Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno

For nine years, from 1949 to 1957 W H Auden spent the summer months on Ischia, a small volcanic island in the Bay of Naples. Soon after he and his partner Chester Kallman moved and made Austria their permanent home he wrote a valedictory peaen to their time in Italy - 'Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno'.

It's far from being one his best, think - 'The Shield of Achilles', In Praise of Limestone' or 'Bucolics' each  must rank amongst the greatest poems written in English in the Twentieth Century. Compared to these 'Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno' is a light piece, but funny and engaging. It nails both the allure of the 'South' to buttoned-up northerners and the absurdities of their assumptions about the place. 

The poem concludes: "though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy,        There is no forgetting that one was."

And it's true, for some reason it is really difficult to feel sad in Italy. 

WeYesterday we moved from Alghero to a sosta in Porto San Paolo, back to the first place we stayed in when we arrived. It's only a few miles south of Olbia, convenient for the return crossing to Livorno that we have to catch in three days time.

We have good reason to feel miserable, not only does this represent our personal 'goodbye to the mezzogiorno' but annoyingly we've both succumbed to a fluey virus. Even though I'm feeling somewhat wiped out, unable to do the things we'd planned such as explore the nearby beaches on our bikes or have a final swim in the Med, I don't feel miserable, like I would at home. It's the Italiano effect!

Even if you feel dreadful there is no point in doing nothing. I didn't feel up to cycling and anything faster than a stroll seemed too much effort. We dialled down our expectations and took a slow 15 minute walk down to yet another positively reviewed gelateria. It has become an almost daily ritual. 

Now we can  attest to gelato's efficacy as an underappreciated tonic when suffering from a cold virus.

By the following day we had perked up a bit and managed to cycled to a nearby marina. In the summer Porto di Porto San Paolo is probably busy and vibrant as it's the departure point for day trips to the spectacular mountainous islet of Tavolara just across the bay. The small passenger ferry was still running but there were only a handful of people queuing up.

We wondered about having lunch out, but most places were closed up. Definitely an end of season vibe. The nearby fish restaurant was open but it was quite expensive, somewhere you would go for a nice lunch out not a delicious snack. Other than there was nothing, not even somewhere to have a coffee. We decided to head back to the van.

We are booked on  tomorrow's overnight ferry back to Livorno. However we have to vacate the sosta by 11am which means we have the afternoon and early evening to wile away before we need to head for Olbia docks.

Porto Taverna, where we camped for a few days when we arrived in Sardinia a little over three weeks ago, is only about five kilometres south of here. The campsite is closed now but there's a big beach parking near by. We decided to head there.

The light was stunning. In the heat of the summer it can be a tad hazy, but in autumn the Mezzogiorno assumes a depth and intensity that is scarcely believable, like CGI for real.

Three weeks ago by mid-afternoon temperature on the beach reached the high twenties - lazing about weather. Today its about five degrees cooler. There are wooden walkways around the nearby lagoons and marshes, previously we never got to explore them, it was just too hot.

Today was perfect, warm but crystal clear, things in the distance - razor sharp and the colours vivid.
Details- textures and patterns - the crinkly fissures of rocky Tavolara in the distance, close by, vivid green algae, like an alien frog spawn in the mirror still lagoon.

Bernard Berenson's notion of the 'tactile imagination' sprung to mind - it must be well over half a century since I studiously made notes from a dog eared copy of his classic 'Italian Painters of the Renaissance' that I came across in the school library. However some phrases mysteriously lodge in your brain. Chatgpt defines 'tactile imagination' as 'a painter’s ability to evoke in the viewer a sense of touch or physical presence—the feeling that the depicted forms have real, tangible volume and exist in three-dimensional space'. The idea asserts that the more textural something is the more real it feels and the more profoundly we respond to it. We are literally as well as figuratively 

The intensity of the light, the depth of colour and the way textures and patterns sing out makes the landscape of the Mezzogiorno feel immersive, addictive almost;  as Auden asserted, 'surfaces need not be superficial'.

So no wonder saying goodbye is so difficult, but 'go we must'. Come mid-afternoon we headed for the docks via a quick grocery shop in Lidl, afterwards parking in an area reserved for motorhomes about a kilometre from the Grimaldi terminal.

Sadly it is goodbye. I wondered if Sardinia actually counted as the part of the Mezzogiorno. Google said yes - Italy south of Campania, Sicily and Sardinia are all regarded  as 'the south' so far as EU structural funds and economic development is concerned. So in terms of economics and geography they all are treated the same. 

