told us we’d reached the Costa dei Fiori.
We’d booked this hotel through Booking.com because it was near Nora, Pula and the beach and looked tranquil. We thought we’d need that for our last two island days, after covering two-thirds of Sardinia in just over a week. And indeed, when the dusty dirt road reached the property, beyond a building that looked a little like a La Quinta Inn, we found a manicured compound with green grass and lush palm trees. A large swimming pool with a few lounging sunbathers took center stage.
Roberto, the agreeable manager at the reception desk, checked us in. He handed us our room key and then surprised us by immediately telling us we needed to make dinner choices. He walked us around to a corner of the desk, where two menus stood on display. One was the a la carte menu. The second listed the chef’s daily selections. We were eager to get to our room and maybe take a swim, so we told him we’d decide later. He warned us that there were only so many of the daily offerings still unspoken for.
Then, leaving our dinner to the fates, he led us past the swimming pool to our spacious upstairs terrace suite in a wing of the main building, offering rudimentary Italian lessons as we walked. When we got there, our luggage already had arrived.
We put on swimsuits, grabbed towels and our books, and followed a path through the tropical grounds past buildings with more guest rooms to a second swimming pool surrounded by umbrellas and lounge chairs.
This infinity pool hung on the edge of the sea and seemed almost to be a part of it. We kicked off our flip-flops and swam and floated in its buoyant salt water until the sun beckoned us to dry off and read at a sandy overlook a few steps away.
With all this, we forgot that the clock was ticking on our dinner choices. By the time we opted for the daily menu, the offerings had dwindled to a few.
The a la carte menu looked badly overpriced based on what we’d seen elsewhere, so we made do with what the chef had left from that night’s specials: two courses apiece. Accompanied with one of Sardinia’s fine Vermentinos, they were entirely satisfactory.
As we ate, an Argentinian couple at a nearby table introduced themselves. The woman told us she had visited New York the year before, and had rented an Airbnb apartment in Queens. Something about the owner seemed “a little strange,” she said. She couldn’t put her finger on just why until, when she was about to leave, she found two dead bats squirreled away in a corner of the refrigerator. She and her husband planned to visit New York again, but said they’d stay somewhere else.
The next morning we settled at an outdoor table for breakfast.
We browsed the lavish spread of sliced meats and cheeses, hard-boiled and scrambled eggs, bacon and sausages, juices, fruit, yoghurt and breads set up inside.
A fit couple wearing high-end running and cycling gear sat at the closest table, and we started to talk. John and Mary hailed from Seattle. They had come to Sardinia from Nice, where they celebrated his 60th birthday by competing in an ironman triathlon. Vacations come in all varieties!
Our morning marathon turned out to be finding a parking spot at Nora, an ancient site on the coast halfway to Pula. The parking lined the marsh where, again, we spotted a flamingo or two.
Locals flocking to the beach adjoining Nora and its attractions on a summer Saturday had slammed the parking areas.
Nora lies largely underwater now, lost to seaside erosion. But enough is left that we could see what the site once meant to the masters of the Mediterranean sea lanes.
The Phoenicians settled here in the 7th century B.C. Carthaginian conquerers built the town into a commercial and religious center and then the Romans arrived in 238 A.D.
While you can arrange for private tours from guides like Riccardo Mingola, who took us to Barumini when we were in Cagliari, you can also sign up for the local tour. You need a guide to walk around the site and it’s worth it. Nora became one of the standouts of our trip to Sardinia.
Our excellent guide, Illira Lori, led a mixed group who heard her explain Nora’s history, first in Italian and then English.
She told us that excavation began in 1952, when archeologists discovered a Roman amphitheater that is still in use today. Workers were setting up for a concert when we were there.
Small details fascinated us, like the way the Romans laid the brick wall behind the amphitheater.
Over the years, teams from the University of Genoa and the University of Cagliari unearthed the city and learned how people in the stratified Roman society lived.
The rich lived uphill, in homes with columns away from the shoreline close to what is now the bay side. The mosaics in the homes of the wealthy featured finer stones and more intricate patterns. The one below seems to feature a nymph.
But in the common areas, like the forum, the mosaic stones are larger and the patterns less intricate.
Archeologists unearthed enough of the communal bath to determine that there was a series of cold and hot baths ranging from 44 degrees centigrade, or 110 degrees farenheit, to very cold. The limestone roof had collapsed at some point, creating a weird canopy.
Closer to the shoreline, we saw what appeared to be the communal cooking area. With our guide Illira’s help, we could make out what was a water jug snugged in the ground.
A few feet away, she pointed out a jug that she said was the top of a millstone.
Through the site, we saw chunks of white marble. At one time, Illira told us, the major buildings in the city, like the amphitheater, were sheathed in marble. But over the centuries locals from the surrounding area took what they could cart away to use or sell.
But before the locals, Vandals sacked Nora in the 5th century A.D. and sent the city into a decline. Today the archeologists hold sway, and continue working on the site to gain new insights.
Leaving the tumbled stone and marble remnants, we followed a curved path to the rocky promontory where 18th century Spanish conquerers erected a squat tower.
Now used as a lighthouse, it was one of dozens where the coastal guardians lit fires to warn others of dangerous weather or attacking forces.
We punctuated this ancient history lesson with one of the wild goose chases that enrich our holidays with rueful laughs. We had seen online an agroturismo — an Italian invention to lure tourists to the countryside for local food and sometimes rooms — outside Pula that looked like a good spot for lunch.
Sparse and unclear signs directed us in circles. On one rutted dirt road we saw a sign to a local tomba di gigante, which we might have visited if we’d realized we didn’t really see a tomb at Dorgali.
When we did find the agroturismo, it looked abandoned, farm buildings without a car in sight. Later, we received a text from the owner saying they served lunch on Sunday, not Saturday.
Pula proved attractive, though. We strolled the streets radiating out from the old town’s central square and then returned to the hotel and the salt water infinity pool, and the sea view to relax the afternoon away.
We learned that if you want to go to a restaurant in a small town in Sardinia, you had better make a reservation in advance. We had booked the night before at Zia (Aunty) Leunora after we read that locals liked it a lot.
We also ordered a taxi to take us into Pula so that we could enjoy the Sardinian wine without worrying. We’d never have found Zia Leunora on our own because it was buried deep in Pula’s old town.
On yet another balmy night, we took a seat outside where we could see patrons coming and going. Most were locals — couples on a date, families eating together. A Dutch couple sat across from us and we started talking.
Like many Europeans, they were mystified about why Americans elected Donald Trump. They approached the topic gingerly at first while they figured out where we stood, then unloaded. They particularly disliked the Dutch-American Tea Party Republican Pete Hoekstra, Trump’s ambassador to the Netherlands, who was caught out by the Dutch press denying he’d said things he was recorded saying. On the plus side they, like us, loved Sardinia, and planned to return.
Our Sardinian restaurant education had included learning to order single courses split between the two of us. This night we did three: sweet and sour sardines,
and tagliatelle with bottarga, zucchini, clams and cherry tomatoes, and the main course – sea bass baked in foil with clams, mussels and shrimp.
And of course the house Vermentino, which made us glad to see our taxi driver waiting when we were ready to head back to the hotel.
Sunday morning came all too soon. We packed the Renault, which had served us so well, and took off for the Cagliari airport and our flight to Rome for a two-day stay. And then a near-disaster. We pulled into a parking space in the Hertz section and unloaded the car. Nick tossed the electronic key onto the dashboard, closed the door and went to hand the attendant the car papers,
Seconds later, Barbara heard a “thunk!” as the lights flashed and the car locked itself. A moment of panic until we confirmed that we’d unloaded everything, and then a sigh of sweet relief.
But wait! The horrified attendants yanked unsuccessfully at the door handle until we thought it would come off. One of them said, “You’ll have to wait until someone comes from Cagliari with a key.”
“Why?” Nick asked. “The tank’s full, there are no issues with the car, and you can email me the final paperwork. We have a plane to catch.”
Over his protests, we grabbed our bags. As we pulled them toward the terminal and our flight to Rome, we wondered what if the same thing had happened on some remote mountain road with no cell phone service, the high mountain, bandit town of Orgosolo, for example, several hours drive from Cagliari. We’d remember Sardinia for a long time. The beautiful island and its welcoming people had given us an adventure and an education, but we’d been pretty lucky, too.
I caught COVID, or I should say, COVID caught me. I thought my two vaccinations and four boosters would protect me and I got careless. The pandemic’s been going on for almost three years now, and I had COVID fatigue. So does everybody else. Signs of it are everywhere here in New York, on our crowded sidewalks and in our crowded stores and in our restaurants and theaters and sports arenas. Hardly anybody’s wearing masks now. People are going about their normal lives and having normal conversations. The COVID virus, whatever variant it’s cooking up to infect us with this winter, is having a fine laugh.
My story is a cautionary tale. I thought I had dodged the virus. So I’m here to urge you: Don’t get careless!
Barbara and I got all our vaccines and wore masks. Everybody else did early on, at least here in New York. Out for a walk, going into a store, riding the subway, even riding bikes, nobody went maskless. If you went to the theater, you had to show your vaccination ID to get in the door and mask up to watch the show. Then a few people started going without, then half, and eventually mask wearers were a small minority even in the subway. Finally the authorities dropped mask-wearing mandates.
Even when others stopped wearing masks, Barbara and I tried to take ours with us everywhere we went. I wore mine on my wrists or stuffed one into a pocket, but I felt better having a mask even if I didn’t use it. She was the more faithful mask wearer. But sometimes she forgot too. To ward off forgetfulness, she scribbled “Remember Mask!” on a piece of paper and taped it near our outside doors. Even then, I’d sometimes get halfway down the block before remembering that I’d forgot, and have to turn around.
I don’t know how or exactly when I was exposed. Maybe at the gym. Maybe the farmers market, outdoors but still close-packed, or buying wine at our small local store, or going maskless when I got a haircut. Maybe I caught it from one of the neighbors in our building who caught it despite having been fully vaccinated.
Suddenly, I felt tired. My body didn’t want to do much although I hadn’t done much all day. That Monday night, I tossed and turned and coughed and hacked and the next morning I knew. When I tested, the second pink line popped up right away.
My doctor said it would likely last 10 days and that I should sleep apart from Barbara in a separate room. We made up the couch in my office and there I was a pariah in my own home.
Barbara was a vigilant caregiver and kept herself safe, too. She found instructions on the CDC website and followed them to the letter. First thing, she put a mask and blue nitrile gloves in front of me and said, “Put those on!” Then she plopped down a dispenser of hand sanitizer. From then on her mantra was, “Don’t touch anything.” When I did touch something like the TV remotes and door knobs, she sprayed them with Lysol or used a Lysol wipe before she picked them up. She pointed out that she had taken her guidance from the CDC. And she apologized repeatedly and said, “I’m really sorry. But this COVID brings out my worst phobias.”
Of course, we had another crisis going on to complicate things. Our dishwasher sprang a leak, and the repair man couldn’t come for two weeks. So we couldn’t super sanitize dishes. Barbara washed by hand and bought disposable, compostable plates made out of palm leaves for me to use. It was an uncomfortable, stressful time for both of us. I couldn’t make our morning guacamole, or mix my own Manhattans. Barbara had to work that much harder because COVID stole my household duties.
My case wasn’t bad. It lasted ten days from a cough and fever and a positive self-test on a Tuesday morning to diminishing and then no symptoms and a negative test the following Wednesday. Even mild COVID is at least a week-long affair and you don’t know what the consequences are.
One piece of good news for New Yorkers. My negative result came from an antigen test at one of many sidewalk testing sites. It’s the same kind of test you do at home, that looks at the antibodies that trigger an immune response. The sidewalk sites also do the slower-to-analyze PCR test, and that test came back positive. But that test finds COVID in your DNA and will show you positive even when you’re no longer infectious. Nevertheless, that result was reported to the New York City Health Department and I got a follow-up call from a nurse to see if I needed any advice or additional care. It’s good to know the city’s on the case.
That’s especially true now, with winter bearing down. Signs of the COVID fatigue I felt are everywhere. Masking is an afterthought. Nobody asks to see vaccination IDs anymore, and hardly anyone wears masks. But as we retreat indoors, we need to prioritize our safety over our convenience.
Only about half of Americans eligible for booster shots have gotten them. And only 10 percent have gotten the newest bivalent booster. With waning immunity and new subvariants looking for chinks in our armor, we’re likely to see an uptick in cases and hospitalizations this winter.
As Dr. Fauci put it, “You may be done with COVID, but COVID is not done with the United States, nor is it done with the world.” So mask up. And get your shots.
I watched TV intently as Hurricane Ian slammed into the southwest Florida coast and Fort Myers Beach, the small island town where I grew up. When I first brought my wife Barbara there, before we were married, we drove across a bridge from the south and she drew in her breath. “It’s beautiful. You grew up in paradise,” she said.
