Southern Sardinia Beckons Visitors – The New York Times

Buzz has been in short supply in southern Sardinia for some time now — some would say ever since the decline of the region’s Bronze Age Nuragic civilization. Yet on Italy’s second largest island, where sheep vastly outnumber people, there’s unmistakable new energy in Cagliari, its small Mediterranean capital, and the surrounding countryside.

“We used to think of ourselves as rustic, as isolated in this island backwater,” a local lay historian, Venturino Vargiu, told me, as we watched the city’s annual folk costume extravaganza of Sant’Efisio. “But Sardinians are starting to understand that our culture has real value for us and for outsiders.”

In Cagliari, there’s a surge in pride, along with a wave of new development, mostly aimed at increasing the already growing numbers of tourists. In the rapidly transforming Marina neighborhood, a onetime fishermen’s enclave that is today a lively mix of immigrants and longtime residents, a promenade designed by the architect Stefano Boeri will create a lush parkland along the waterfront. A light-rail line will connect the Marina with Cagliari’s hinterlands, and a new port, projected for 2026, is being constructed to move cruise ships farther away, allowing the yacht set to dock (and spend money) in Cagliari’s center.

For Cagliari and the south — which stretches out along a white-sand and cyan-sea coastline of stunning beaches — a tide of tourism could either prove destructive or be a boon to a region short on opportunity. Decades back, the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia’s north became a resort playground for the rich — a Milan-by-the-Mediterranean that symbolized how tourists can colonize a territory.

But can a more harmonious form of travel be created in the south? With overtourism now the curse of many an Italian outpost, I visited the area and asked locals what might shape a better future.

A city that belongs to its residents

“This city is gentrifying for tourists,” said Samuele Muscas, one of the founders of Sabores, a sceney restaurant and natural wine bar in a couple of old Marina storefronts. It has a Parisian feel but a local menu and crowd — and it’s one of many urbane Cagliari bars and restaurants that rival those in Italy’s larger cities. Mr. Muscas, who also oversees Sapori di Sardegna, a nearby food shop, served me a plate of wild asparagus and a Deperu Holler white wine from Sardinia’s north, and pointed out that I was the only non-Sardinian in the dining room. “We created this place for our community,” he said. “We welcome tourists, but we want them to be immersed in our culture, in a place for us.”

“Politics are changing in Cagliari,” Nicola Marongiu told me the following evening at Pipette, a much-loved wood-paneled wine bar, also in Marina. The new president of the Sardinia region, Alessandra Todde, and the return of the former mayor of Cagliari, Massimo Zedda, who won the June election, have inspired optimism in many.

“There’s a feeling of community taking shape,” Mr. Marongiu said enthusiastically.

Like others I talked to, he hoped the current political shift would make it easier to open small businesses, especially for young people and immigrants, and that it would regulate vacation rentals and increase cultural offerings, which would attract tourists beyond the summer months.

Compared with other Italian cities, Cagliari’s cultural sites can seem a bit thin, although the Archaeological Museum has a fantastic collection of Sardinia’s ancient Nuragic, Phoenician, Roman and other artifacts, including stone-carved Nuragic archers, known as the Giants of Mont’e Prama. Elsewhere, there are sites like the Giardino Sonoro, an outdoor installation of music-making stone sculptures by the locally raised artist Pinuccio Sciola, and the Baroque Duomo with its arched crypt covered in tiles that depict almost 200 saints.

It’s a city best enjoyed by strolling. The miles-long Poetto Beach is Cagliari’s warm-weather hangout, with beach clubs and classic seafood restaurants like Ristorante Calamosca at the water’s edge. Pink flamingos, the city’s most cherished denizens, gather nearby on the Molentargius salt flats. Tourists and locals alike flock to the St. Remy Bastion, the best lookout point in this steep hillside city. And in the early evening, Piazza Gaetano Orrù fills with young people congregating around the Vineria Villanova wine bar and heading to dinner at classics like the Trattoria Lillicu, dating to 1938, or one of the new generation of gastronomic restaurants like Retrobanco and Sabores.

There are as yet few hotel options, but a couple of somewhat upscale and rather quirky accommodations — the boutique hotel Casa Clàt and the Accor group’s Palazzo Tirso — recently opened.

For now, Cagliari still feels like a city that belongs to its residents, unlike Florence, Venice or other tourist-swarmed towns. “But we want visitors here,” said Giuseppe De Martini, the head manager at Retrobanco. “Cagliari,” he said, “should become the capital of the Mediterranean.”