Culturally, however, there are differences. The exuberant somewhat madcap behaviour that Auden celebrates in his poem is certainly the norm in Naples or Palermo, but less noticeable in Sardinia. If there is such a thing as an Italian introvert perhaps you might chance upon one here.

As darkness fell we headed for the terminal. Loading was less chaotic than on the outward leg, but because of the number of trucks it took ages. An HGV jam is not surprising when you consider the  vast majority of the goods bought by Sardinia's one and a half million inhabitants arrive on the island on the back of a lorry. We departed eventually, about forty minutes late. 

We had a beer and a snacky supper in the bar then settled down in the cabin. Somewhat spartan but serviceable.

 It was just after dawn, around 7.30 am when we drove into the Livorno rush hour. The sky was overcast, threatening thundery showers later. It looked like late autumn. Most deciduous trees were still bright yellow, but the topmost branches bare. We may be 900 miles south of the Pennines but Tuscany felt distinctly northern.

Stop, relax, do bugger-all except eat gelato, sit on a beach and think about stuff...

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!

Ingorgo stradale, momento Nuraghic

 

Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean, only a little smaller than neighbouring Sicily. Big, but not huge, both are about the same area as Wales. 

So, at a stretch it would have been possible to drive the 180 miles from Jamaica Beach back to Laguna Blu Camping near Alghero in one go. However we want to stop off and visit Nuraghe Santu Antine, so splitting the trip made more sense. The challenge was to find somewhere en route to stay. We considered two sostas, one situated in an urban car park in the suburbs of Oristano, and another nearby in Santa Giusta. Both had mixed reviews, the one in Oristano was noisy, people were divided about Santa Giusta, everyone praised the layout and service point but a few people found the app operated entry system tricky to figure out.

It was slow going at first, to reach the motorway involved navigating back towards the outskirts of Cagliari on local roads with multiple roundabouts and inconsistent signing. We only went off track a couple of times, Google maps proved a better guide than the Sat Nav. She seemed determined to take us on a themed tour of the lesser frequented donkey tracks of southern Sardinia.

However once on the motorway we made rapid progress arriving outside the Santa Giusta sosta by mid-afternoon. The reviews were right, it was well designed and conveniently situated, but also entirely empty apart from one clapped out van in the corner which looked as if it had been rusting there for years. It was also true that the app based entry and payment system was bewildering. 

Even the version in English was very confusing. Moreover it demanded a lot of personal information - including my passport number and place of birth. I did comply, but was left wondering, is it wise to place so much personal information into an obscure app - am I inviting identity theft?

Having completed the process and gifted 'Inarea' the requisite €6.50 we followed the instructions to approach the entrance and zap a QR code with my phone. The barrier lifted, then immediately came down again before we could drive through. No amount of faffing about would shift it. The shenanigans had taken over half an hour. We decided to give up, though I did help myself to four watering cans worth of drinking water from the service point to top up our tank.

'Well at least the sosta in the car park in Oristano is only a ten minute drive', we agreed. It was true, unfortunately the street leading to it was being resurfaced and temporary diversions signs were in place that directed us through a grid of narrow one way streets. Google maps and the Sat Nav were useless - they didn't know about the road works. Eventually after a few tight squeezes we ended up parked on a scrap of waste ground next to the entrance to Oristano's main hospital. What now? The priority was to get out of Oristano so we reset the sat-nav back to another public car park is Santa Giusta, at least the place was quiet and next to the autostrada junction.

Parked there we hatched plan B. There are sostas here and there in Sardinian villages but we had been avoiding rural roads, particularly in upland areas. They are nerve-wracking if you happen to be driving anything bigger than a Fiat Panda. However Gill pinpointed a sosta at Semetene to the north of us. It was only 3.5kms from a junction and less than 20 Kms from Nuraghe Santu Antine that we were planning to visit tomorrow. 

The road to the sosta was only mildly alarming and its situation in an empty looking upland valley very beautiful.

The place was busier than we expected, almost a dozen mohos parked in the compact space. Luckily there was room for us, and a couple more that turned up at dusk. Not all days go to plan and today was certainly one of them.

It was overcast when we arrived, but just before sunset the cloud cover thinned and the green valley surrounding Semetene was bathed in a golden light.

 

The landscape looked Iberian rather than Italian. Perhaps it was the simple architecture of the village that reminded me of Spain. The regions of Italy are very diverse, both culturally, gastronomically and geographically, Ticino is not at all like Sicily. However there is something recognisably Italian about both. However, Sardinia sometimes feels like a different country altogether.