Fort Myers Beach before Ian
Now paradise seems lost. Ian’s eye passed a just a few miles north, targeting the beach with its heaviest onshore winds and fiercest seas.
A Coast Guard spokesperson said there are no landmarks left on Fort Myers Beach.
Ian’s winds and waves swept away houses, flooded condos and hotels, tore palm trees apart, ripped boats from their moorings and dumped them like matchsticks blocks away, left the white sands of island’s beaches littered with debris and piled in dunes across the one main road.
Houses and stores became rubble on Fort Myers Beach, Florida
At first, as the hurricane was bearing down, I thought back to 1960 and Hurricane Donna, the storm that raked the Beach that year. Other people I grew up with, I knew through email and Facebook, were thinking the same thing.
Hurricane Ian zeroed in on Fort Myers Beach. CNN reporters followed.
I was fourteen that September 10 when Donna came straight up Florida’s west coast toward Ft. Myers Beach. Forecasts then were a lot more primitive but we still had advance warning. My dad was working in North Carolina but Mom and I had enough time to tape the windows in our house built on stilts near the bay. We drove into Ft. Myers, farther from the coast, to ride it out with friends there.
Kay and Roland Hyatt lived just a block from the wide Caloosahatchee River that flowed from Lake Okeechobee past Fort Myers to the coast. A fancier riverfront house across the street had huge plate glass windows. I don’t remember who lived there, but during a break in the storm as Donna’s eye passed over us I went across to the big house. When the wind started to blow again a few teenagers, including me, stood with our hands against the plate glass to try to hold off the wind pounding it. The glass was taped and we felt the pressure, but this wasn’t very smart. Yet the idea that we fought against Hurricane Donna exhilarated us.
That night Donna veered inland and headed across Florida. By eight the next morning she was in the Atlantic Ocean east of St. Augustine. Once warnings against travel to the beach were lifted, Mom and I went home to see what was left.
We crossed the swing bridge onto Fort Myers Beach. The road turned left at the long fishing pier jutting out into the Gulf of Mexico.
The Fort Myers Beach fishing pier before Hurricane Ian. Photo by Timothy Vail. Creative Commons License.
The fishing pier was a fixture at the beach for as long as anyone alive remembers. It survived Hurricane Charley in 2004, too. Fast forward to 2022. Ian ripped the pier to a skeleton of pilings.
Back in 1960 Mom and I drove across and around five-foot-high sand dunes that covered the island-long road, Estero Boulevard, to reach our neighborhood. Our house still stood, high on its stilts. A sofa and other debris had collected on the slats on the beach side, carried from ground-level houses closer to the beach when the storm surge water crashed through their doors and windows and sloshed across the island. We climbed the stairs and went inside and found, happily, that we still had a roof.
But Ian did far more damage than Donna and Charley.
Sixty-two years of development and growth, investment and increasing density, gave a hungry storm more prey. The same was true on neighboring islands like Sanibel, Captiva, and Pine Island north of Ft. Myers Beach. Aerial photos that would have showed few beachfront houses and many undeveloped lots in 1960 in 2022 showed houses, condos, hotels and shops all cheek by jowl. There were more canals now, and more boats. Hurricane Ian must have licked its destructive chops as it bore down.
Officials say 90 percent of Fort Myers Beach, Florida is destroyed.
Every person in my childhood friend network feels stunned. Lee Melsek quoted our friends Chris and Tucker Patton as saying their home and 32-foot boat are gone. It makes me cry to think about them and all the others, whom I don’t know but who have lost so much.
Parts of the causeway to Sanibel and Captiva islands were torn away and left the islands cut off. You can see it buckled in the distance in this photo.
Damaged boats and causeway in the distance.
On Sanibel, where causeway damage has blocked traffic to and from the island and neighboring Captiva, #SanibelStrong is trending and people vow to rebuild. We hope the same for the beach and the other barrier islands. But a time of challenge lies ahead for the place that Barbara saw as beautiful all those years ago. Ian’s been described as a “once-in-500-years” storm. A warming climate seems to make them happen almost every weekend now. I want the beaches where I grew up to restore themselves and live again, but do it right. Recognize the dangers that lie ahead and don’t take shortcuts to restoring paradise.
Driving west on Tuesday, we listened to the news. Reports from Yellowstone were grim. The park’s flood-damaged roads wouldn’t be open for some time. But the high plains eased our disappointment. As we crossed them, we saw skies that seemed wider than we knew as Easterners, and sprawling landscapes that put horizons almost out of reach.
Heading west on I-94 in North Dakota. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com. A high prairie vista. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
Near Medora, the landscapes closed again to upthrust rocky hills that in another age closed off easy passage. The Lakota Indians called this territory mako sica, meaning bad land or bad earth.
The Badlands began to form 65 million years ago.
French fur trappers used a phrase meaning they were bad lands to cross. Even in the bright travel day we had that Tuesday, the clustered hills looked forbidding and impassable.
Clustered hills of the North Dakota Badlands. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
We chose Medora because it was an entry point for the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the Badlands. Driving into town, we saw that the whole place was a de facto monument to the boisterous twenty-sixth president.
On the main street we found ourselves behind a line of horse riders in western gear.
Teddy Roosevelt had come to the western Dakotas to hunt buffalo in the early 1880s, when he was in his twenties. He fell in love with the rough, yet beautiful, terrain and then bought cattle ranches, one near Medora. In the Badlands and high prairie he gained an appreciation of America’s grand landscapes and came to believe they should be shared with all Americans.
Inspired by the beauty of the West, Roosevelt helped create the National Park Service. Photo courtesy NPS.
Medora is the gateway to the Badlands but it is like a western toy town supported by the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation. Harold Shafer, a businessman, fell in love with the Badlands and the Teddy Roosevelt history and wanted to preserve and promote it. He began by renovating the Rough Riders Hotel in 1962. Three years later, he’d built an outdoor theater to stage “Teddy Roosevelt Rides Again: A Medora Musical.” It has played every summer since, and brings in the tourists.
Somewhere else the Rough Riders might be the name of an S&M establishment, but not Medora. We entered to find the hotel and its spiffy lobby had been recently updated.
Lobby of the Rough Riders Hotel, owned and run by the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
The young woman who checked us in might have stepped out of a Gaugin painting. Barbara asked where she was from and told us she was from Tonga via Hawaii, where she was studying hotel management. Her school had an arrangement for interns with the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation. While we talked, a manager came out of the office and it turned out that he was from Ukraine. He’d married a mid-westerner, they had children and, he said, “Now I’m from here.”
So right off the bat, this was interesting. Then, as if we needed reminding about where we were, a portrait of Teddy greeted us as we headed to the elevators.
Teddy Roosevelt portrait at the Rough Riders Hotel. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
We hurriedly stashed our things and went back out for a scenic drive in the park. On the way we passed the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame and a lot of western clothing stores. At the park entrance, we paid $20 for an annual national parks senior pass that was a bargain even if we only used it once. Right away, the drive through Theodore Roosevelt National Park amazed us with its beauty.
Wildflowers bring color to the ancient rock. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
It was easy to see TR’s inspiration for setting aside 230 million acres of land for the American public during his presidency. The spectacular Badlands landscape thrust up out of the earth twisting into weird shapes and layers and layers of buttes and spirals. Deposits of rock here began 75 million years ago and the erosion that created the unusual formations began 500,000 years ago. Now the park has 244,000 acres of rocky hills and grassy prairie.
Normally the scenic drive is 36 miles long, but erosion had closed the road beyond mile 24. So we turned around and had a 48-mile drive, and the scenery was just as spectacular the second time. We stopped whenever we could to take closer looks at the rock formations in front of us and scan the vista that stretched on and on. Our New York license plates caught the attention of fellow easterners. At one spot, a man from Vermont introduced himself. He said, “My wife likes to garden in the summer and I like to travel.” He was alone in his camper van and eager to have a conversation. We met a couple from Rhode Island next. They explained that they’d been touring the west for a couple of months and like us they were astounded by the beauty of the Badlands. At just a week into our road trip, we felt like were taking the accelerated tour.
We spotted bison and pulled into a parking area near where they walked around.
The bison meandered through the grass between the hills and they seemed indifferent to people like us who wanted to capture them in photos or on video.
As we drove and stopped and looked, it was easy to imagine pioneers and fur trappers struggling to cross. Now it’s possible to hike on trails here and camp in designated areas beneath the sparse trees. We looked for them, but didn’t see any wild horses, elk, mule deer, or prairie dogs in the park.
Later that evening as we strolled into the town a rainbow arced over the small houses and rabbits played in the street.
[caption id="attachment_48275" align="aligncenter" width="2048"] A rainbow gave the bunnies a golden glow. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
The rabbits share tiny Medora — 2020 population 121 — with its human population.
We left the rabbits and headed for the Little Missouri Saloon, named for the river that meanders northward here before it flows into the Missouri River.
At the saloon, Nick decided to continue some important research. He was drinking Manhattans on this trip, and asking bartenders along the way what bourbon they favored. Most of them said Maker’s Mark, which was odd because it has no rye. He likes Basil Hayden’s, which mixes 27 percent rye into its 63 percent corn and 10 percent malted barley mash. But being a flexible New Yorker he switched to a local product, Great Jones bourbon, which also has a decent rye content.
A digression, for sure. Nick asked the waitress if the bartender knew how to make a Manhattan and she said she wasn’t sure. So he carefully gave her instructions and when the drink came back it was perfect.
Researching Manhattans at the Little Missouri Saloon. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
The restaurant felt like a western theme park. We sat at a high top table with dollar bills dangling overhead. TVs mounted on the walls played a constant loop of old Westerns from the 1950s and ’60s. That looks like Marshall Dillon of Gunsmoke over Barbara’s head.
Just off the bar-dining room, a bank of three slot machines had a steady stream of customers moving from their tables to the slots, back to their tables and back to the slots again. We heard thundering hoofbeats from the Wild Stallions machine, but no dropping coins to signal that someone hit the jackpot.
Back at the hotel after dinner, we chatted with the night staffer on the desk. She, like the woman who checked us in, was from Tonga. She said she had a contract to remain through October, and while she liked it, it was just too cold.
But there was something beautiful about to happen; at 11:51 a Super Moon was set to appear in the sky over Medora. A Super Moon occurs when the moon is closest to the earth. And this moon was called a Strawberry Moon, nicknamed by the Algonquin Native American tribe in the northeast and Canada, according to NPR, because it appeared during the strawberry harvest.
The town seemed fast asleep shortly before midnight when the Strawberry Moon sat overhead. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
The town was absolutely still and there were no other people on the street. A few blocks from the hotel, the moon shone low and bright through the trees.
The Strawberry Moon on June 14, 2022 in Medora, North Dakota. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
In the morning we had breakfast in the hotel’s dining room and then hit the road headed for Billings, Montana. Honestly, we wished we booked for a couple of more nights so that we had more time to explore the park.
I walked by a fortune teller on the street the other afternoon. She was young and beautiful, dark hair cascading across her shoulders, dark eyes smiling at passers-by who might want their fortunes told. I don’t what lies ahead in the wake of my prostatectomy, but I smiled back at her and said, “My future is shorter than my past, but I’m looking forward to it.”
Writers have had a lot to say about the prostate over the years. Anatole Broyard of The New York Times Book Review learned in August 1989 that he had prostate cancer. He died of it fourteen months later, when he was seventy, but in the meantime wrote Intoxicated by My Illness. He said it woke him up: “Illness is primarily a drama, and it should be possible to enjoy it as well as to suffer it.”
Scottish urologist Gavin Francis recently reviewed two books about the troubled prostate in the New York Review of Books. One was the writer’s account of his diagnosis, surgery and convalescence as the covid pandemic was beginning, the other a look at how culture has approached the prostate since medicine identified the troublesome gland in the sixteenth century. Francis pitched in that his patients treat their prostate problems with “an odd mixture of anxiety and jokey bravado; they find it easier to make wisecracks about the prostate than to confess their fear of disease.”
Most writing on the subject undoubtedly has escaped young, healthy men. Why give a thought to a walnut-sized gland that sits at the base of your bladder if it’s not malfunctioning?
That is to say, if you can easily summon an erection and you don’t leak pee inside your pants. But those two functions have a lot to do with how we men think about ourselves. That little fellow is responsible for a big part of our identity. I remember a Top 40 song from the 1960s titled, “You Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Until You Lose It).” It was about teenage love, but it could have been about the prostate.
When you’re older, though, you have to rethink who you are in any case. A sore shoulder hampers that once-effortless forehand. Touchy knees hobble your easy running stride. The sounds you make rising from a chair are heard across the room. A troubled prostate is a part of that continuum. As Anatole Broyard discovered, it helps to think of all this, painful though it may be, as an adventure.
