Doing nothing is a low bar aspiration for inveterate travellers, but sometimes on a longer trip you just have to stop and escape the tyranny of the 'where next' mindset. We've been travelling for 30 days and so far stayed in 16 different places. Furthermore, Italy is not a relaxing place for a foreign driver especially one in a right hand drive biggish vehicle. There comes a point where I had to do something different, maybe even do nothing at all.
Although I was snarky about Camping Laguna Blu when we were here two weeks ago, I think my annoyance had more to do with the noise from Oktoberfest Sardinia than the site itself. It's quiet now and a lot more relaxed.
In fact, the place has quite a lot to recommend it. The pitches are big, the site is set in umbrella pine and eucalyptus woods with a big lagoon at the back of it and a nice beach across the road near the gate.
The facilities are ok, the showers a bit cramped and the hot water hit and miss, but in general terms it's comfortable.
The old walled city of Alghero is 15 minutes away by bike most of it on a cycle track.
There's a well stocked supermarket called Nonna Isa half way into the city and the very popular Gelateria 'Oops' just along the road from it.
Camping Laguna is a great place to be if you are planning to do very little, though we did clean the van inside and out and do the laundry.
The beach is in a big, sweeping bay, gently shelving, a great place both to swim and paddleboard. I did manage to stand-up for a bit, but I'm still disconcerted by the 'wobble' you get from the wavelets even on a flat calm sea.
I need more practice, but that's unlikely until next February when we are back in Spain and Portugal.
I wanted to visit the archeological museum in Alghero as it had some artefacts from nearby Nuraghic sites.
The place was confusingly organised in what seemed to be an old Palazzo, The artefacts were spread across three floors, up staircases with Escher-like qualities; all the interconnecting corridors looked identical; signage was minimal and the museum staff seemed to be channelling 'Mrs Overall' dubbed into Italian. The place was very confusing
.
In truth there really was not that much to see, partly because the most significant finds from local digs seem to have been removed to the regional museum in Sássari, but the main reason for the scant remains is more fundamental. Compared to other ancient Mediterranean cultures - Minoan, Mycenaean, Greek, Etruscan, Roman - Nuraghic people's 'stuff' seems curiously absent.
Still, it is possible to draw some conclusions about why there are so few artefacts from Nuraghic sites simply by running the basics through your head. The time frame is a tad mind-blowing. Sardinia' Nuraghic shepherds and herders were following their flocks when Santorini exploded and weakened the Minoan Civilisation on Crete in 1600BCE ; still tending them when King Solomon built a temple in Jerusalem about 600 years later and two centuries later when Carthage was founded by Phonecians from Tyre. A couple more centuries on when Athens fought off Persian aggression, then founded the world's first democracy and executed Socrates for asking too many questions, Sardinian shepherds were still semi-nomadic, and building giant dry stone towers all over the place. It was only when Rome became the dominant Mediterranean power that Sardinia's autonomous Nuraghic culture declined.
I think it's transhumanism that explains the lack of material artefacts. Think of other pastoralist cultures - Native Americans, the Sámi in Lapland, the Yurt dwelling Yak herders of Central Asia, the Bedouin, Kenya's Masai - all people who maintained a semi-nomadic lifestyle for centuries. In all these cases their dwellings were easily transportable and material goods kept to a minimum. In ancient Sardinia though the monumental Nuraghe may have acted as a clan strongholds or a gathering place, most of the of the population probably led semi-nomadic lives within tribal lands. It doesn't necessarily make the culture more primitive than their more materialistic City-state neighbours - the stories they told, festivals, dances, beliefs, may well have been as complex and rich, but those things are immaterial, so their culture all but vanished, reduced to intriguing fragments.
What I tried to do was to piece their story together s by looking at the pottery fragments that I had photographed in the museum.
The first fragment predates the Nuraghic age, an almost complete Neolithic pot dated between 4000 - 5000BCE. It can feel spine tingling when faced with something familiar that's 7000 years old.
The collared vases are from approximately the same time and have coarse decoration scratched into the clay.
The decoration on the Nuraghic era pottery is a little more developed.
However the Carthaginian ware from the same period is somewhat more sophisticated. The fact that both were found at the same site also shows that there were trade links between Sardinia and other parts of the Mediterranean at the time.
Given that the Nuraghe were built from the bronze age onwards through to the Roman era there were no metal artefacts in the museum aside from some copper ingots found in the shipwreck of a Carthegenian merchant ship. It does raise the question - why, given Sardinia's central position within the Mediterranean, did the island remain something of a backwater throughout most of the 1st millennium BCE?
To an extent it remains so, but it would be wrong to assert that it is undeveloped, even though Sardinia is significantly less populated than other parts of Italy. The best way to describe Sardinia is that it feels as if it had been left to its own devices, a little apart - quiet, introspective even. Not terms that immediately spring to mind if you brainstormed the word 'Italian'.
I'm writing this sitting on Fertilia beach on a warm, bluest of blue days in mid-October. The coastline curves southwards from here, the ancient ramparts and church towers of Alghero perfectly clear in the distance, beyond them blue-grey mountains. I've just been for a swim. Maybe I'll go for another, but before I do I need to photograph the water so on a chilly winter's day in the Pennines I can stare at it and recall exactly what perfection looks like.
Perfecto!
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