Part One

A song plays on the 2024 equivalent of the juke box. It's the Doors. 'People Are Strange'. Tell me about it, Jim, tell me about it.

I'm sitting on a slightly hard seat in a cafe bar. This is Sassari, the second most populous place in Sardinia, and they go in for cafe bars big-time here. Restaurants are few and far between. Maybe because this is a working city, where tourism is all-but non-existent. Most people aren't quite up for the whole Italian restaurant experience every lunch time. But they'll do a good cafe bar.

I'm awaiting a dish of ravioli con sugo, a tomato-based sauce that commonly accompanies this kind of meal. It's a staple for folk who don't eat meat or fish - though eating non-carnivorous is not a problem in Italy, the way it might still be in France and Spain. 

The Righteous Brothers come on, and funny feelings begin to emerge through my body. Real feelings. People don't stop to think about why this kind of music, capable of touching the soul, disappeared, to be replaced by noise that is either aggressive in intent or purely anodyne. In the mainstream, at least. It's not 'musical progress', folks, not at all. 

People still love listening to music from that era not out of nostalgia, but because it touches them, wakes up and expresses aspects of their being. They will feel more complete as a result. It's a funny thing. Watch old film clips of the 'stars' of the time, and the performance is stilted, wooden, choreographed to maximum cheese effect. Unnatural. The Righteous Brothers are a good example. But listen to the music........ 

Outdoors, it is warm enough, but the sky is overcast, grey. Wind is funnelled through the arcade, and squally showers have Sardinians running for cover. Black guys wander through the sheltered areas, selling umbrellas. "Ten euros." Tomorrow, when the weather is better, they will be back with sun hats and tacky souvenirs.  

Strung along side-by-side, three piazzas extend across the hills which mark the focus of the centro storico of Sassari. It  is here that our cafe bar is located. Organ-based twelve-bar blues played by Georgie Fame or Brian Auger or someone comes and goes, before the ravioli finally arrive. Nestled in a tiny bowl, they look as if they will all be gone in thirty seconds flat. In reality, they are nourishing, and will keep me satisfied the afternoon long. 

Meanwhile, my wife eats something else. I do not recall what, but it's substantial enough to warrant a glass of red wine as accompaniment. As we settle down to dine, the Doors make a return. Roadhouse Blues. I wonder whether the sweet teenage Sardinian girl who serves us likes this music. Or whether she even notices. 

My mother had a strange and utter fondness for Roadhouse Blues. She was ill in bed, on the way out, really. But put Roadhouse Blues on the CD player and she would perk up, her eyes alight, her mouth breaking into a broad and mischievous smile. Sometimes she would begin to move about rhythmically in bed, in time to the music. 

It's time to leave, and to explore a bit more. My wife engages in her normal ritual of asking which wine it is that she was drinking. There follows the normal ritual huddle of cafe workers, who try to remember which one they served to her. Uncertainly someone finally hands over a bottle, which my wife ritually examines, then hands back, none the wiser, as she doesn't understand a word of Italian......

Part Two

And now out into the Sardinian afternoon. And to get lost. I spend a lot of time being lost. It happened in Olbia, where we stayed for three days beforehand. And now it happens in Sassari.

I don't really understand. I have successfully negotiated my way to the top of some of the most remote and isolated mountain peaks in Scotland using map and compass. But the streets of Sardinia have me beat.

The maps are clear enough, but they don't seem to work. Maybe some of the street names are different from those on the maps; and for sure the street signs are absent when you most sorely need them. And the names of the streets all seem the same. Is Corso Giovanni Andrea the same as Corso Andrea? Maybe yes; maybe no. And the signs to the museums and churches all give up once they've sent you in one particular direction.

We look for the Duomo, but it's nowhere to be seen. And then stumble upon it later, when we're trying to get somewhere else. It's a funny affair, with a swirly fancy Baroque facade, while the rest of the exterior is plain and simple Romanesque, all built in lively off-yellow stone. 

Sassari does its best to persuade you of its many attractions. If you can find it, the tourist information office is an attractive little place, where two remarkably friendly and helpful people will detail for you everything that there is to see, and draw large circles in pen around the major sights. You exit invigorated, and begin to explore the compact little area that is the historic centre. The wandering is pleasant enough; but the truth is that, in Sassari, there is not an awful lot to see..... 

Part Three 

In January 1921, along with his wife Frieda, D.H. Lawrence made a brief visit to Sardinia. He apparently wanted a change from Sicily, where he was living at the time, and the few days spent in Sardinia form the basis for his book of travel writing 'Sea and Sardinia'.

Their first port-of-call was Cagliari, largest settlement on the island. But then they took the train north and inland. First to Mandas and then to Sorgono. Even today, these tiny townships entertain very few visitors; in D.H. Lawrence's day they were almost unknown.