When I came home from the hospital I carried a sheaf of post-operative instructions. Some addressed short-term problems like dealing with my catheter. As news anchors say before their technicians cue up scenes of violence, “Some of these images may be disturbing.” And while readers may find my adventures with my catheter a fascinating voyage of discovery, I’ll leave them to the imagination. It’s enough to say that it’s a device that requires some care in handling.
The catheter wasn’t all I had to deal with. The surgical incisions across my belly were glued shut, but still painful. I couldn’t sit up to get out of bed; I had to roll out onto my hands and knees and then stand up. I filled an oxycodone prescription that I carried from the hospital, but one of those was enough before I moved on to Tylenol. On another recuperative front, passing gas halfway through that first week meant I could now expand my post-surgical diet of clear liquids to include soft solid foods and eventually ordinary meals. I’d soon be able to enjoy eating once again.
I was told to expect a swollen scrotum. “This is common and should not alarm you,” the post-surgical information sheet assured me. The lack of alarm lasted just one sentence. The one after that said, “Your scrotum may become as big as an orange or grapefruit.” Sure enough, one morning I found that my penis and an inch of catheter had disappeared within the folds of my scrotum grown to the size of a small grapefruit. With wrinkles. It looked more like an ugli fruit, which is a good description. The endlessly helpful information sheet told me I could roll up a towel or washcloth to elevate and support that big boy during the week or two that this might last.
A week after my surgery I strapped on my catheter’s leg bag, tucked my large scrotum into my underwear, put on some clothes, and Barbara and I took a car to 221 East 41st Street to have the catheter removed. I was looking forward to it, but I didn’t think I was going to have fun. As it turned out, I practically laughed the catheter out. This was the doing of a team of young nurses named Danielle and Elinor, who had had enough experience with catheters to see the humor in them if the patient saw it too.
What happens during catheter removal is that you drink some salty water and then see if you can pee it out through the catheter into a plastic receptacle. This is what I did under Elinor’s supervision. I struggled at first. It wouldn’t come out. Then, in adjoining room beyond a curtain, Danielle triggered the universal urination impulse; she turned on a water faucet. It was so obvious I broke out laughing. And it worked. That meant my bladder functioned. Moments later, Elinor had somehow deflated the balloon that held the catheter inside my bladder and pulled the contraption out.
Moments later, I was wearing a pair of Depends under my sweat pants and Barbara and I listened as Danielle explained what was going to happen next. “Bladder Training” headed the list. You need this because without a prostate you’re also missing one of the things a man needs in order not to have to wear Depends. That’s the involuntary or internal sphincter that pinches your urethra, which carries urine from your bladder to the tip of your penis. With it, you don’t have to think about not peeing in your pants. Without it is another story. Thus the bladder training.
There’s another sphincter, the voluntary or external sphincter, farther down the urethra toward the penis. We’ve all clenched it in the middle of a pee. Now the bladder training means you’ve got to wake it up to step in for the one that’s missing. How do you do that? Kegel exercises. You clench it up, regularly and repeatedly and more frequently as time goes on. You graduate from Depends to pads inside your shorts (snug shorts; no boxers, please) until after a few months you might be dry again.
In the meantime, you try to plan ahead. Seconds ahead. You have to anticipate things you didn’t much think about before, like coughing, sneezing, blowing your nose, and even clearing your throat. Because if you don’t think about it . . .
I was a weekend into this journey when big news arrived. MyChart told me on February 14 that I had new test results to look at. It was the pathology report of my dismembered prostate. Which, for the record, had weighed 72.4 grams and measured 6.2 by 4.5 by 3.9 centimeters. Bigger than a walnut, then. The cancer had registered 4+5=9 on the Gleason scale, a rating that determines how aggressive the cancer is. Ten is as high as it gets. But while my cancer was aggressive, it involved only 2 percent of prostate tissue. “Tumor is confined to prostate,” said the report. I would have tried to turn cartwheels, but my bladder training suggested that would be a bad idea.
With that I turned to the next compelling signpost along my journey of recovery: “Post-Operative Sexual Rehabilitation.”
Like most men, since puberty my hormones dictated my behavior in certain situations, giving rise to a good deal of pleasure and some misadventures. And like most men of a certain age, my river of testosterone had slowed to a mere tributary even before my surgery. My hormones had to be coaxed out of retirement and persuaded to participate. They could still pitch in enthusiastically, but they had to be reminded of old times. The absence of my prostate did not improve things. I came home from the hospital with a prescription for 5 milligram tadalafil tablets — that’s generic Cialis — that I take every day. The chapter advises you not to expect to be the stud you remember for six months to two years, however.
You can resort to more elaborate measures if you choose. You can inject your penis with something that increases blood flow. You can stick it in a tube from which the air is pumped out, which also increases blood flow. Or there are penile implants.
Meanwhile, four months post-surgery as I write this, I’m still struggling to reacquire the rhythms of what I remember as a “normal” life. The COVID pandemic hasn’t helped. Nobody’s life is normal, after all. Lives aren’t normal in Ukraine, or among American women who might get pregnant, or in wildfire-prone states, or in schools or churches or stores or any other place where disturbed people with guns decide there are other people they just have to kill.
Meanwhile an explanation of benefits from United Healthcare, where I have my Medicare supplemental insurance, arrived in the mail. It told me Medicare and United Healthcare paid almost $12,000 combined for my prostate surgery and the accompanying procedures. A lower line told me I was fortunate that NYU and Dr. Taneja accepted Medicare assignment. The actual amount charged was $148,119.27. So outside a privileged life like mine, even the hope of a return to normal would come at a cost much greater than most people can afford.
And I am doing some of the things I used to do. I’m playing tennis, doing yoga sessions with Barbara, going to the gym, walking and riding my bike, doing the Saturday morning shopping at the farmers market at Union Square. Some other things I once thought were part of what defined me I can do with less of. But other definition points remain.
I still have things I’m curious about. I still have things I want to write. I still have friends and family I cherish and want to spend more time with. I still want to witness the beauty of humanity and nature that lies before us everywhere. There are places in the world Barbara and I still want to see together, lots of places. I still have love and kindness to give and conversations to hold and flowers to smell. I still can show every day the gratitude I feel for the life I’ve had and the life that’s yet to come. As I told the fortune teller, my future is shorter than my past, but I’m looking forward to it.
The pandemic doesn’t erase our zest for travel. We can’t make the trips to places that fuel our imagination. But we can revisit the photos and stories of destinations we’ve visited and love. We vividly remember our drive through Sicily in 2016 and our stops in historic towns and cultural centers and the food and wine we enjoyed while we were there. It’s a trip that we would make again, if only . . .
Sicily opens a window into history and envelops you in its tumultuous past. But the island also offers a surprisingly current vibe, great food, warm hospitable people and an opportunity to indulge in romance.
On our fifth day in Sicily, we headed to Piazza Armerina because it’s near the Villa Romana del Casale. This 4th century Roman villa boasts elaborate mosaics that were preserved for centuries by being buried in a landslide. But the town offers some attractions of its own, as we learned negotiating its steep streets to the B&B where we would spend the night.
The entrance to B&B Kimera. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
Barbara had found B&B Kimera online. It nestled in a cluster of buildings near what must have been the highest point in Piazza Armerina behind the town’s massive Baroque cathedral.
Piazza Armerina Duomo. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
Rita Chiaramonte, the enthusiastic owner, greeted us effusively and asked us to choose between a room in the main building off the lobby and one in its own little house. We picked the main building and her husband Giuseppe brought our bags in from the car.
Our room at the B&B Kimera in Piazza Amerina, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.
The lovely room with elaborate furnishings made us feel as though we were invited to stay in a relative’s home.
Lovely details in the room at B&B Kimera. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
Eager to stretch after a long ride over the Hyblaean mountains though Ragusa and Modica, we walked down Via Cavour to the square that fronted on the town hall, the Comune di Piazza Armerina.
Bird’s-eye view of Piazza Armerina city hall from a cafe. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
While we sipped white wine and munched breadsticks, nuts, chips and olives at an outside table, fancy cars delivered men in suits and uniforms and well-dressed women to a meeting at the town hall. Barbara’s journalist’s curiosity propelled her to ask one of the participants what was going on. The get-together of “a commercial federation,” she was told.
After an early evening nap, we took Rita’s recommendation and headed back down Via Cavour to the Ristorante La Tavernetta. The restaurant, with eight tables and a TV over a small bar alternating between a game show and a soccer match, filled up with locals. We soon found out why.
The “Specialita di Pesce” on its card told us that even inland, fish dominates Sicilian menus. We ordered a bottle of the local vino bianco. Barbara started with spaghetti con vongole and Nick chose the octopus salad. Her dish surpassed any spaghetti with clams we’ve had anywhere, ever. We both ordered grilled sea bream for our mains. The fish arrived blackened on the outside and moist and tender inside.
We gushed over the food as we ate. When we asked the chef how he cooked the fish so perfectly, he showed us the kitchen’s grill — a flat cast iron slab on top of a gas stove. “Lento, lento,” he said, demonstrating how he turned the fish over and over to get its blackened exterior and delicious interior texture.
We slept with the window open. Sometime in the middle of the night, I heard a thump, beating wings, and the chortle of a pigeon at the unbarred window. When I went to close the window Barbara woke up and asked what was going on. “Pigeon,” I said. Foggy with sleep, all she heard was, “…trying to break in.” When she realized what happened, her laughter at my heroic defense of the home front from the single bird invasion threatened to wake all of Piazza Armerina. We slept the rest of the night with the air conditioner on.
The next morning — now it was Friday, July 8 — I found Grazia, a young woman, helping Rita set up breakfast.
Our host Rita Chiaramonte and her assistant Grazia at the charming B&B. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
They put out a lavish spread of prosciutto, salami, mortadella, cheeses and an assortment of breads in addition to croissants, with and without cream. But we disappointed them by sticking to caffe Americano, yoghurt and croissants. Experience taught us that big breakfasts and travel don’t always mix well.
The young couple at the breakfast table next to us had been at the Ristorante La Tavernetta the night before. They were speaking English and Italian, and I (Nick) told them we had noticed last night that they actually talked to each other instead of burying their noses in their cell phones. That started a conversation. It turned out that he was Sicilian and taught Italian at a university in the north of England. She was Austrian and taught German at a London university.
Like all other other European and Australian tourists we had talked with — we’d met no other Americans so far — they wanted to know how Americans could possibly take Donald Trump seriously. “How could they vote for him?” they asked. We talked about the anxieties of working people that fueled the Brexit vote and their similarity to the anger and fear that motivate Trump’s voters.
When we packed up and paid our bill, we rated B&B Kimera a bargain at less than seventy euros including VAT. We said goodbye to Rita and headed toward Villa Romana del Casale.
Rita Chiaramonte and Barbara Nevins Taylor at B&B Kimera Piazza Armerina Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
This UNESCO World Heritage site is one of the first places you read about when you start to plan a trip to Sicily. It’s near the middle of Sicily and reachable in two hours or less from almost anywhere. From Piazza Armerina it’s about three kilometers and the short distance is so well-marked Nick made only one wrong turn.
Bath Area Villa Romana del Casale. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
We decided against joining a group tour or hiring a guide. Cards at the many viewing sites explain how the villa worked. It’s thought to have been the center of a large agricultural complex or latifundium. The Roman owner, who ranked among the senatorial or perhaps the royal class, lived and conducted business there. One sign of his status was that he and his family lived on the north side of the villa in the summer and moved to its south for the sun in the winter months. The place was technically sophisticated for its time, with heated bathing areas and running water to carry away waste.
Latrine Area Villa Roman del Casale. UNESCO Photo.
But viewing the bathing areas along the outside of the villa was just a run-up to the main attraction.
Love mosaic. Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com [caption id="attachment_40174" align="aligncenter" width="480"]
We’ve seen lots of Roman mosaics in our travels. The Romans made art of tiny colored tiles almost everywhere they went, including for example in Israel and Istanbul. But nothing had prepared us for the extent and variety of these, probably because it’s the largest surviving collection in the world.
[caption id="attachment_40134" align="aligncenter" width="496"] Long Floor Mosiac Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
The storytelling on the floors and walls takes the breath away. The exquisitely rendered mosaics, some as long as 80 feet, include scenes of Roman life and myth — hunts, exotic animals, warriors and giants, and the famous “bikini girls.”
Bikini Girls, Weight Lifter and Discus Thrower, Mosaic, Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.comWomen Athletes Mosiac, Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.comFemale Athletes at Villa Romana del Casale. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
The mosiacs depict women athletes playing a variety of sports and a crowning ceremony for the victors.
Crowning Ceremony Mosaic, Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
We went from scene to scene, pointing out details in each new beauty that we saw and delighting at the charm of the stories the artists depicted. It’s a must-see, not duplicated or even approached anywhere else.
