Winding down

I have a random question. How did Stone Age people cut their fingernails and toenails?  One of the tiny but really useful things in my lifetime has been the invention of, or widespread availability of, those nail-clipper things.   I can remember struggling with so-called nail-scissors for years, with their curved blades. But they can only have been around for a couple of hundred years or so, as a gadget. What came before that? Plain knife blades? Teeth?  Bits of obsidian? 

Muravera is a long thin town on the south side of a river which runs into an opening valley on the south east corner of Sardinia. It is curtailed by mountains behind it, and the river and green lands in front. There is a twin town - Villaputzu on the other side of the valley. The farms grow citrus fruits on the lower reaches, and the higher lands seem to be richly but randomly planted with olives, nuts, eucalyptus, oaks, wild woods. 

The beaches are the main tourist attraction, and they have nothing except fine sparkly sand and a duckboard running along at the top.  We saw one little jellyfish - medusa! - drifting about.  Looked the same as the ones in the bay at Arbatax.  My cunning wheeze - to take a bottle of tap water with us to the beach, to heat in the sun while we swim - is a great success in my opinion. You can simply wash the salt off before you dry and change back into your clothes - makes for a more comfortable day. However we should have taken an umbrella with us… it was ferociously hot.  The sand was really too hot to walk on.

We found a plasticky cafe by Spiaggio San Giovanni. Our macchiato coffee was unusual being mostly milk - a dialect misunderstanding. One hunky bloke was sunbathing...

 We sort-of noticed that at some point all the locals drifted away. What they knew and we did not is that the glamorous and spinky resto - further along - would rapidly fill up for lunch. We got there too late!  Reservations only.  It was Sunday after all!  So instead we drove back along the watercourse (not seeing any flamingoes in the spagno) and eventually found a local place at the back of the town, no glamour and not many punters but a decent little lunch - eel pie, pasta with smoked fish for one and little ravioli stuffed with swordfish, bottarga (fish roe) and tomatoes.  All for 38€.

Later we drove round to the intriguingly named Porto Corallo which is just a modern yacht basin with no-one there. One boat made us laugh.  

We had an ice-cream before heading back to Muravera.  The bridge over the river in the valley is a memorable thing - concrete at each end and rusty green metal in the middle, presumably built after the war to pre-war designs. It’s very narrow and has traffic lights. 

A further note about Sardinian bread. We have - on this last but one day - found a brand of packaged focaccio bread, which comes in mini-packs. It’s pretty tasteless and dry but actually better than a lot of what we bought as ‘fresh’ in various shops.  Would recommend. Focaccelle. 

  

As you can tell, this was a lazy day. I did some drawings, we managed to get the manager of the apartments to unlock the washing machine (she was 40 mins late for the appointment), and did not much. Odd how long it takes to unwind.  Back at home, Brexit rolls along like a never-ending hurricane, and the threat of flooding in the creek caused some alarms, but the Environment Agency were on the case. (FB is a strong tie).  It’s so hot and bright here, it’s really hard to imagine cold dark days. But we are going home tomorrow.  Then on to Ireland for Alex’s 4th birthday party. 

Why do Sardinians eat such horrible bread?

This is our last stop in Sardinia for this trip. It’s a spacious modern apartment overlooking the valley town of Muravera, not far from the sea, and about 30 kms from Caglieri airport for our departure on Tuesday.  There is a swimming pool, up about 600 granite steps behind the building.  The pool is about twice as long as our bath at home, but is graced with an urn which spills water forever into the blueness of the teeny tiny pool.  (The photo on bookingdotcom is accurate but deceptive at the same time).  

We opted to get here from up the coast by driving inland through the mountains - the geomineral national park - the drive was really spectacular.  The rocks of Sardinia (as mentioned the other day) are really old and complex in such a small space, so the landscape varies quite dramatically in short distances.  