Next day we managed an early start, at least by our standards - around ten thirty. We are definitely one of the more tardy members of the motorhoming community. Quite often we are still having a bit of a lie-in when throb of adjacent Ducati shames into action. Today, as often, the sosta was almost deserted by the time we made our 'early departure'.

It was less than a half hour drive from the sosta to Nuraghe Santu Antine. The car park was small but luckily there was a scrap of waste ground at the far end big enough to accommodate a couple of motorhomes, Sadly the space left free was covered in big puddles after the overnight showers. 

There are about 7000 Nuraghic monuments scattered across the Sardinian landscape, many are in remote locations with little to see other than heaps of large boulders and a grassy mound. Only a few have been explored using modern archeological techniques. Santu Antine is one of the best preserved Nuraghe, the remains of a tribal fortress or'palatial dwelling' extended over many generations.

The ruins are varied, some are dwellings, great and small, others are tombs, there is little evidence of large scale temples or sacred spaces. Our knowledge of Nuraghic culture or history is very limited, but one thing the remains have in common is the building technique - round house structures using massive dry stone blocks predominantly.

Santu Antine lies a few hundred metres from the road, dominating a broad plain circled by mountains and old volcanic cones. Remains of another nuraghe can be seen in the middle distance. 

The culture that produced these monuments was long lived, the earliest Nuraghe dating from the middle bronze age, around 1600BCE. It appears that the Nuraghic age faded around the time Sardinia passed from Carthage's sphere of influence to Rome's, an outcome of the Second Punic War which ended in 201BCE. The most remarkable thing about Sardinia's first identifiable indigenous culture is not its longevity - 1400 years - but the fact that so little is known about it aside from several thousand piles of stones. How people lived, their beliefs and practices, political structure and language is largely a mystery.

Ancient Sardinians do get mentioned in passing by Hellenistic Greek writers, but mostly the comments relate to their mythological ancestry. In terms of practical information all you can glean is they were thought to have lived mainly inland and not on the coast, they were pastoralists and herders rather than farmers and were violent and warmongering. 

This would fit with the reconstruction of Nuraghe Santu Antine as a clan or tribal stronghold. Such arrangements were commonplace in other parts of the Mediterranean even up until modern times, such as the towers found in the mountains of the Mani in the Peloponnese. Closer to home, Pele towers in the borderlands between England and Scotland are reminders that lawlessness and intergenerational feuding between neighbours is not something confined to prehistory.

 

Archaeologists estimate that the main tower was originally 25m - 30m tall. Even in a ruined state it looks impressive. The towers were linked by concentric passages with small anterooms off them.

There was one larger room with blackened stonework, perhaps the main room where food was cooked.

Some of the passageways have been restored and you can clamber to the top of these up a rough hewn spiral staircase. I was pleased to reach the top. The interior was claustrophobic and the atmosphere slightly sinister, like being trapped in an un-nerving dream. 

From the top the view towards the distant mountains should have been magnificent, but again there was something foreboding about it. I took a panorama - checking it I was reminded of the doomed landscape in the Apple TV miniseries, 'Silo'.

Unsurprisingly, given the labyrinthine layout Gill and I had become separated. I decided to find her. First I needed to descend to ground level. It proved unexpectedly challenging. We had arrived at the same time as two tour buses. The occupants were nowhere to be seen on the site, I guess they had gone for lunch at the café. 

Now they all wanted to climb to the top of the tower. I was about 3m from the ground floor at a sharp turn in the stairwell when the first of the German tour party began to climb up, glaring at me as they squeezed past. If one of them had paused for 20 seconds to let me through then the 60 people behind them would have been able to ascend easily, but nobody would, so they all edged past me stony faced

 I found Gill, She must have wondered why I greeted her as if we'd been parted for weeks.

We headed to the shop and café. I bought a particularly gruesome Nuraghic mask fridge magnet as a memento of our visit. We had the café to ourselves as the German contingent were going to be trapped in the Nuraghe for hours. There was only space on the top for about twelve people at most, and there were two coach loads of them. If they couldn't cooperate with a lone English tourist on the stairs what hope did they have of taking turns to take a photo from the top of the tower?

It was good that we had succeeded to visit one of Sardinia's most significant Nuraghe, even if it had proven somewhat more challenging than we had anticipated. We headed for Alghero, we need to stop and relax, do bugger-all except eat gelato and sit on the beach.

Archaeology versus meteorology

We had a plan, (we always do). We ditched it, (it happens). It was a very good plan, because I am very good at planning. I spent twenty years where professionally it was the most important part of my job..... spreadsheet Pete!