Cyclops, Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.comMosaic Story, Villa Romana del Casale. Photo by ConsumerMojo.comThe Story of the Hunt, Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily. Villa Roman del CasaleNoah’s Ark, Villa Romana del Casale. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
The Story of the Hunt, Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily.Fishing Mosaic, Villa Roman Del Casale, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
We wandered among the mosaics into the early afternoon. Then we grabbed a sandwich at the snack bar, tried (again without success) to program the car’s GPS, and headed west toward Agrigento and the Valley of the Temples.
Autostradas link Sicily’s major cities, but most of the secondary roads we used were good and we never saw much traffic.
Autostrada Cinisi, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
Hertz’s throwback paper map was short on details but Barbara is great at asking directions regardless of language. It took us less than two hours to reach Agrigento via Caltanissetta and Racalmuto, a drive of about 100 kilometers.
We stopped on the outskirts to refuel. Barbara got out and her eyes widened. “Look!” she said, pointing to a temple on a hill that overlooked the highway. Now we really wanted to see more.
View from below of Valley of the Temples, Agrigento, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
Greek mythology says Daedalus and his son Icarus founded Agrigento after they fled Crete. History tells us that Greeks from Rhodes and Crete settled Agrigento as a city-state in 580 BC.
The philosopher Empedocles was born in Agrigento, then called Akragas, in 490 BC. The four so-called “classical elements” — earth, air, water and fire — were his idea along with a fifth, the elusive and invisible aether. The temples, built with local sandstone, were underway when he was born. When he died, in 430 BC, seven Doric temples stood lined along a narrow ridge between the hills of Agrigento and the Mediterranean coastal plain.
Temple of Heracules, Valley of the Temples, Agrigento, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
The city became one of the richest in the Mediterranean world. The poet Pindar called it “the most beautiful city mortals have ever built.” Despite wars of destruction and a succession of rulers from Goths and Vandals to Byzantines to Muslims to Catholics to Normans to Germans, Spanish, French and finally unified Italy in the 19th century, its beauty remains.
Temple of Concordia, Agrigento, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com,
We passed the entrance to the Valley of the Temples on our way to the B&B friends recommended. But once we got into Agrigento’s narrow and confusing streets we naturally got lost. We finally called the owner and he came to rescue us.
Francesco Foti operates the Terrazze di Montelusa in a building his family has owned since 1820. He led us in his car along the switchy and ever-rising streets to the Piazza Lena and the B&B.
Francesco doesn’t live in the building, but two of his cats make their home in his office there. He’s posted signs on the doors warning not to let them out, but those two snoozing lumps of fur didn’t look interested in going anywhere. Francesco suggested it was too late to see the Valley of the Temples that day. He said we should go the following afternoon when we’d have more time.
So once we’d freshened up in our spacious room, we went out to get familiar with the old city of Agrigento.
A walk up a steep hill took us to the Monastery of Santo Spirito, which doubles as a B&B and where the nuns make famous sweets.
Nick Taylor on the steps in Agrigento, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
From there we followed stone stairs down to Via Atenea, a shopping street. From there more stone steps descended to streets with terraces overlooking the Valley of the Temples and the sea.
View from Agrigento, Sicily to the Mediterranean. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
We found a restaurant that shared a piazza with the Chiesa di San Pietro (Church of St. Peter). There, we again found ourselves entertained by the comings and goings of a political gathering. Women in dresses and men in dark jackets, tieless white shirts and jeans stood around the entrance talking.
Inside, a speaker addressed an audience that filled the pews. He stood in front of a sign that implored “Dire di si!” or “Say yes!” Italy has its own brand of political gridlock, and then-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi launched the campaign to reduce the size of Italy’s Senate and change its power. Italians voted no that fall. But in 2019, the far right Five Star Movement, then the main party in the governing coalition, pushed a vote through parliament that reduced the number of MPs from 630 to 400.
While we learned about Italian politics, a server appeared and we said, “Yes!” to our usual vino bianco to cool us off in the summer heat.
That night we took Francesco’s recommendation and walked down the hill and around a corner and through a piazza named for playwright and native son Luigi Pirandello. We sat outside at Osteria ExPanificio, ordered the local white wine and shared a bowl of mussels. Then Barbara had casserole al pesto Trapanese with red shrimp and Nick stuffed calamari. Again we smiled through a meal and stayed until the servers began stacking chairs on the tables.
The following morning, Saturday July 9, we ate breakfast on the B&B’s terrace a floor up from the bedrooms. We paid Francesco 75 euros plus taxes and then he drove us with our luggage in his small car down to the garage to retrieve our car. The night of parking was free for his guests.
We had only a short drive to Villa Athena, by far the most expensive and most luxurious hotel of our trip. It’s a renovated 17th century villa with only twenty-seven rooms.
Website of Villa Athena, Agrigento, Sicily
It lines up squarely with the Temple of Concordia, so close you felt you could reach out and touch it over the surrounding almond and olive trees.
Villa Athena and Temple of Concordia, Agrigento, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
We arrived too early to check in, left our luggage and set out to explore the area around Porto Empedocle. We detoured from history here and ventured into the fictional world of Andrea Camilleri.
We’re big fans of the wry series he created featuring police inspector Salvo Montalbano. Camilleri used his home town of Porto Empedocle as the model for Vigata, Montalbano’s base of operations. So in a case of life imitating art, in 2003 officials changed the name to Porto Empedocle Vigata. They changed it back in 2009.
Camilleri was an inspiration, by the way. He was 69 when he created Montalbano and vaulted onto the best-seller lists. He continued working and produced more than twenty novels and a BBC television series. He died at 93 in 2019, a Sicilian national hero.
We rode through the port and followed the waterfront road where Montalbano, in Camilleri’s imagination, lives in a house by the sea and crime occasionally rolls in with the tide.
Boat at Realmonte, Agrigento, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
We passed beaches and beach clubs packed with people, but kept going. At Realmonte we turned toward the sea. The road dwindled and we parked and found ourselves above a pair of crescent beaches divided by a natural rock jetty.
Beach at Realmonte, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
A few people sat on towels under umbrellas and a couple of small boats hugged the shore. We climbed down toward the water. Signs advised against swimming due to water pollution. But it was pretty.
Barbara Nevins Taylor and dog at Realmonte, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
As we walked in the sand, a small brown dog introduced herself.
Soon we headed back through Porto Empedocle to San Leone, Agrigento’s beach town. Surprisingly, very few people came out to the beach on a Saturday afternoon.
We found a parking space and a machine to buy a parking ticket. Thinking it worked like New York’s, Nick put his debit card in and the machine swallowed it whole. Then somebody came along and said you didn’t have to pay for parking on the weekend anyway. He felt stupid but knew the card was gone so he only beat his head against a tree once.
We were diverted from the loss of the card when we walked through an amusement park on the beach.
Amusement Park in San Leone, Agrigento, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
It had bumper car rides and a carousel and a pint-sized Eiffel Tower replica and workers lounging. Flags flew from the towers of a small fake castle. Weirdly, a Confederate battle flag flapped among them. News of American flag politics had apparently not reached San Leone.
Confederate flag at San Leone amusement park, San Leone, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
At lunch time, we joined locals at Trattoria Portobello at the end of a string of restaurants that curve along the beach road.
Nick Taylor at Trattoria Portobello, San Leone, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
By now we had each consumed about eight feet of octopus tentacles and squid bodies in antipasti, pastas of all kinds, seafood mains, and been delighted every time. So we ordered calamari fritti, a seafood mixto salad and some spaghetti with tomatoes and basil to split.
Calamari Fritti and Seafood Salad Mixto, Trattoria Portobello, San Leone, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
When we got back to the hotel, the desk clerk told us we’d been upgraded and showed us to a room whose small terrace looked onto the Temple of Concordia. The hotel’s inviting pool lay right below us and also looked toward the temples, so we couldn’t resist.
After a swim blessed by the Greek gods, we took our Sicilian nap and awoke in time to make it to the Valley of the Temples by 4:30. People say the best time to visit the temples is in late afternoon and early evening when the light is golden. We arrived when the sun was high and hot and the sky a cloudless blue. We still had not seen a cloud over Sicily.
The temples are part of an archaeological park that also contains thousands of almond and olive trees. At the parking lot, you have two options. You can take a taxi to the Temple of Juno at the park’s far end and give yourself a one-way tour back to your car. Or you can do what we did, walk into the park where we were, at its western end.
This led us first to the ruins of the Temple of Jove. Even the wreckage — huge columns and hewn stones strewn about over a wide area — conveyed grandeur. Beyond it to the west stood the four remaining upright columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux. But more eye-catching ruins lay farther to the east.
Columns, Valley of Temples, Agrigento, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
Next, we stopped at the Temple of Heracles (or Hercules). Of its original columns only eight are standing. Somehow we had entered this site from the back side and climbed into a restricted area, as we learned when a park employee took our picture and ordered us back to the right side of the ropes.
Now we joined a wide paved path that followed a slight upgrade to the Temple of Concordia.
Temple of Concordia, Agrigento, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
It’s the best-preserved of the valley temples, mainly, we’re told, because of interior arches that were added later when Christians used the temple as a church. With its fluted columns — thirteen long and six wide — upright and intact, and its entablatures above still whole as well as the crowning pediments at each end, you could almost imagine it was still in use.
Temple of Concordia, Agrigento, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.Nick Taylor at Temple of Hera, Agrigento, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
What remains of the Temple of Juno is mostly standing columns and a few remaining pieces of entablature. Juno being the Roman name for Hera, the Greek goddess of love and marriage, the newly-married like to have photos taken here.
Bride and Groom at Temple of Hera running to have their photo taken. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
We saw several decked-out wedding parties posing at the site to preserve their memories under the smile of the Greek goddess.
Smiling bride and groom in the Valley of Temples, Agrigento, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
Before moving on, we struck up a conversation with a park security guard who had lived in New Jersey for awhile, and whose daughter works as a cop in Totowa. He told how much he missed New Jersey and New York and good Chinese food.
On the walk back, we spotted an enclosure with exotic long-haired white goats with twisted horns that looked as if you could use them to drill a hole.
Girgentana Goat, Valley of the Temples, Agrigento Sicily
A placard explained that these Girgentana goats, while native to Agrigento, are thought to have originated in Afghanistan or Tibet and were brought to Sicily by Arabs when they ruled the island. There’s a growing movement to keep the endangered breed alive because their milk makes great goat cheese. In the meantime, the park hopes that people will contribute money to maintain them.
Girgentana Goat Valley of the Temples, Agrigento, Sicily
We returned to the Villa Athena and toasted the view from our terrace with a couple of glasses of prosecco and watched a rush of chirping birds descend on the trees as twilight eased in. The birds made a racket for about five minutes and then as suddenly as it began, the chirping stopped when they settled down for the night.
Night view from Villa Athena of the Valley of the Temples. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
We couldn’t resist dinner at the Villa Athena’s restaurant.
View of Temple of Concordia from Villa Athena restaurant, Agrigento, Sicily.
From our table at Terrazzo degli Dei we had another fine view of the Temple of Concordia, now dramatically lighted in the dark.
Nick had a first course of spaghetti in a shrimp, pork cheek and Girgenti goat butter sauce. Barbara ordered eggplant gnocchi with octopus, potato and thyme. The wine list offered a reasonably priced Mūller-Thurgau from Erice in western Sicily. That’s where we would head next.
We chose a fresh whole red snapper from the fish cart wheeled to our table and ordered it grilled.
Red snapper at Villa Athena, Terrazzo degli Dei, Agrigento, Sicily
In love and feeling the bliss of another wonderful meal, we went to sleep smiling.
The next day, Sunday July 10, we took a quick morning swim, said a reluctant goodbye to the Villa Athena and headed west along Sicily’s southern coast.
Less than an hour later we reached Sciacca and left the highway to take a look.
Looking into the harbor at Sciacca, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
We wanted to see it because we knew New York City fishmongers whose families came from there. Nick wrote about a feud in one family from Sciacca that played out in our neighborhood on Bleecker Street. The story appeared in New York magazine. While that was in the 1980’s, you can still read: Blood Feud on Bleecker Street.
Nick Taylor overlooking Sciacca, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
We drove down steep streets to the harbor, passing men drinking coffee and playing cards at outside tables and we had to take photos here.
Barbara Nevins Taylor at the fishing dock in Sciacca, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
When the local road narrowed and closed in at the far end of town Nick realized we had gone too far on the sea road. There was no room to turn around. His maneuverings terrified a bevy of Sciacca housewives on their apartment balconies worried about damage to their cars or property. Barbara got out of the car to guide as he backed up inch-by-inch to turn around.
A sigh of relief and we headed back to the highway. We drove another 36 kilometers to Selinunte (or Selinus), once an important Greek colony in Sicily where more temples cluster close to the Mediterranean.
Acropolis of Selinunte, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
Wars with Carthaginians in the fourth and third Centuries B.C., destroyed the city and yet a haunting beauty remains.
