We left our rather sweet awkward little Tiny House to drive back towards Cagliari and then diagonally across the south-west corner of Sardinia up to Bosa, our next stop. The landscape was dry, wide, open, dull. Stopping for petrol along the way we also had a smart little coffee and I was surprised to find a very modern Japanese-style wash-your-bum set-up in the garage toilet. I don't think I have ever seen one of these in England, and here we were in a fillingstation lavvy in the middle of nowhere.
We began to see grapes growing, and small fields of vegetables - at last some horticulture was evident. Mountains started to erupt from the flat marshy plains, and our road wound up and down the hills, giving views of the sea as we approached Oristano, a prosperous medieval town with dramatic history and pretty higgledy-piggledy streets.
Lunch was in a cellar with wonderful old brick vaulting, and we chose local dishes - Andrew had a soup made of Sardinian bread and cheese, and I had a kind of pasta-rice with cheese, saffron and chopped up courgette flowers. That ceiling was mesmerising, hard to draw!
We made a quick trip to the highly-regarded archaeological museum, on the hunt for any ancient goddesses, but there were none of any antiquity to be found - just some Roman bits. However, they had a very amusing display... The Nuraghi culture produced some strange sticklike bronze figures about 10" high, some with horns, tails, tits-and-willies, double feet, etc., and these (not surprisingly, I suppose) were and still are to some extent regarded as devilish by modern people. (My enquiries about goddesses met with blank reactions - they asked if I meant Maria?) The little bronzes are fascinating, and not very easy to interpret without knowing more. These date from the 9th-8th century BC.
Now in the early part of the 19th century, the King, Carlos Alberto, was an archeologist who had done a lot of excavations in Libya etc, and he took a keen interest in these Sardinian/Phoenician figures. Then a whole lot more were discovered, and these were collected and catalogued by him and his academics. There are several hundred of them, slightly smaller than the first ones.
Later, of course, these smaller ones were denounced as fakes and relegated to a cupboard in a church basement. We can only speculate how deeply these figures were loathed by priests and cardinals - the models have so many horns and six-fingered hands and cloven feet and weird sticky-out ears etc. They are wonderful.
We carried on to Bosa - on the coast, and found our new accommodation, in an area not unlike Llandudno in north Wales - wide streets, grid pattern, all very genteel, in a modern villa... there's a small swimming pool in the back garden, helpful landlord, proper kitchen, etc etc. We swam, shopped, had a drink on the way home in a local bar.
The corkscrew in the flat was utterly broken - no screw and handles bent (what had happened?) Our landlord rushed to get us a new one. Supper, wind down, bed....
AAAAGGHGHGHAGHAGHGHAHG!!!! A street party started up 2 doors down! Karaoke at top level, with horrendous howl-round, bangs, thumps, sudden stopping and starting of the backing music, changes in level... and a young man 'singing' flat, wailing on and on.... Sometimes he handed over to a girl, singing equally flat. The music was not known to us, Italian crooning. There was a happy crowd outside, no-one (except grumpy us) seemed to mind. It started at about 1030 and went on till after midnight. Really, torture. It was enough to make me cry....
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