The Train to Sassari

We rode the small train to Sassari, the most cosmopolitan city of northern Sardinia, through nubbly green land, rocky with lichen-covered granite. Christine said, bring a book or you'll get bored. It's barren. We brought our books but mostly stared out the windows of the three car train as it entered into Sardinia's interior.

White clumps of sheep roamed with frolicking lambs, and sometimes galloped from the oncoming train on their black legs. Everywhere were ruins of stone houses, roofless, with roosters perched on top. Some ruins were perfect round stone stumps, some magnificent Roman arches of old palazzos of centuries gone by. The dark rain lowered on the distant rock mountains. Winding through the land were low rock fences and bristly olive trees, bowing over emerald grass. Vineyards appeared, first hardscrabble, and then bordered in aluminum. A thousand shades green, gnarled and prickly maquis and stately poplars, and granite mountains rose in the distance in blue silhouette. Now and then the hillside was strewn with the contents of a kitchen. Bursts of cacti leaned against ancient walls of carefully laid stone, or against concrete shed with tile roofs where a strange breed of rooster-duck stared at the passing train. At some farms the sheep sat placidly in the grass, awaiting the threatening rain. The land was verdant and stony with hillocks of rocks that farmers had harvested, now small landscapes of their own, sprouting trees and flowers. But at the stations every concrete surface is covered with grafitti. And alongside them long abandoned, roofless rock ruins of ancient stations.

Neat rock borders of fields wound to nowhere. We were chugging (on diesel, perhaps) into dark rainclouds, the hills and fields patchworks of seamed patterns traced by bristling hedge and stone walls, blossoms and shapely white cattle, and nipples of tufty green. We passed through netted rock passes and abandoned rock terraces lined with cacti, thistly wild bushes. The rolling inner country had occasional fruit trees bursting from the hills as if electrified, emerald pasture and orchards of wild brush. Tan reeds erupted from land sculpted in thick swathes of many greens like paint from a giant brush. Now concrete strust led to an actual highway. Chalky high cliffs and immense reeds, and a few dwarf flowering fruit trees in bright magenta, ribbons of dirt pathways through fruit orchards. A white horse galloped along the train, throwing his head high. Ribbons of white that were actually sheep climbing the hill. Poplars also marched up the hillside wound round with tan rock of gray silken skin, gray rock face carved away to a soft beige core.

We arrived in Sassari and had espresso at 10:30am next to a round black woman with blue nails, gobbling a pastry, next to an old gray man getting refills on his whiskey. Behind us a young man with wide and sad eyes etched in dark thick eyelashes sat in a wheelchair. Our viaggio through history, c'est parti.