Part of Temple E at Selinunte, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
Partly reconstructed Temple E, or the Temple of Hera, wasn’t roped off so we climbed the steps and walked around.
Barbara Nevins Taylor at Temple of Hera, Selinunte, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
An unreconstructed temple on this site, known as Temple G and dedicated to Apollo or maybe Zeus, at some 330 feet long was one of the largest temples the Greeks built anywhere.
Nick Taylor happy at Selunite, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
From Temple E we could see in the distance toward the sea the Acropolis of Selinunte. Of its three temples, only one row of columns remains standing amid a lot of fallen stones. We could have seen much more at Selinunte but the road was calling. We still had kilometers to go.
Barbara and I just came from a pharmacy near our hotel in Amsterdam, where I bought two two-gram tubes of Zovirax cream for 10 euros each. A Google search now shows a price just over $1,000. Even its generic version, acyclovir, costs around $800. And it’s prescription-only, not over-the-counter.
So the outrage continues. We first discovered the price disparity when we visited Rome and stopped into a pharmacy in 2018. Then and now you can thank the American pharmaceutical industry and shameful Congressional inaction for a price many times higher at home than in Europe. You have to spend $10,000 in travel, (Some may do it cheaper, but still.) to save hundreds of dollars on a drug that long since lost patent protection but is jacked up artificially to keep the pharmacy fat cats from losing weight.
We first spotted the problem and outlined it in this post. On vacation in Rome five years ago, I spied one of the green neon crosses that in Italy advertise a farmacia and walked in to ask if I could get a tube of acyclovir ointment. It was a shot in the dark. You need a prescription for acyclovir in the United States, but that’s not true everywhere. And at $700 for a 30-gram tube at my local CVS I thought, Why not?
Photo by Elliot Brown via Flicker, Creative Commons License
The woman at the counter turned to some drawers in the wall behind her, riffled through the stock, and produced a small box that contained a 2-gram tube of Zovirax-branded 5 percent acyclovir cream. How much was it?
She smiled brightly. “Nine euros twenty. But if you buy three you get one for free.”
My wife Barbara said my jaw dropped and my face brightened when I heard that. And so I walked out with 6 grams of acyclovir for my herpes outbreaks for less than 18.40 euros, or about $21.50. At home I would have paid $140, or a fifth of $700 for a fifth of 30 grams.
Acyclovir, an anti-viral medication, is prescribed for the herpes simplex virus wherever it may appear: chicken pox, shingles and severe complications from Epstein-Barr viral infections.
I’ve had genital herpes since a one-night stand in the 1970s. Treatment at the time was primitive. It involved lying on a table in a doctor’s office with an ultraviolet light shining on the affected area. If you imagine that and can’t unsee it, I apologize.
GlaxoSmithKline revolutionized herpes treatment when it brought acyclovir cream and ointment to the market in 1981 under the brand name Zovirax. Topically applied, they ease the discomfort and shorten the duration of outbreaks. Acyclovir pills, also available, are more of a prophylactic; taken regularly, they ward off outbreaks.
I remember a time when Zovirax ointment didn’t cost a head-scratching amount of money. I don’t remember what I paid for the last tube I bought that is now squeezed dry, and that’s because the price didn’t seem like highway robbery. Clearly that changed in the same way that the cost of other drugs have skyrocketed in the U.S.
Brand name drugs account for 77 percent of U.S. sales. They face annual price hikes because the pharmaceutical manufacturers don’t have competition in the market place, according to the Association for Accessible Medicines. In addition, an out-of-control patent system allows companies to continue monopolies on drugs and raise prices year after year.
It all adds up to one thing: pharmaceutical prices in the U.S. bring in big dollars for big pharma, but make no sense for consumers.
U.S. spending on pharmaceuticals exceeded $1,000 per person in 2015. That was the highest by 30 to 190 percent among the ten high-income countries studied, according to the Commonwealth Fund. And in a separate component studying seven countries, U.S. retail prices for commonly prescribed drugs were the highest by 5 to 117 percent.
GlaxoSmithKline licenses the sale of acyclovir in the U.S. and Canada to Valeant. Valeant, headquartered in Quebec and as of July to be called Bausch Health Companies (it owns Bausch & Lomb), a few years ago started buying companies with products on the market and drastically raising their prices. In the process it developed a reputation for price gouging on a number of drugs. Questions about its strategy, drug pricing, accounting and management led Valeant’s stock price to plunge 90 percent. The company now, under CEO Joseph Papa and a new management team since May 2016, is trying to reinvent itself and turn its reputation around.
Valeant’s spokesperson, Lainie Keller, told ConsumerMojo in an email that Papa chairs a multi-disciplinary Patient Access and Pricing Committee that reviews its drug pricing and its effects on patients’ ability to afford the drugs they need. She also told us that Valeant has pledged not to raise prices on its branded prescription drugs more than 10 percent a year. Zovirax, for example, got a 9 percent price bump in January 2018.
But she had no good answers when ConsumerMojo asked her why Zovirax in Italy costs a fraction of its price in the United States. “I don’t know,” she said. “In Italy things are run by the government. They set prices for drugs differently. It isn’t an apples to apples comparison.”
In fact, an Italian government agency does regulate the price of medication covered by its national health insurance program. But the price is set by the marketplace for non-covered drugs, and over-the-counter medications like Zovirax or acyclovir.
Keller also couldn’t say why a topical cream for herpes or shingles outbreaks is sold over-the-counter in Italy while it requires a prescription in the United States. “In Italy the government decides,” she said. “Here the FDA decides what can be sold over the counter. The FDA says 5 percent acyclovir should be sold by prescription.”
The FDA, as in Food and Drug Administration. In other words, the government decides here, too.
We reached out to the FDA about why it designates acyclovir and Zovirax as prescription-only medications. FDA Press Officer Sandy Walsh said she couldn’t say, but wondered if Valeant had ever sought over-the-counter status for Zovirax. We’ve asked, and will let you know when we find out.
My experience in Rome highlights the wacky, out-of-whack and unfair pricing system for medicine in the United States. Forget that there seems to be no good reason why American consumers can’t buy acyclovir without a prescription. That’s a symptom of something much larger.
When we look at pricing, we have to consider the influence of the pharmaceutical industry in Congress and in the White House. When the Medicare drug benefit passed during the George W. Bush administration, the bill barred Medicare from using its huge market leverage to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices.
Pharmaceutical companies hire lobbyists to help keep the prices high. Their lobbyists swarm in Washington like summer gnats. The industry deployed almost 1,200 of them in 2017 and spent almost $280 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ OpenSecrets.org. That’s the main reason American drug prices are the highest in the world.
President Trump campaigned on, and repeatedly picked up the populist mantra of lowering drug prices. But Kaiser Health News (KHN) reports that healthcare experts say Trump hasn’t come up with new ideas to cut drug costs. James Love, Executive Director of the nonprofit Knowledge Ecology International, told KHN that the Trump administration’s ideas could have been written by the pharmaceutical lobby.
That leaves us paying the big bills. But we can do a few things of things.
Shop around for medication. In some cases, Walmart and Costco offer lower prices than pharmacies.
You can also shop around, if you travel outside of the United States.
But we do caution you to take care if you see online ads from international companies that tempt you. Customs can seize the deliveries before they get to you and you can lose your medication and your money.
Getting angry politically also makes sense. Contact your U.S. Representative and your U.S. Senators. You can call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 to put you through to their offices. Theoretically, they listen to constituents.
The drive from Bosa to Alghero ranks among the most spectacular sea views Sardinia offers. We swept around a curve, the hills fell away, and the blue Mediterranean practically hit us in the face. Every roadside pull-off beckoned us to stop for yet another cell phone shot of green and flowered cliffs dropping to the sea.
Road between Bosa and Alghero, Photo Courtesy Italy Cycling Guide.info
We stopped at one pull-off and joined a camper van, whose occupants had had the same idea.
We were taking pictures when Horst and Ilana, a German couple from Bavaria, walked up and introduced themselves. They had driven through Austria and northern Italy to Livorno, where they took an overnight ferry to Olbia on Sardinia’s northeast coast.
That put them in the middle of the fabled Costa Smeralda (Emerald Coast). But the fables were perhaps overblown. It’s “like Disneyland,” Horst said. “Beautiful but plastic. George Clooney’s there,” he laughed.
Ever since the Aga Khan and his friends opened a yacht club at Porto Cervo on the Costa Smeralda in 1967, the area has attracted the international sailing crowd, celebrities, the rich and those who want to be, the beautiful and their admirers. And since Soviet communism gave way to Russia’s state-sanctioned oligarchy in the 1990s, the oligarchs steamed up in their mega-yachts to join the party.
We’re both sailors, but none of that had much appeal for us. We had already decided to bypass that part of Sardinia, and Horst confirmed our judgment. We were hoping to find Alghero more attractive.
From the hillside, we could see the small city across the water and felt eager for a new part of our adventure. Alghero has a long history as a commercial and military hub and we read that it retained a strong Spanish flavor.
But the inventive Bronze-age Nuragi settled here long before the Spanish invasion.
And in their time, they used the strategic location to trade metals and pottery with the Phoenicians and others who traveled this part of the Mediterranean
By the 12th century, Alghero became a fortress town ruled by the Dorias, a Genoese family. The walls and defensive catapults they built did them no good, though, and they lost control to a family from Pisa. The Pisans had a problem with the Vatican, and in 1297 Pope Boniface VIII handed over Alghero and Sardinia to King James II of Aragon.
It was what we’d call today a virtual handover. It took almost thirty years for Peter, King James’s son and successor, to muster the ships and the navy to invade and actually take over in 1323.
King Peter IV, Image in the public domain
War then raged between local family dynasties and the Aragonese Spanish for nearly 100 years before the Spanish gained a firm hold on Sardinia. But in Alghero, King Peter IV expelled locals and replaced them with Spanish prisoners, prostitutes — and we hate to add this to the list, but history says it’s so — Jewish people.
Hapsburg kings ruled for more than 200 years from 1516 to 1720, northern Italy’s House of Savoy held sway until Italy unified in 1861, and through it all the Catalan influence remained in northwest Sardinia. Today, an estimated 15 percent of Alghero’s 44,000 residents speak a form of Catalan.
We were looking forward to exploring this mash-up of Mediterranean cultures when we drove into town.
Barbara had booked us into a B&B in the old part of the city near the water. It was in a pedestrian zone and we unloaded at a small plaza nearby before going in search of one of those blue-lined parking spaces.
At Palau de Rosa, we rang the bell and the door opened to reveal a man sitting on the steep steps. He introduced himself as the husband of Giovanna. She had taken his family home and turned it into a B&B offering three rooms.
He took us to us to the small, clean, charmingly decorated room that was dark despite a window on a narrow street. He also showed us the tiny — one table with six chairs — breakfast room that looked out on the street in front.
Then he bowed out hurriedly saying there was someplace he had to be.
Finding a parking spot turned into a chore. By the time we got the car safely situated, decent restaurants weren’t serving lunch and we ended up at place under the umbrellas across from the B&B.
Barbara ordered calamari fritti, which tasted like frozen food barely cooked. It went uneaten. Nick’s food seemed slightly better. When the bill came for a less than mediocre meal it added a ten euro cover charge. I asked the waiter what the cover covered. “Things like cooking and washing dishes. Like Rome,” he said.
Italian restaurants don’t expect tipping unless you’re really happy with the service and then it’s mostly a matter of rounding up. Many of them add a cover of a few euros to the bill, but ten seemed excessive, especially in this place.
Alghero just didn’t speak to us, and we’d only just arrived. We had planned to stay two days. At the suggestion of a fellow traveler we’d met in Cagliari, we booked a day sail on the Andrea Jensen, an old Danish gaff-rigged ketch.
It offered a day of swimming and snorkeling and a glimpse, from the water, of Neptune’s Grotto, a stalactite-hung marine cave .
Crowded tour boats could take you there, too, and for a lot less than the 150 euros apiece we’d be paying, but this seemed better.
That would make the second day in Alghero more of an adventure. But in the meantime, we got back in the car and drove out to the northwest past Fertilia to Porto Conte.
We found a pull-off where a dock jutted into the water and some rocks proved comfortable enough to sit on and get our feet wet. On the way back we stopped at a small beach and took a walk along the shore.
Our first impression of Alghero got worse when — our fault — we failed to book a restaurant for dinner in advance. We stopped to see if Al 43 di via Doria could fit us in. They could, but not until 9:45.
So we walked the old city walls and mellowed with the twilight.
Restaurant prices along the wall seemed high for what their menus offered and we were glad that we decided to wait for something more special.
So we sauntered.and found ancient catapults used long ago to try to repel invaders.
Twilight gave way to sunset and restored our good moods.
As we were taking photos under the moon,
Barbara’s phone rang. It was Rachel, from the Andrea Jensen. She said she had to cancel our boat trip. No one else had booked and they couldn’t afford to take just us. Time for Plan B and moving on from Alghero.