At one point we drove through the road-junction village of Gairo - all unexpectedly modern. Then we found Gairo Vecchio just a few hundred feet further down the hillside, totally abandoned, every roof crashed in, only the church looking habitable (and glossy too).  For some reason everyone had fled this place, and not too long ago. A man in a little café across the valley told us it was all due to a flood in 1951… the ground had become unstable. The move to the new village was complete by about 1970. 

Each village and town has a distinct character - some seem very open and hospitable, some seem sullen and closed. Some apparently have no cafés or restaurants despite being quite large places. We searched for lunch at Escalaplano but all the activity was in a small square with a very loud music festival going on, so we headed on, and eventually found a place called Mistral, in the middle of nowhere. I think they must have big parties there, discos etc, but we were the only customers at first. The guy showed us two old stone flour mills. The grain was poured in from a bottle or tank on the top, and a donkey did the work.  I have no idea how old these were. He spoke too fast for me to get it!

  

The place was really spacious inside, huge in fact, but we sat outside on the terrace… no menu, we talked our way into a simple lunch of such exquisite taste and finesse, it will rank as one of the greats.  

  

  

He brought a variety of cold meats (‘prosciutto’) on a large plate of carasau bread, accompanied by a basket with what I would call real bread - the best we have had in Sardinia - sourdough, I think, artisanal, handmade, slow.  In fact, this is the only decent bread we've had in nearly a fortnight. There were two sorts of cheese, and then he brought some of the famous maggoty Sardinian cheese, with live maggots…. (we ate it too, v powerful salty strong taste). He brought the stomach of a goat with a different cheese packed into it… and then a little portion of fegatini (liver) cooked with chilli pepper and sage, and served with some delicious lentils, and then a salad.  By this time three men had sat themselves at another table, and then a couple who arrived on a spectacular white Goldwing motorbike.  Meanwhile little cats prowled about, goats bleated in a pen nearby, and a small free range pony grazed the thin grass beside our terrace. A line of shrubs was alive with bees.  It’s hard to describe how wonderful it was, as this was not really ‘cooking’, but everything was just delicious and perfect. All this, with water, came to 27€.   It just goes to show, you CAN find excellent bread here. They do know how to make it. But for some reason they choose to buy really horrible tasteless dry dull stuff. Why?     

  

I have been meaning to say, it is usual to hear people greeting each other in Latin: Salve!  ‘Buon giorno’ is more formal.  (This reminds me of how in Austria, earlier this year, we learned that people don’t say ‘Guten Tag!’ but ‘Grosse Gott!’)  Because Sardinia has a robust dialect of its own it’s not always easy to understand any of what is said, but French is a good useful go-between language. That tends to be the Langue d’Oc, of course, so ‘pain’ (bread) is ‘penn’.  

The village or town of Muravera is one of those with dozens of winding back streets, especially up the hillsides…  This is a screenshot from the satnav earlier in the day....

We walked into the main road (Via Roma) to find provisions. The church doors were open - lusty singing could be heard (and vibrant church bells this morning too). There were lots of young people about, children doing cartwheels in the shade, young girls smoking in bars, groups of youths laughing loudly…. We had a drink, watched a mass of bats wheeling over some trees in a small garden, and I drew the view up a tiny street leading to the mountain.  

Luckily no mosquitoes invaded the flat in the night, but one very loud hornet came to explore - especially interested in my Juice Plus+ capsule jars - and then buzzed off again.  

And now, just a moment ago, this creature (what is it?) has come to sit on the bathroom terrace door... 

Smoky girls, prickly fruits

Over the last few years I’ve taken a little sketchbook and pens with me on all my travels, and often sit and draw what I see - whatever it is. That’s often a cafe or bar, so there are a lot of pages with tables and chairs, sometimes a few people appear. Some people don’t seem to notice what I’m doing, or ignore it. Some walk casually past to glance at what I’ve done.  For the first time ever, I was directly asked yesterday to show my work…. The scene was a street cafe in Tortoli. Two girls, who were in a group of five, appear in my drawing. I would say they were schoolgirls, all wearing black.  A man came to join them - maybe a teacher. They did not have enough courage to speak to me, but sent him and they came to see the drawing. They decided with squeals of laughter who it was I had drawn …. they took photos of my sketch, giggled, said they liked it.   All of them had been smoking….