And then they pushed on north, by bus, to Nuoro. Nuoro is a rather larger place, though still remote from the comings-and-goings of the rest of the world. And it moved Lawrence to write. Here is what he had to say:

"There is nothing to see in Nuoro: which, to tell the truth, is always a relief. Sights are an irritating bore. Thank heaven there isn't a bit of Perugino or anything Pisan in the place: that I know of. Happy is the town that has nothing to show. What a lot of stunts and affectations it saves! Life is then life, not museum-stuffing. One could saunter along the rather inert, narrow, Monday-morning street, and see the women having a bit of a gossip, and see an old crone with a basket of bread on her head, and see the unwilling ones hanging back from work, and the whole current of industry disinclined to flow. Life is life and things are things. I am sick of gaping things, even Peruginos. I have had my thrills from Carpaccio and Botticelli. But now I've had enough....."

Life is life in Sassari is the same; not a lot to see; and things are pretty much things. And by now I am going down rapidly with a rasping cough and streaming cold, the kind that I only seem to get when away.

Come evening, and before I disappeared completely into a feverish mess, I dragged myself out for a walk. We found a long, straight road heading directly up the hill outside the hotel. Surely even we would not get lost if we followed this through the darkness. 

We were walking back home when I looked across the road and spotted something. "Look!" I exclaimed through the blur of malady. "Look at that supermarket!"

Out of the dark night it shone bright, friendly, welcoming. I could hardly believe my eyes. 'Come on in' it seemed to be saying. 'I am warm, happy to have you in.'

It's a thing. Supermarkets - or at least most supermarkets - in the UK. Grey, grey, grey. The lighting minimal and functional. Most supermarkets of my acquaintance look like old warehouses, or disused aeroplane hangars, that someone has gone into at midnight, put up some shelves with tins of tomatoes, and deemed it suitable for human use. Grey, depressing, awful. It says a lot about the state of the nation.

And conversely, the bright welcoming supermarket of Sassari. It says everything about Italian mentality. They wouldn't accept the British version, for sure. Too much of an insult to life, to going about your daily affairs. The supermarkets say everything there is to say about the Italian and the British attitudes to life. And, while such things are fickle beyond words, still you are better off these days in Georgia Meloni's Italy than under the sinister shadow of the dark entities in charge in the UK. 

Part Four  

All that remains is to return the way we came a couple of days beforehand, from nothing-to-see Sassari to slightly-more-to-look-at Olbia. This entails a trip across the northern interior of Sardinia by public transport.

It's a bit like northern Scotland where, outside the towns, trains and buses are scarce. It's a single-track railway; however, unlike its Scottish counterpart, it is spotless, clean. And the toilets are spacious, immaculate, properly maintained. In this short stay, I detect none of the engineered creeping dystopia that is now characteristic of British public life. There remains some pride in Italy, and in being Italian.

Halfway across the great Sardinian outback we arrive at the station of Ozieri-Chilivani. Head in one direction and you'll reach the one-horse township of Ozieri; go the other way and you'll end up in the one-horse watering hole of Chilivani. In the middle is the station. What secrets the place may hold are outside our ken, however, as we are bundled from the train into a swanky bus for the remainder of the journey. The line and stations are being improved, apparently.

Unspectacular landscapes pass us by, until we near Olbia on the east coast. Here, jagged dry limestone peaks rise from the plateau, steep and precipitous. The scenery is rather wild and exciting; but all too soon we are descending towards the coast, and the end of the line.

Olbia is more geared to visitors than is Sassari. The cafe bars are gone, replaced by restaurants and pizzerias. A few of these establishments display their superior credentials by posting notices at their entrance: 'No pizza'. That's for plebs.....

Olbia boasts a steady tourist trade, but quiet and manageable - in October at least. The central piazza is the perfect place to spend an hour or two quietly observing the world and dozing in spontaneous siesta. And a stroll beside the open waterfront, be it in daytime or during the hours of evening, is one of the most therapeutic activities I have engaged in for a long long time. There is a civilised air about things in Olbia; I rather like it.

There is, however, not a Perugino in sight in Olbia. Nor anywhere else in Sardinia, for that matter. I find it curious that the island suffered invasion and occupation time and again from anybody who took a fancy. Yet no-one thought to get on a ship in Genoa or Pisa with a handful of painting materials and do an altarpiece or two during that time we have learnt not to call 'the Renaissance.'

People come to Olbia, and to Sardinia in general, for the beach. The island is home to a myriad of clean, sandy, unspoilt stretches along its enormous coastline. We went to the beach one day. It wasn't the best of times, as the sky was pretty overcast by the time we got there, and a wind was preventing it from being hugely relaxing. Nevertheless, the beaches come highly recommended, if you like that kind of thing.

And so comes to an end the report. The illness is not very nice, and continues to penetrate every nook and cranny in my ageing body. A visit to the physiotherapist beckons next week if things don't pick up. Hip, gluteus maximus, getting worse by the day. Probably needs treatment, unless I'm prepared to spend the rest of my life on ibuprofen.In the meantime, the Sardinian sun continues to shine into the deep autumn. I might be back.... 

Images: Portrait of Perugino; Duomo, Sassari; Vision of St Bernard, Perugino; Sassari station