But first, the blazingly unique and utterly charming restaurant Barbara found.
We arrived back at Al 43 di via Doria a few minutes early to treat ourselves to prosecco while we waited for a table.
Photo courtesy of al 43 di via Doria
Whoever had designed the dining rooms had a fine eye — lamps and chandeliers, lush draperies, ornate mirrors, a silver bull’s head, free-standing cabinets under the curved arches of the rooms. It was quirky, striking and inviting.
So were the women who ran the place, the chef and mastermind being Luisa Gagliotta. They chose different outfits for each evening. This night it was short black organza dresses. The menu options ranged from vegetarian to gourmet burgers, but we stuck with seafood and weren’t sorry.
Photo courtesy Al 43 di via Doria
The crudo starter was a long time coming but when it reached the table we saw why: the kitchen had produced a work of art. And the meal continued with beautifully prepared, delicious food.
Back in our room at Palau de Rosa after midnight. Barbara went online and booked us into Su Gologone, a resort that promised mountain luxury near Oliena on the way to Sardinia’s east coast.
Our route that Tuesday took us through farm and sheep country. Neat, tightly-rolled hay bales lay strewn across cut fields.
At one point we heard this strange sound even through rolled-up car windows.
We looked to our right and saw hundreds of sheep apparently herding themselves. We didn’t see dogs, or herders, just the sheep moving in an eerie flow toward some unseen point.
The road took us higher in the mountains and the first thing that struck us as we neared Nuoro and the turn south to Oliena was the slab of sheer rock mountain that walled off the horizon to the east.
Mount Corrasi is the highest peak of the limestone massif called the Supramonte that attracts climbers and hikers to a part of Sardinia once known as a hotbed of banditry.
At Oliena we skirted Corrasi’s north end and then the Supramonte’s rock walls rose on our right.
A few miles east we found the turnoff to Su Gologone and drove into the resort.
“What a difference a day makes!” Barbara wrote in her notebook when we’d looked the place over. What started as a country restaurant in 1967 has transformed into a lavish “experience hotel,” as the resort’s website puts it.
Our second-floor room
gave onto a covered terrace with set-in upholstered couches
bracketing a huge square bathtub, intended for soaking after a long mountain hike or romance.
Moments after checking in, we were seated at Su Gologone’s terrace restaurant looking out over the swimming pool onto a long vista of rolling hills and olive groves.
In the countryside and the Barbagia region of Sardinia, roasted lamb, pig and goat supplant fish on the menu.
We quickly and happily learned that at Su Gologonne they spit roast the meat and serve seasonal vegetables from their farm and garden. And when we sat down we found a thin pane carasau, a salty flatbread prepared by the hotel bakers on our table. Its name translates as “sheet music bread.”
Nick ordered lamb ribs, Barbara a pasta with tomatoes and eggplant and a zucchini salad with lemon.
The mountains that loomed west of us were part of the Gennargentu National Park.
Just to cover all the bases, Sardinia put the Bay of Orosei to the east into the same park, so whether you hike, bike, climb, swim, dive, go spelunking in caves or practically any recreation in between, you can find it all within a relatively few miles.
But for hikers and trekkers, the Supramonte and the Gennargentu mountains are a wealth of opportunity. Thirty-three trails cover terrain that will take you from canyons to peaks with spellbinding views.
That’s why most of our fellow guests at Su Gologone, whom we had started to meet at the swimming pool, had booked for several days, and barely managed to conceal their pity when we told them we were staying just one night.
But we’d lucked out. That night’s special meal, offered only on Tuesdays, starred Sardinia’s inland specialties of roast suckling pig and roast lamb. Dark had fallen when we followed a candlelit path to the courtyard where we and our fellow diners would enjoy this feast.
Outside Matteo, in a slim black suit, welcomed the guests with almond sweets and Ororosa, a sparkling rose from the local winery Cantina Oliena.
The roasting chef and servers watched from the sidelines, behind them a fire pit where the roasted pig and lamb were resting.
A table in the middle of the courtyard groaned with a dizzying array of locally-sourced starters: ham and sausage from Oliena, bacon with cardoons, coppa with artichokes, Oliena cheeses with vegetable and fruit jams and sauces, pan-fried fresh tomatoes and artichokes, empanadas, casadinas (ricotta and pecorino tarts) with artichokes. As we loaded our plates the multi-lingual Matteo gave us table assignments, grouped according to language.
We sat with a young New York couple, Jordan and Daniel, and an English couple, Dean and Liz. Jordan sells real estate and Daniel is the creative director at a hot ad agency; like us, they live in the Village. Liz, a fashion photographer, and Dean, an actor, were there to celebrate her fortieth birthday.
And they were New Yorkers-to-be, since Dean is a featured actor in “The Ferryman,” an IRA-era Irish play that’s conquered London’s West End with rave reviews and will open on Broadway in the fall.
Together we had a lot to talk about. It was the first time Donald Trump’s name had come up in conversation since we’d been in Sardinia. And everyone at the table worried about the direction of the United States, its policy of separating immigrant children from families at the border, Trump’s bromance with Putin, and the seething anger and resentment of Trump’s supporters.
And Dean, it turned out, sandwiched a career in dog training in among his acting gigs. Nick asked him if dogs could tell time. “Not really,” he said. “Unless you count the time since their last meal. They know when they’re hungry.” That led to a talk about animal intelligence, especially that of octopi. Dean said they were too smart to eat, so he’d stopped. We’re still thinking about that.
Meanwhile, the food (and wine) kept coming, so much that when a server offered raviolis in tomato sauce on top of the array of starters some of us shook her off to save room for the roast meats and the salads, fresh fruits and desserts to follow.
We all stumbled off to our rooms after a couple of hours and slept soundly. Tomorrow, while the others stayed on, we headed for the coast.
The idea of the Nuragi fascinated us before we even set foot in Sardinia. A civilization that had existed nowhere else, and we’d never even heard of it. We wanted to find out as much as we could about the Nuragi.
Then during our planning, we noticed on TripAdvisor that other travelers raved about Riccardo Mingola , a private tour guide, and before we left New York, we lined him up to take us Su Nuraxi, the Nuragic site at Barumini north of Cagliari.
Riccardo met us at 9:15 in front of the Palazzo Dessy. We walked down to the marina and hopped in his car for the hour-long trip to Barumini.
Riccardo, a Cagliari native, clearly loves his home town and its island. He earned masters degrees in History and Society and Tourism Science to help him share his passion with others.
Riccardo Mingola tour guide in Sardinia
On our travels, we discovered that one of the great things about riding around with locals, wherever you are, is that they talk about life in general and you get to learn a lot about the place you’re visiting.
Riccardo bemoaned Sardinia’s economy. “I’m thirty-seven years old, married and have a new baby girl,” he said. “I’m lucky. Most of my friends can’t afford to get married. This generation is different from our parents’ generation. People my age don’t have a steady job, or make enough money.” In fact, the island with 1.7 million people has overall unemployment of about 18.6 percent, which leaves a lot of room for honest complaint.
He blamed the European Union and what he sees as the lack of control that Italy and Sardinia have over their economies. “Imagine if the U.S. couldn’t control the Federal Reserve,” he said indignantly.
But he quickly turned away from money matters and pointed to the hilly mountains that loomed in front of us. “This is called the Marmilla Region because the mountains are shaped like breasts,” he explained with not a hint of smile
We left the highway and turned onto a road that led through a series of small towns.
“This is what I love,” he said, pointing to murals painted on the walls of houses that we passed. “You’ll see when you go around Sardinia that the villages have murals.” Of course, Barbara had to get out and take photos.
Then we drove on a bit, and turned into a parking lot below a hill. This was what we had come to see.
Looking toward Su Nuraxi, Sardinia
The hill was just a hill when archeologist Giovanni Lilliu began digging there in the 1940s. The Nuragic remains that he unearthed by 1952 proved to be the most complete example of what these Bronze Age people built between 1600 and 1200 BC and inhabited into the Christian era.
Nuragi lived all over Sardinia and more than 7,000 sites have been discovered so far. But Barumini, Riccardo said, would show us more than any other not just where, but how these people lived. UNESCO designated it a World Heritage site and we soon would see why.
We walked to what looked at first like a pile of tumbled stones. In fact “Nuragi” derives from words for “pile of stones” and “cavity,” and as we grew closer it took shape as a complex of conical towers at the crest of a low hilltop with a command of the surrounding countryside.
Riccardo led us to the central complex first. He explained as we passed through the “village” of outbuildings where regular Nuragi lived that he wanted us to see what had anchored the site and, even with its top now open to the sky, was most original.
Footprint of Su Nuraxi community buildings
We followed him up a set of steps to a platform that provided access to the central tower. Once over 60 feet high, the loss of its upmost of three chambers enclosed by a domed top shaved it down to about 50 feet. The stones that built it are massive at ground level and diminish as they rise.
From the platform, Riccardo pointed us to a tiny opening. This led to a circular stone stairway that we ducked into and twisted our way down into the main chamber. The Nuragi must have been small, spry people to get in and out. Going in we passed an Irishwoman who wasn’t so small. She leaned against a railing and said with horrified conviction, “There’s no way I’m going to get stuck in there!”
Emerging from the steps as pretzels, we untwisted ourselves and looked around.
We were in a courtyard, once enclosed, next to the main, ground-level chamber.
Riccardo led us in and we stood in the middle of what had once been a complete room dotted by openings in the stacked stone walls. “Can you find the hidden room?” Riccardo asked.
We hunted around until we found a panel on the left wall. That led to an opening. “What was it used for?” Barbara wondered. Riccardo said archeologists can only guess. “Maybe it’s where they kept their spice jars,” Barbara said.
The sophistication didn’t stop with hidden rooms. Many of the building stones, which were volcanic basalt, were shaped into lintels to form window and passage openings.
Light-colored stones mixed with the black volcanic basalt in the tower walls; the Nuragi clearly used whatever was at hand.
Down low, even on a hot day late in June, the air inside the rooms was cool and some of the wall openings were probably used for food storage. A well sunk into the floor provided water.
Four more conical towers, linked by a curtain wall, stood outside the central one and some of these had survived nearly complete for more than three millennia. More towers surrounded these. The tallest of them must have been manned by Nuragic sentries to watch the surrounding countryside for signs of danger.
Outside of these lay clustered dwelling units. Most were round, and would have had roofs built of wood and thatch. Among them were scattered wells and fire pits with openings in the walls for ventilation, stone basins for water, and sites for religious rituals.
Photo by Riccardo Mingola
It looked like a really rough first draft of a city. Unlike monumental wonders of the distant ancient world like the pyramids or Stonehenge, you could see how the structures served the needs of the people who lived in them, not the glory of their rulers.
It showed that people even millennia ago tended to cluster for mutual advantage, defensively but also socially. You could actually see what the people who built them had in mind. I found it thrilling, and
Barbara interpreted my enthusiasm as a sign that my 0.2 percent Sardinian DNA made me a Nuragi, by affinity if not by blood.
Afterward, Riccardo drove us to the Giara di Gesturi, an upland plateau a few miles north of Barumini.
The road was lined with wild flowers, orange red poppies blazing in the sun.
Riccardo said wild horses lived on the plateau. He wanted to see if they were still around, drinking from two rainwater lakes that usually go dry in summer. “If we see them, be still and not too loud,” he said. “They run away from people.”
We walked for a quarter of a mile along a dusty road until we came to a lake on our left.
It was low but still wet, and there on the back side were about a dozen horses, drinking as they stood up to their ankles in the water. They looked small, and they were all black or lustrous dark brown, a color horse people call bay. Some say they have been here since Nuragic times, others believe they were imported by Phoenicians. Whatever their origins, they’re the last wild horses left in Europe.
“Another,” he said and motioned us to walk farther up the road. After about five minutes, we spotted the second lake, with more horses drinking and nipping at leaves protruding from the water.
Back in the car, we headed to the Casa Zapata, a 16th century Spanish palace that was built over another Nuragic site. Nobody knew this until 1990, when the Barumini municipality was restoring it as a museum.
The restoration took an abrupt turn and now, in addition to displaying Zapata family and church artifacts,
the museum shows through plexiglass panels remains of a Nuragic complex built along the same lines as its Su Nuraxi neighbor.
Back in Cagliari, Riccardo dropped us in the Marina District. He’d given us a wealth of information for his 150 euro fee and we had a great time. Now we were halfway through the afternoon, and we returned to Su Cumbidu for another late antipasti.
We had one more must-see in Cagliari. We walked uphill, and around another hill, and another hill after that until we found the ruins of the Roman amphitheater near the edge of Il Castello. Carved into a hillside in the 2nd century A.D., it sat as many as 10,000 spectators — the entire population of Cagliari at the time — for gladiatorial blood sports. Two tired workers were selling entry tickets in the late afternoon heat, but we found the view from the tree-lined road outside just as satisfying.