Later we went up to Lanusei (too late, or too early) for the cannabis shop to be open, but had a splendid lunch in the Belvedere Hotel with a marvellous view down to the sea. Once again, a ‘pizzeria’ - at this end of season - was not in operation for making pizzas.  Menu choices only.   Pizzas then are just for evenings, or for crowded times.

I drew prickly pears, Andrew gathered some windfalls…. These magnificent cactus are everywhere - absolutely loaded with their slightly rude-looking fat-toe fruits… an unexploited food resource. If you can avoid touching the damned prickles the fruits are scrummy.

  

Bread of heaven

When I was 16 I went to the United States on a scholarship for a year (AFS).  One of the things I remember very clearly from that visit (1965/6) was that the bread looked amazing but tasted horrible.  (Hollywood had changed everything... looks more important than substance).  

Coming from a part of north London where Rumbolds Bakery was a world-class phenomenon, but where there were also many wonderful Jewish bakeries, I had taken it for granted that bread was just wonderful - to see, smell, touch and eat.  Bread like that, of that quality, seems to have disappeared now, in England, France, Spain, Denmark, and Sardinia….  

The bread in Sardinia is particularly disappointing. The one highlight is the widespread availability of a kind of crisp wafer-bread called Carasau, which is made from leavened wheat, rolled flat, baked till it puffs up into a sort of pillow, and then split into two halves and rebaked.  Like all the other breads we’ve tried, it’s pretty tasteless but has the merit of having this interesting production technique. The others - well....... 

There’s a big movement in labelling and packaging to promote artisan foods - breads, honey, cheeses, etc. - but the bread certainly lacks something. (I can see my children or grandchildren rolling their eyes and saying “She’s always going on about how things were better in the old days…”, but truth is, they were).   I think it must be down to the sort of wheat which everyone is using.  I am not a chemist but maybe the modern strains have more gluten so they rise more easily/quickly.  The old bread probably took longer and developed richer flavours.   By the way, I was told as a child that Mr Rumbold ran his remarkable chain of bread shops because he’d been a prisoner-of-war in Burma, enslaved by the Japanese and working, I think, on that infamous railway. He prayed to God and promised that if he survived he would devote his life to doing what he could as a good person, and that was baking. His bread was utterly superb.  Modern production and supply just cannot match it. 

We have the same disappointments about the fruits and vegetables… Even here, in this rich land of farms and sunshine, the supermarkets are stacked with stuff which looks ok but tastes of nothing. Tomatoes are really naff. We brought a very few with us from our allotment, which we ate in the first few days here, and they were divine, a shocking contrast.

My nagging disappointment about this trip is crystallised by discovering that the places which have (quite reasonably) turned to tourism for their fortunes, are all rather like this bread… looking ok but unsatisfying. They lack something. The heat has gone out of the old world's economies, production, knowledge... it's all mass-market, designed and made by machines or something. Oh dear.  

Our accommodation here was labelled as Tortoli but is actually in Arbatax, which is a much more interesting place - a working port and shipyard. At the far end of the road is a wide open space giving fantastic views of the most spectacular red rocks and other geology… 

    

     

The bay opens out to the north, cliffs have been quarried, the variety of rock colours is amazing… coppered green, bright red, glinting grey granites, all squeezed together. You can walk for quite a long way around the beaches to see it all.  A mile or so away the main drag of Tortoli seems to be a normal sort of modern place, shops, families, alleyways, cafes.  

Who were they?