However, both at work and in everyday life plans never work perfectly because things are unpredictable - ultimately chaos theory rules. If you are touring by motorhome there are many things that can upend your plans, esoteric local festivals, unexpectedly busy sites due to some distant country's school holidays, road closures, mechanical breakdowns, accidents... Really, if you dislike uncertainty it would be better to stay at home.

In practice the most chaotic thing we have to deal with is the weather. Though we both are inveterate travellers, neither of us are outdoorsy. If rainy days are forecast we don't carry on regardless, we try to follow the sun.

After visiting San'Antioco and Isola San Pietro our plan had been to head east towards Cagliari, staying at a big site near Pula. Maybe we would have taken the bus into the city, certainly we would have visited the archeological site at Nora which has well preserved remains of an important sea port used by the Phoenicians, Catheginians and Romans. Nearby are two Bronze age monuments of Sardinia's unique Nuraghic culture. 

We have ten days remaining before we catch the night ferry from Olbia to Livorno. Many campsites in Sardinia are closed by mid-September and only a handful remain open by mid-October. Most of these are on the east coast, which makes sense as it faces the mainland where the ferry ports are - Golfo Aranchini, Olbia and Arbatax. So our plan was to head up the east, using a campsite near Muravera. Sadly, the medium range forecast was mixed to say the least, showery interspersed with thunder storms.

The weather in Northwest Sardinia was much sunnier, but that would mean heading back to Olbia using the same motorways we took to get here and giving up on visiting the archeological sites. Most people would have a brief chat about this and make a decision. I am annoyingly pedantic, I drive myself nuts, Gill must have saintly qualities to have put up with it for half a century. I consulted a range of meteorological sites, Google Maps, the Michelin Italian road atlas, Search For Sites. Park for Night, Acsi Eurocampings searchable database, Wikipedia's entry on Nuraghic culture, then pinpointed the location of every Lidl in Sardinia, and summarised the results in a gnomic chart.

The conclusion was no different what I knew all along, we don't like camping in the rain. So if course we are going to head back north again retracing where we have just come from even though sostas with services are hard to find and it means returning to the campsite in Alghero (the only one still open on the West coast) - a place I was quite rude about  previously.

Right now it's still beautifully sunny. The sosta where we are parked is idiosyncratic. It's quite remote, located in the extensive car park of the 'Jamaican Beach' cocktail bar. It appears to be some kind of tribal gathering place for the Bundersrepublik's kite surfing fraternity. It is a fraternity, there were a couple of female kite surfers, but predominantly it seems to be a man thing. Within this there are two species, honed athletic types in crisp white shorts and 'bros' with man buns and crumpled khakis. Lots of man love and bonding going on, high-fiving, fist bumping, and 'bro-hugs. I do love niche sub-cultures.

Some of the reviews mentioned that the place was unwelcoming. I don't think that's quite the case, its simple self absorbed, if you don't have a kite board then you simply don't exist. The guy at the service point was amazed that that I could not understand him - not a kite surfer, not German - does not compute....

What reviewers were right about is that sitting on the beach watching the kite surfers was very entertaining, a huge amount of faffing about with complicated kit to get a few minutes of adrenaline fuelled pleasure, I guess you have to be an adrenaline junkie to understand the appeal. 

In the winter we share beach parkings with Portugal's surfing community. They are a different breed. There is something almost spiritual in the relationship between the surfer and the sea, the sheer audacity of the thing, a frail human skimming the concave face of a glorious roller. Snatching a gust is not the same as catching a wave. Watching the kite surfing aficionados it seems anyone who is reasonably fit and lacks a sense of personal safety could become proficient at it, they came in many shapes and sizes. It's not the same with big wave surfers, they all look lithe, slim but powerful, beautifully honed bodies like a dancer's.

Though the Search for Sites app claimed the sosta had a service point it isn't fully functional. There is a black water dump, but the white water refill is adjacent to it which is a somewhat insanitary arrangement. Even more tricky is there is nowhere to drain grey water, luckily our tank was only half full, but in hot weather it does start to smell a bit fruity if it's not emptied regularly.

While we watched the kite surfers we hatched a plan. Head back to the campsite at Alghero for a few days via an overnight stop at a sosta with a service point in Santa Giusta on the outskirts of Oristano. Then the next day carry on to Alghero via a lunch stop at a Nuraghic site just off the motorway which looked to have a big enough car park to accommodate a moho. A good plan, that's what I like, what could possibly go wrong?