Cheese-making, wild horses and fields of flowers

Certain not to be the next capital of the Mediterranean is Gergei, a tiny town an hour’s drive north of Cagliari that’s famous for absolutely nothing. Still, it would prove to be the most inspiring stay of my trip, thanks to Samuel Lai, who independently conceived a cultural tourism industry for his hometown. He showed me around Domu Antiga, an old property he restored using artisanal construction methods and materials to create a cluster of stone guesthouses surrounding a rose garden, where rooms have antique farmhouse furnishings and traditional ceilings of tied cane.

“If you make an Airbnb that doesn’t relate to local culture and history, then you’re going to get tourists that have no interest in local culture and history,” he said, making me rethink booking that next blandly Ikea-furnished vacation rental.

Mr. Lai’s cheese is reason enough to visit the area. At Sinnos, his small workshop, he follows a long Sardinian tradition of making natural cheeses with fresh milk from his family’s sheep. “Food crafted in a mindful way becomes a means for conveying culture,” he said, as we were up to our elbows in hot milk, breaking up curds in a fire-heated copper pot. Guests can visit the shop for tastings of his exquisite aged cheeses or, as I did, try their hand at making them.

Italy’s villages are losing population, but Mr. Lai found a way to make a living in his own village, and to make that way of life the experience for tourists, with historical accommodations, a home-style restaurant run by his family, visits to artisans and more: “Tourism that shares our rural life in Sardinia with visitors.”

Serving in the Italian Army, he realized abroad the value of his own culture, and returned to Gergei to become a one-man civic committee. Today most of his family is involved; his sister and other townspeople have opened their own accommodations, and several foreigners have bought houses. Domu Antiga, Sinnos cheese and the many activities on offer are, Mr. Lai said, all about “evolving tradition to keep the roots alive” — “sardità,” or Sardinian essence, “that you share with the world.”

Later that day as I trekked in the nearby Parco della Giara, I watched herds of some of Europe’s last wild horses grazing on buttercup blooms, and walked highland paths through cork tree forests. A short distance away in Barumini, Su Nuraxi, among Sardinia’s best preserved prehistoric sites, dates to 1600 B.C. At S’Acqua Salida, one of innumerable other Nuragic locations in the area, there were ancient stone stairways, caverns and water wells, and a grand view of inland Sardinia’s wilderness stretching in every direction: fields of fuchsia sulla flowers where sheep grazed, thickets of fennel, and bee-eater birds as bright as fireworks flitting between the ruins and the woods.

Ancient culture, modern design

In the neighboring Sulcis region, I encountered another interpretation of sardità, in which traditional craft is combined with unabashedly contemporary design. Pretziada is the creative studio of Kyre Chenven and Ivano Atzori, transplants from California and Milan, who design and produce furnishings with local artisans. This spring, the pair opened Luxi Bia, a cluster of stone guesthouses set amid olive groves and fields. They reconstructed the dwellings in the area’s traditional style and filled them with Pretziada’s striking carved wood-frame beds, sculptural cork side tables and other artisan-made contemporary pieces.

“In art and design, Modernism has always been about rejecting the past, but we believe in incorporating the past instead,” Ms. Chenven told me. She pointed to a grapevine canopy shading the room. From the past, she said, we can resurrect “the sustainable practices that were integral to countryside life.”

“A lot of people are looking to get back to Sardinian roots now,” said Mr. Atzori, whose family hails from a village near Luxi Bia. There’s growing interest in a culture that’s remained distinct from the Italian mainland, he explained. “Any worthwhile project here needs to be oriented toward Sardinian identity.”

Later, I took an electric bike to reach the Tombe dei Giganti, a Nuragic site with hiking paths overlooking forested hills. Porto Pino, Su Portu de Su Trigu and Is Solinas — dream beaches of the Mediterranean — are just a short drive away, as is the history-rich fishing community of Sant’Antioco island, connected to the main island by a thin land bridge.

Deeper in Sulcis, a region known for its former mining operations, and along the southwestern coast, Le Dune Piscinas opened in May as a glamorous hotel in a onetime mining storehouse — an ambitious attempt to transform a territory now emptied of industry into a nature-themed destination. The encircling park has become part of the Santa Barbara hiking trail, following paths that miners once walked to work. But the real draw is the spectacular remoteness of the hotel and its sunset-facing beach, dramatically backed by some of the tallest sand dunes in Europe — “perhaps the most secluded part of the Sardinian coast,” said the owner, Marcella Tettoni, who spent 10 years renovating Le Dune. “What better way to revive it than with visitors and this labor of love?”

She gazed out over the long beach, empty save for a few nudists. It was impossible to imagine this corner of Sardinia ever filling up, yet sardità is fragile, as heritage always is, and depends on committed locals and politicians as much as it does on visitors, the kind who approach travel as cultural immersion rather than as a bucket list — and in that, we can all play a role.

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