Our second night in Cagliari confirmed the first: Italians wherever they are take their food seriously, and if they’re on an island or near a coast that means seafood tops the menu.
Riccardo enthusiastically recommended Trattoria Lillicu, a family-run place that dates to 1938 and was just steps away from Palazzo Dessy on Via Sardegna. The waiters didn’t hand us menus, they just told us what they had. That included tuna tartare and octopus salad for starters, pasta with clams and bottarga (tuna eggs), and fresh fish prepared how we liked it. With an excellent Sardinian Vermentino, a wine the island excels in, we made our last discovery on a day full of them. This time it was a recipe for happiness.
Kravice Falls, Montenegro, Perast and the Beautiful Bay of Kotor
A Trip To The Balkans Part 4
by Nick Taylor and Barbara Nevins Taylor
With Montenegro in the news thanks to President Trump’s questioning its membership in NATO, we want to share what we found on our trip to the small and scenic Balkan country.
We began in Mostar, Bosnia, and detoured southwest to see the waterfalls at Kravice, which locals described as spectacular. Lonely Planet’s Eastern Europe guide calls them a “splendid . . . mini-Niagara.”
The road took us up and across a stark plateau, then descended through a series of small towns until we saw the signs to Kravice with a falling water logo. Soon we entered a dusty parking lot with a smattering of trees. One was free and we parked beneath its shade. The heat wave was still blistering the Balkans, with high 90s F.
At the window to pay the parking fee we searched our pockets and realized we used up our supply of Bosnian money. Others had the same problem, and a man in front of us paid five euros.
We didn’t have any euros, but I thumbed through my wallet and pulled out a five dollar bill and handed it to the attendant, shrugging to say I didn’t have what he wanted. He took it, held it up, looked at it front and back, and nodded with an expression that said, “I don’t know why I’m doing this.”
We joined a steady stream of visitors, many families carrying towels and beach chairs, on the path down to the waterfalls. Here and there stone steps broke the path, which switched back on itself because the grade was steep. The sound of water falling on water rose from below.
At a final set of steps the falls came into view. As many as ten cascades sixty to eighty feet high plunged down green cliffsides into a swimming hole. Swimmers batted a beach ball around out in its center, while bathers sprawled in the sun around its sandy edges. It was a lovely setting, but to call these falls a “mini-Niagara” was pure exaggeration.
Barbara and I took a few pictures and climbed back to the parking lot. But first we made a stop. And again, the cleanliness of public restrooms surprised and delighted us. Cleanliness seems like a byword for the Balkans. Every hotel small or large was clean. Every public restroom along the way was extremely clean. Barbara had a fussy mom, and passed the cleanliness bug along to her, especially about public restrooms. So this became very important.
On the road again, we set our sights for Montenegro and the Bay of Kotor.
This meant we had to make a choice. We’d learned that crossing borders in the Balkans can consumer a lot of time.
So should we head for the busier crossing near Trebinje and the coast, or the more remote one in the mountains near Bileca? We chose Bileca.
Once more the road led through spectacular stark mountains and towns that showed up only as dots on our Hertz map of the western Balkans.
At Bileca we thought about lunch and remembered we were Bosnian cash poor. We got fifty convertible marks at a cash machine, bought a couple of sandwiches and spent the rest filling up with gas. Then we headed for the border.
Bileca lies at the north end of Bileca Lake, created when the Tresbisnjica River was dammed for hydroelectricity in 1968. Some of the lake overlaps into Montenegro.
The road to the border took us along its north shore. Soon we rose to the mountain pass and the crossing at Vracenovici.
The smattering of trucks and cars told us we had made the right choice.
The Republika Srpska border guard gave us a perfunctory wave through. On the Montenegro side, Barbara took our passports and car papers into the checkpoint office, chatted with border guards Dragon and Vladon, watched them scan the passports and returned in five minutes giving a smile and a thumbs-up.
Signs to Kotor didn’t exist and we made a wrong turn that took us onto a narrow dirt road where we met a local family in a dusty Mercedes. I asked the driver if it was the road to Kotor. He shook his head, clamped his left hand on his right arm and pointed back the way we’d come. I gathered that meant a right turn somewhere, and one more stop to ask directions confirmed it.
We followed a narrow road with crumbling edges but trucks going the same way indicated it was a road to somewhere. Then it improved and opened up vistas, yet again, of the impossibly rugged mountains we’d seen throughout our trip.
We emerged from the mountains above the Bay of Kotor. My sailing friend Spencer Smith, who keeps his boat on the Croatian coast, said it was beautiful and boy was he was right.
The green mountains plunged steeply and held the sprawling bay, shaped like a rough anchor, in a sheltering embrace. Beyond its far side, though more mountains blocked the view, you sensed the empty horizon over the Adriatic Sea.
The road descended and switched back to follow the shoreline. We passed Strp and Risan.
Hotels clustered on the high side of the road. Traffic slowed near Perast, our destination, with buses and day trippers’ cars directed toward a parking area. I said we were going to the Hotel Conte, and got waved through to a narrow road along the water.
We’d found the Conte Hotel on Booking.com and it proved a good and interesting choice. The hotel reception office faces the bay and many of the rooms lay tucked away in the warren of centuries-old stone houses on the hillside.
“We have rooms all over the place,” said the receptionist when we checked in. A valet disappeared to stash our car somewhere and we paused to take in the view.
We sat at one of the hotel’s waterside tables
and enjoyed glasses of complimentary prosecco. We felt a rush of overwhelming pleasure at the peace and the calm of this beautiful place.
Although we really didn’t want to leave the water’s edge, we knew we should find our room.
Two big young men, hotel employees, pulled our bags and led us past a church, a basketball court and ice cream shop.
We should say that we consistently met tall, big men in the Balkans. In fact the data collected by people who chart this stuff indicates Montenegrins, Croatians, Serbians and Bosnians, all people who live in the Dinaric Alps region, run among the tallest in the world. They average over six feet one.
Montenegro also ranks as one of those countries others have fought over for centuries. It only became a nation on its own in 2006.
It was part of the Byzantine Empire in the 10th century and then became aligned with Serbia in the 12th and 13th centuries.
Courtesy Wikimedia public domain
By the 15th century Venice and Hungary vied for power here with Venice gaining the upper hand until the French had a brief reign in the early 19th century. Then Austria captured the area and ruled until 1918, when Perast and Montenegro became part of Yugoslavia. During World War II, Mussolini annexed it and put the area under the Governorship of Dalmatia until it was returned to Yugoslavia in 1945.
U.N. Map of Yugoslavia, Creative Commons License, Public Domain
More recently, Montenegro, a little smaller than Connecticut, was very much involved in the brutality of the 1990s’ Balkan war. As Croatia moved to pull out of Yugoslavia in 1991, Montenegro aligned with Serbia and its army attacked and bombed Dubrovnik.
Courtesy Wikimedia
The Serb-Montenegro alliance was partly based on religion; the Montenegrins, like the Serbs, practice Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Twelve percent of the people in Croatia were Serbian at the start of the war and they didn’t want to give up their land to the Catholic Croatians, just as they didn’t want to give up their territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina to Muslims.
Perast, Bay of Kotor, Photo by Marcin Konsek, Creative Commons License
Back in the present, Barbara asked Nick, the hotel staffer who pulled her bag, whether he was Catholic or Christian Orthodox. She felt him bristle and grow an inch beside her. “Christian Orthodox. We are Christian Orthodox here in Montenegro,” he said. Actually, 74 percent of the country is Orthodox, 3.5 percent Catholic and 18 percent Muslim, according to the U.S. State Department.
We turned beside a building where the walk led to a long set of stone steps.
Nick and his colleague hoisted our (heavy) bags and started climbing. This Nick was glad to have the chore taken off my hands.
We reached a small landing near the top, and Nick’s partner put down the bag he carried and disappeared.
Nick opened the door to our room and revealed much more than a room, much more than what we anticipated when we booked.
It was a lavish studio suite that extended past a sofa and a king-sized bed to a bathroom that featured, in addition to the usual fixtures,
a jetted spa that looked as if four people (or two large Balkan men) could fit in.
We rolled our eyes. Who, with eye candy like the Bay of Kotor right outside, would spend time lolling in a hot tub? Well, maybe in winter. As for views of the bay, a terrace with chairs and an umbrellaed table right across from our room was ours to use.
At some point we realized the small windows of our room’s one windowed wall opened on the terrace of a local family, and we could see as well as hear them mere feet away. Closing the frosted windows solved that problem.
We went down to dinner about nine. The evening softened around us as we sat inches from the water at the hotel’s outdoor restaurant and watched lights blink on around the bay.
After the lamb and meat of Bosnia, we craved fish. The menu had what we were after. Barbara ordered fish soup and I had gazpacho to start. She let the waiter talk her into poached sea bass and wished she’d had it grilled, while my plate with black risotto (with cuttlefish), skewered shrimp and grilled octopus and squid gave me the tastes I craved.
The wine list featured selections from around the Balkans as well as Italy, Spain and France, but when in Rome . . . A couple at the next table, Amy and Brian, encouraged us to drink Montenegrin.
The Montenegrin sauvignon blanc was delicious, and a bargain. Our dinner mates both worked for the government on Guernsey, an island in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy, that with two other islands form the Bailiwick of Guernsey. Guernsey has what they term “a crown dependency.
That means it governs itself but depends on the UK to defend it, provide the diplomatic links to the outside world, and assist with trade. Brian travels back and forth as a liaison between the government and the British parliament. Amy works with Guernsey’s legislators to help put their ideas into practice. She clearly understands how to plan.
Guernsey, Image via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons License
She was interested in Montenegro and organized their drive along the coast from south to north. Perast was their last stop. They talked about the beauty of the drive, and the places they stopped.
Photo Courtesy Pixabay
The conversation turned to the complications Brexit will cause for Guernsey and then they wanted to know, guess what? “How could Americans elect Donald Trump?” Amy asked. Brian shook his head. We launched into our explanation about angry working-class Americans anxious about the future of jobs and opportunities for them, and Trump’s brilliant manipulation of fear, the Russian election tampering, James Comey, and Hilary Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate.
Like others we met, they listened with great interest. But they still could not believe people from the country they have admired from afar could pick a man like Donald Trump.
We lingered after they left and enjoyed the scent of the sea and soft breeze of the night and did not talk about politics.
The next morning, we again took a table under the awnings at the water’s edge.
As we watched teeny fish swim after crumbs a child dropped in the water,
we wondered if we should stay another day. The beauty and calm of Perast enchanted us.
The buzzing of a drone coming over the water attracted our attention. It hovered and darted around, its camera apparently interested in what was on our breakfast plates. It flew away as soon as we tried to take a picture of it. A minute later, a smaller drone replaced it.
That got us talking to an extended family at the table behind us. A couple from Atlanta, where we had lived in the 1970s and early ’80s, was there with their two sons and their families.
These Georgians were vacationing in Montenegro because one of the sons, Drew Giblin, is the Cultural Affairs Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo and his wife also works for the State Department there. We explained that we’d just come from Sarajevo and Barbara asked, “How do you deal with what seems like an overwhelming challenge?” Drew smiled and said diplomatically, “We appreciate every small victory.”
We resisted the temptation to stay another day, but did take in the beautiful Church of St. Nicholas with a bell tower that you could climb.
Now we faced another route decision. Google Maps told us we’d get to Dubrovnik faster by the coastal road, but not by much. We could also return to the border crossing near Bilaca, tempting because of the light traffic. But that would mean two crossings, into Bosnia and then into Croatia. We chose the coastal route.
The road took us along the bay for thirty kilometers or so.
Near Herceg Novi it turned inland toward the Croatian border. Not long afterward the traffic slowed and stopped and we joined a long line of cars fitfully moving toward the checkpoints up ahead.
Twenty minutes later, though, we were through and driving toward Dubrovnik, its old city sheltered by stone defensive walls dating to before the Middle Ages. “Game of Thrones” location scouts saw Kings Landing in Dubrovnik and set other scenes from the popular HBO saga throughout the ancient city. We were eager to see it for ourselves.
Photo by Samum at the German language Wikipedia [GFDL
We discovered the pleasure of overnighting in Venice. It can be a perfect stop if you plan to fly from one part of Europe to another.
Yes. Spring and summer in Venice fill the narrow streets and bridges with tourists like the tides fill the canals. But even with a crush of people, Venice enchants.
We thought that we would try it when we scheduled our return from a trip to the Balkans. Our Volotea flight from Split in Croatia put us at Venice’s Marco Polo airport in barely an hour. We picked up our bags and headed to the arrivals area to figure out what form of transportation we should take into the island city. We hope our discoveries will save you time and anxiety.