Heading south through the island towards our penultimate destination (Tortolí) we reluctantly abandoned plans to look at Corsica across the sea, and chose a day of mountain driving instead. Over and again we were amazed and uplifted by the beauty of the landscape, especially in this late summer light.  Although we had been completely satisfied with our visit to the nuraghe at Santa Barbara near Macomer, and had thought we would leave it at that, in the end we were tempted to visit one more…. said to be the most complete. (There are so many of them, and they are so central now to a particular kind of tourism, that each village will find a superlative quality to promote in its own local tower….).  This one hits the guidebooks as being worth a visit, so we found a coffee in Humberto’s Bar in Thiesi (observing how rapidly the customers come and go, knocking back a tiny exquisite shot of espresso and then leaving), and then headed to their nuraghe.  This is known now as Sant Antinu, and it sits on flattish land with distant mountains all around, in the so-called Valley of the Nuraghi.

We paid our €6 each for the visit, in a ranch-house style coffee-shop/ticket office with a largish car park, and ambled across the road towards the tower. It actually lost its top storey in the 19th century (agh!), but remains as a tall sturdy coffee-pot of a structure, much bigger and more massive, and supported by more outranges than Santa Barbara’s.  The stones are blackened and dirty on one side, and washed cleaner where the prevailing winds have scoured them. Here again we have the motif of the steep deep doorway with its overflying window, and those astonishing staircases built inside the walls themselves.  But here there are far more elaborate corridors leading round the ground-floor of the whole building, with passageways between them. It's hard not to imagine ceremonial use of all this, especially as a chamber at the back of the tower looks very cervical indeed.  

      

The views from the top and from the ‘shoulders’ are lovely, and we could hear the bells on a flock of sheep nearby. It made me wonder how the people who built these things communicated with each other over inland distances - drums? smoke signals? pipes? On the flat lands of course they could run or walk or ride… but in the mountains and across the crevasses it would have been more difficult back in the stone age.  And how did they get down to building these things? Manoeuvring the huge stones - even just collecting enough of them? Explaining the layout to new builders? This was before any writing was known… so was it scrawls in the sand? charcoal on rock? Who were the architects? The engineers? Were they men or women?  I have so many questions.  It’s plain to me that Earth (God) was female but somehow this tower has a masculine feel to it, elaborated and all about power and carefully-revealed mysteries.  Perhaps we’ll never know.

After the disappointments of the museum in Sassari being closed, as also the local one in Thiesi, I was pleased to find a good selection of learned books in the ticket office, and bought one on Sardinia’s prehistory (I wish I had had this at the beginning of the trip), with excellent photos and information about artefacts (very early female figurine - 12,000 years old - from near Macomer, etc etc)….  

And I bought a little female bronze figure - sadly with no kind of provenance and no info from the saleslady.  This will add to my collection of 'goddesses'.  

I must say, my understanding of some of the female figures has expanded - whereas I feel many of them are probably not goddesses at all but jujus made by women to preserve them through the perils of childbirth, nonetheless there are some figures which are so perfect, so radiant, that they must have a public or divine purpose....

Middle Neolithic or Copper Age, one holding a swaddled child

They really are missing a huge opportunity here, the story-telling, the explanations….  You have to really search to find any information like this.  Where you go, to the sites, is not really well explained if at all.  And yet there's a heavy hand of public management about a lot of it, with railings, barriers, signs saying things like 'Archaeological area' which don't tell you much. 

We arrived finally at the east coast - down into modern nondescript Tortoli, and found our slightly depressing quarters inside a holiday development… I dislike in myself the disgruntlement which attacks me from time to time, the dissatisfaction, the complaints.  Of course, it’s all fine (and I am lucky), and we’ll get to know it better and settle in. But I am having a queasy kind of anti-tourism mood. Why do we do this? What damage do we do? I was cheered up by a little expedition to the local port which has such vibrant and interesting views - dockyards, cranes, railway line, business… and then the mountains to the west seen over the shining water…  

We sat and had a drink taking it all in and will go back. And then I have been doing this blog, and making drawings and paintings which somehow have far more value to me than any photos (marvellous as the smartphone is).