We made a mistake with our first decision. We didn’t pay the 110 euros per person for the water taxi, which can take you directly to your hotel. Instead we bought round-trip tickets on an Alilaguna water bus, a motoscafo that’s smaller than a full-sized vaporetto, for 27 euros each.
We had arrived about noon and wanted to make the most of our day, but the water taxi took forever. You might think you’d get a good look at Venice from the water, but the scratched plexiglass windows don’t let you really see much. On top of that, the motoscafo slowed for smaller boats as a safety measure to avoid creating rocking wakes. Nice, but that made it a slow boat to Venice.
It stopped first at Murano. Then, like a bus, it took the local route with all the stops on the east side of Venice before chugging across to the Lido and then back to our stop at Arsenale. The entire trip took an hour and a half. On the plus side, we enjoyed chatting with our fellow passengers.
We called our hotel for directions. Allesandro, manning the desk at the Hotel Sant’Antonin, clearly had done this before. “Turn right. Cross the square diagonally. Don’t cross that next bridge. Turn right and start looking,” he told us. We started walking pulling our suitcases.
The Sant’Antonin, on the Rio de la Pleta that bisects Venice north to south, dates to the 16th century when it served as a warehouse for merchants. A renovation in the late 19th century turned the building into a home for a large family. The large high-ceilinged rooms with enormous windows facing the canal, and a beautiful back garden, give a romantic hint of what life in the house might have felt like.
Once we checked in, we began to wander to renew our acquaintance with Venice. We crossed the bridge over the Rio de la Pleta onto Salizzada dei Greci. We stopped at a small cafe for something light and quick and chanced into a moment of pre-“MeToo” political incorrectness.
The proprietor, probably in his late sixties, clearly loved the sight and feel of women. Maybe he fell instantly in love with every female customer who walked through the door. Or it might have been just Barbara. He transformed from a shopkeeper to a Lothario in seconds. We sat at a small table on the sidewalk and laughed when he bent to kiss her cheek. Before we knew it, he was pouring Prosecco for the three of us and joined us at our table.
He pointed across the street to a small house where he said he had been born. “Venice,” he said, sipping his sparkling wine, “It’s the most beautiful city in the world. Like nowhere else.” His enthusiasm shattered our language barrier. We went inside to take photos and while it seemed good-humored, his fingers hovered around Barbara’s bra line and dipped into creepiness and we escaped as quickly as we could.
We did laugh and and kept smiling as we joined the thicket of tourists on the narrow streets, quays and bridges that crossed the small canals. We stopped at the high point of one bridge and were rewarded with a concert when a group of gondolas passed on the canal below with an opera singer serenading the passengers and the rest of us.
We walked for the fun of it, with no destination in mind. But a map tempted us to small galleries featuring artists exhibiting in the Venice Biennale. We went through a gate in a courtyard and up the stairs into a building to look at work by artists from Zimbabwe. Three men and one woman displayed works on the theme of “Deconstructing Boundaries: Exploring Ideas of Belonging” using paintings, sculpture, and installation pieces, some of the work quite strong. We had planned to see more of the Biennale but the pavilions were far-flung and the time wasted in the motorscafo cut into our plans.
While there isn’t a Biennale this year, there is the wonderful Peggy Guggenheim Museum worth visiting at any time of the year.
But in Venice, on an overnight stop, you can stay outdoors and feast on the glorious architecture. Even if we only had a few of hours of daylight left, we knew we had to visit the gorgeous 11th Century Basilica San Marco, wrapped in its mashup of Byzantine and Gothic architecture. The cupolas, columns and cornices adorned with statues, floral decorations and mosaics make the church seem like a vision created by a wedding cake baker on acid.
When we felt a little dizzy with it all, we headed back to the hotel to refresh with a Prosecco. Alessandro recommended a couple of restaurants and we chose Osteria Oliva Nera, or Black Olive.
It was very close to the hotel, a short way past Barbara’s rambunctious admirer’s place on Salizzada dei Greci.
Isabella, the owner, set us up at an outside table right next to a party of four. We quickly fell into an easy conversation with the two couples from California.
It turned out that one couple had been coming to this restaurant for years. Richard Von Ernst, after a long successful career as a TV costume designer, was now in real estate, and his partner Thomas Casteneda did movie publicity. They also rented an apartment from Isabella. Their friends Dereck Whitfield, a defense lawyer for the auto industry, and Gary Dahle, a contractor who builds shopping centers, told us about the wonderful apartment Isabella had rented them, and raved about the way she seemed to go out of her way to make sure they had everything they needed, from pastries in the morning to wine in the evening.
We discovered later the restaurant’s website points out, “Not only a restaurant. We have apartments too.”
At dinner, we talked through our fish carpaccio starters — oysters, shrimp, and sea bass and tuna crudo. And the conversation continued as our main courses arrived. Nick had sea bass filet with polenta and grilled tomatoes, and Barbara had her favorite spaghetti with red mullet bottarga. Isabella recommended a Pinot Grigio and began to treat us as if we’d been coming there for years as well.
We got to the hotel about 12:30 and made sensible plans for our 7 a.m. departure. This time we ordered a water taxi.
It arrived promptly just as a delivery boat was unloading cases of water. We climbed over the deck of the barge onto the elegant taxi.
What a huge and welcome difference! In no time we left the small canal behind and the driver throttled up the powerful engine to speed us through the channel we’d poked along the day before. It was a clear day, cool in the early morning, and Barbara shot video with the wind blowing through her hair. We docked at Marco Polo in less than twenty minutes, and the 120 euros we paid the driver when we climbed off was more than worth it.
Overnighting in Venice will definitely figure in our plans again.
I know a man who believes his mother hated him. He tells me his story piece by piece when we sit down to work on a book proposal about his life. But I wonder if he’s wrong about his mother.
His father died before he was born and she shunted him into an orphanage where he spent his childhood and graduated high school. He saw her seldom, but he told me she showed up twice on Mothers’ Day, drunk the first time, argumentative the next.
And then on another Mothers’ Day, years later, he called the hospital where he had seen her just two days earlier to learn that she had died. His fiancée at the time said, “She must have really hated you, to die on Mothers’ Day.”
I’m not so sure. Only mothers can know what they will do for their children and how they will do it. My subject’s father was either a machinist’s helper or a fruit and produce seller, according to his death certificate and other documents, and his death at 33 left his pregnant widow with few resources. She had no job skills. No doubt she had problems, too, as he’s described.
But getting him into Girard College, the orphanage that shaped and educated him, was a significant feat.
They had to test him and for that she had to get him from the shabby apartment she shared with her father to Girard’s walled 40-acre campus west of center city Philadelphia. Before that, she had to convince him that his first months of public school before he could enter the orphanage at six could not be wasted. And when he passed the tests and was admitted, she had to take him there and give him up.
It cannot have been as easy for her as his memory makes it seem. She turned him over to a governess and walked away without a word, he said. Maybe that was the only way that wasn’t too hard.
This man bears scars from his mother’s absence. He didn’t have what the luckiest children have, parental love that they can trust beyond all doubt. But what she gave him was a chance at an education and security she couldn’t provide. Almost as soon as he left the orphanage at 17, he began to use the lessons he learned there to build a rich and accomplished life.
Why would Republicans pass a “tax reform” bill that rewards corporations and the rich at the expense of most of the rest of the country? To unravel New deal protections. They’ve tried for eighty years to destroy President Franklin Roosevelt’s (FDR’s) New Deal and restore the government for rich people that preceded FDR’s reforms. This tax bill threatens New Deal protections because it inflates the deficit and will trigger demands to cut government services we all depend upon.
The New Deal rewrote the compact between America’s government and its citizens. It recognized for the first time the responsibility the nation bore for its people. The Great Depression of the 1930s exposed the the need to give workers and the old and unemployed a fighting chance and to protect them from the wide swings and uncertainties of unfettered laissez faire economics. Today Republicans call it free market economics. They insist that going back to the standards that led to the Great Depression is a good thing.
FDR and a farmer in Georgia, National Archive Photo, Roosevelt Library
Social Security grew out of that need and recognition. So did unemployment insurance, wage and hour laws, restrictions on child labor, and laws that allowed collective bargaining. The government insured people’s savings accounts and stopped banks from gambling with their depositors’ money. I wrote about this in my 2008 book, American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of The WPA, When Roosevelt Put The Nation To Work.
Big businesses, corporations, the rich, and some with honest political beliefs that providing a safety net is wrong, have been circling the New Deal like jackals ever since.
The tax bill fifty-one Republican senators passed in the pre-dawn hours of December 2, with no public hearings, no bipartisan participation and scribbled amendments to buy off reluctant members, is only a start. They, their House counterparts, and the Trump administration aim to bring down a legacy of progressive legislation that includes: protections for elderly citizens, the sick, the unemployed, consumers, union members, low-wage workers, voters, women, racial and sexual minorities, our public lands and air and water.
Programs that helped create and sustain a broad democracy and the greatest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world may soon be ripped to shreds.
Who is behind it and why?
Why? To keep the money flowing. Donors like the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, and Robert and Rebekah Mercer mirror the rich man’s anti-New Deal coalition called the Liberty League. It formed in 1934 backed by du Pont gunpowder and J.P. Morgan banking money. The du Ponts alone poured almost a million dollars into the 1936 Republican campaign, money used in some cases to incite racism and racism. Steve Bannon would have been proud. Then, as now, there were no effective limits on campaign contributions. Shadowy groups acting on their own gave the league the cover of deniability. Officially, it promised an “unremitting” fight against “government encroachment upon the rights of citizens.” The script hasn’t changed one bit.
Other distant echoes reverberate in this first year of Trump. Lammot du Pont argued that “all government regulation of business . . . should be abolished.” He pressed his case in millions of pamphlets and the new technology of radio, harnessed via nationwide broadcasts made on purchased time.
Irénée du Pont was talking about makers vs. takers way back then. He said, “The Roosevelt administration practices the socialistic maxim ‘work like hell so that the parasites may get the benefit of your labor.'” When FDR and the Democrats complained about the yawning gap between the richest Americans and all the rest, Republicans charged them with waging class warfare. That script remains the same as well.
Reading socialism or worse into the New Deal was standard fare. Worse was represented by Al Smith, the former New York governor and Democratic presidential candidate who lost to Herbert Hoover in 1928.
Photo in Public Domain
Smith had become reactionary in the extreme. On the eve of the 1936 election, he railed that Roosevelt was sowing the seeds for communist control of the United States. Speaking in Albany, NY, he said the New Deal was using taxpayer’s money “to train young men to go out and preach communism, to preach the gospel of ‘down with property, down with capital, down with government, down with church, yes, down with God.'”
“Down with government” is today’s Republican mantra in a nutshell. Oddly, or maybe not oddly at all, Smith’s 1936 accusations are the bedrock of Republican rhetoric repeated over and over on Fox and Breitbart and the rest of the right-wing talk machine.
The tax bill the Republicans just passed will add $1 trillion to the national debt, so the double-speak narrative they’ve shaped will blame government for overspending and then try to carve the guts out of what have been fundamental facts of life for most Americans for at least three generations.
But FDR won 48 states in that 1936 election and 523 electoral votes to two. And the 2018 mid-term elections are less than a year away. So this means if you care about Social Security, unemployment insurance, wage and hour laws, Medicare our national parks and environment, safe drinking water and clean air, seriously think about who voted for the current tax bill that will undermine all of the things you value.
If you don’t like what Congress is doing, let your Senators and Representatives know. Here’s how:
Call the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121and ask for them. You can find your U.S. Representative here.
Image by EmjeR, Creative Commons License
Ele
We talked about the earliest choices we make as children and whether they foretell one’s course in life. We tried to remember what might have happened to two toddlers that encouraged their mutual lust for history, travel, road trips and off-the-beaten-track locales and, years later, brought them to Sardinia.
Now the tourist buses we saw in the square spill out visitors to photograph the political murals that adorn town walls
Fleeing Alghero for Su Gologone Mountain Luxury
Locals flocking to the beach adjoining Nora and its attractions on a summer Saturday had slammed the parking areas.
Over the years, teams from the University of Genoa and the University of Cagliari unearthed the city and learned how people in the stratified Roman society lived. 
Officials say 90 percent of Fort Myers Beach, Florida is destroyed.
The bison meandered through the grass between the hills and they seemed indifferent to people like us who wanted to capture them in photos or on video.
A rainbow gave the bunnies a golden glow. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com.
Long Floor Mosiac Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily. Photo by ConsumerMojo.com
Finding a parking spot turned into a chore. By the time we got the car safely situated, decent restaurants weren’t serving lunch and we ended up at place under the umbrellas across from the B&B.
The road was lined with wild flowers, orange red poppies blazing in the sun.
The Republika Srpska border guard gave us a perfunctory wave through. On the Montenegro side, Barbara took our passports and car papers into the checkpoint office, chatted with border guards Dragon and Vladon, watched them scan the passports and returned in five minutes giving a smile and a thumbs-up. 