This morning in bed I was reading about how Sardinia was settled in various unrelated stages during periods of glacial activity - the sea ‘migrated’ as they say, maybe as far down as 100m… leaving the island connected to Corsica at some period, and much closer to the Italian mainland. Tiny fragments of worked stone, or masticated bones, and similar evidence give us these clues.  The first to arrive were maybe homo erectus, 500,000 years ago.   The great ramp and ziggurat in the north at Monte d'Accoddi comes much much later - 4000 BCE.  And these nuraghe towers about 1700BC.  

Monte d'Accoddi

It was hard to find our archaeological venue yesterday morning, because for some reason, Google maps was really not working properly. It was genuinely trying to pervert us, giving us wildly wrong directions.   We spent nearly an hour trying to find the destination - wrong directions, lanes petering out in the middle of nowhere, dead-ends, privacy signs etc…. Very frustrating and very odd, but in the end, following good old-fashioned brown public signs (rusty or not) we found it.  The access is down a concrete road which is marked in fake slabs so it’s like a rumble strip for the half-mile or so till you get to the soft brow of a hill overlooking Porto Torres and the sea to the north, and the hinterland to the south… with lovely mountains to the west.  This place is now called Monte d’Accoddi and is regarded as one of the most important sites in the western Mediterranean. It pre-dates the nuraghi by far…. originating about 4000BCE, built in phases, and remains an extraordinary thing to have survived for so long.   It was ‘discovered’ in this field by the farmer in 1954…. (We shouldn’t laugh because Stonehenge wasn’t ‘discovered’ till the 16th century - no-one knew about it all through the Middle Ages, strange as that may seem).

    

The place is aligned n/s/e/w.  It must have taken various forms during its long life - a false-mountain perhaps giving even better views over this beautiful far-reaching landscape, a ziggurat, a sacrificial place (huge altar stone), a fertility machine with two menhirs - red and white, thought now to be male and female, large ramps leading to the top, and it once had a red wooden painted house or hall on the top - some kind of temple I suppose.   Two omphalos stones survive, a large one with what looks like a deliberate split in it, and a smaller one. Could this be sun-and-earth, or earth-and-moon?  It had once settlements clustered around it - first round houses and later rectangular ones.  Who knows?  It is a very very interesting place, showing how ingenious and well-organised our predecessors were. They understood so much - astronomy, geology, construction, organisation… Yet they’ve all gone, and left this huge ‘thing’ behind them. 

      

The explanatory literature (A4 pages google-translated from Italian to ‘English’ and presented in a flimsy plastic-sleeve booklet) urged us to go to the museum in Sássari where a lot of this is explained, including a hologram model of how it was all built and various artefacts on display (including a female figurine!)….. so we finally made our way south to the city, and having had lunch (pasta), we went to the museum.

It’s a handsome building in its own garden, with fine stone steps leading up to the grand porticoed entrance….  The gate was not locked, but stiff to open. We went up … to find the place empty and echoing… It is being totally refurbished. Nothing is available to see, at all. Various amazed and kindly ladies came out to tell us in Italian they had no idea how long the work would take.   Oh dear, what a shame.  They directed us to another museum which turned out to be art gallery with a comprehensive collection of Sardinian art right up to the 20th century. There's a very macabre Christ (from a crucifix) now lying nonchalantly on his back inside a Sleeping Beauty glass box, which reminded me of the photos of Jacob Rees-Mogg lounging on a parliamentary bench.

We strolled round the city. It's a very pleasant place, rather laid-back, with a lovely higgledy-piggledy centro storico. Google maps led us astray again because the address which we were assured had a cannabis store was just an empty doorway.  We found the duomo with its fantastic facade on which numerous men are displayed.  The Virgin and her Child get a rather shallow statue further out of sight, and there are some decorative females - nude - propping up the displays.   But you are in no doubt that God talks just to men round here. It all seems rather biased and pompous, despite the flamboyant stonework and grandeur, compared to the nuraghi and Monte d'Accoddi.

So, we sauntered back toward the coast, swam in the delightful and perfect little bay at Spaggio de Balai, and came back to our apartment to watch the boats and ships in the harbour. It really is a delightful view.