Cagliari

Cagliari is Sardinia's largest city with 140,000 inhabitants, breezy and lovely and splashed with sun. The fierce Barbagian spirit is missing here, though there is much to be proud of, but the architecture is largely due to the hated Spanish domination under which Sards were chased from the citadel of the city, even before the Jews were chased away after the directives of the Catholic Spanish Empire. Whereas we are traveling geeks following the ephemeral traces of time, most travelers would rightly see Cagliari as a fabulous place to get sun and sea and Mediterranean leisure.

The Citadel

Cagliari (KALyari)'s history began as a Phoenician port that came under Carthaginian rule, but under the Romans it became a real metropolis with an amphitheatre and water supply and paved roads on the flat coastal plain. The Pisans, who took over Cagliari from the Genoans in 1258, built up the hills to create fortified citadels, with a wall around the sector of the city still called Castello. Aragon conquered it next, bringing in Catalans and Majorcans as well to fill public positions. By 1328 a harsh trumpet announced the curfew, that all Sards must get out of il Castello on pain of severe punishment. The darkest age began in 1479, when Ferdinand the Catholic succeeded to the Spanish Empire.

We drove in after a morning jog on the beach, greeting all and sundry (oggi bella!). Cagliari is a little like San Francisco, airy and lovely, the via Roma that faces the port lined with elegant facades like Florence or Venice but more recent. And then we climbed up winding pedestrian streets where laundry hangs by a shop of gleaming Buddhas and an Indian grocery. A school boy's t-shirt read "I (heart) Sex and Drugs." At a sunny square a huge Roman general in bronze urged his soldiers on, marking with a Roman column Carlo Felici, the north-south former Roman road that is today one of the major highways.

St. Michele

St. Michele was a lavish Baroque Jesuit church with polychrome Genoese marble work and high Spanish cage-like galleries from which nuns and noblewomen hid from view as they attended services. As soon as we sat in a pew, a soft-spoken and well-informed guide introduced himself, and presented the paintings of Sardinian artists of the 17th and 18th.

Everywhere the cruel Spanish had created the grandeur of a the Mediterranean port, everywhere they had exiled and imposed penury on the Sardes. They were succeeded by the House of Savoie, benevolent rulers of the 18-19th c, whose portraits are in the Vice Regio Palace where outstanding grafitti art was also displayed.

Up the hill we climbed, where the climate was more sublime, to the Botanical Garden, simple and academic, an Italian Jardin des Plantes of seemingly 1000's of plants, and a Roman cistern where actors took their refreshment between acts at the ampitheatre. The amphitheatre is just outside the garden, its beauty marred by stadium seats and scaffolding. It seats 10,000, and its underground passages once used for the beasts of the spectacles were later used in WW II as bombing shelters and even homes. We passed students from the nearby university and old people, self-absorbed in the Mediterranean sun.

We climbed through the original white rock boulders of the city's summit, past the prison where laundry hangs from the bars, and onto a rocky abutment which overlooks the city and fort. We strolled down through the public garden, utterly simple and beautiful, with herbs growing and a little lending library in the sun and shade. Now on the eastern side of Cagliari we descended terrace by terrace with views of the city below. The terraces are bars, and people recline with their cocktails on boxy furniture.

Tower of the Elephant

We continued on bumpy medieval roads down to the Museum Citadel and found the only open restaurant in the area, with an enchanting terrace, where we ate focaccio in the windy sun. The tourist season hadn't begun, but at InfoPoints overqualified staff eagerly plied us with maps and brochures. We passed the smooth Genoan Tower of the Elephant, with its carved eponymous beast on a bracket, while high above are the brackets where cages swung with the weight of the chopped heads in them, during the dark years. The Cathedral Santa Maria is elaborate and baroque, but most interesting were the four stone lions inside, gleefully and cruelly pinning down some antique beasts, as well as the extraordinary 12th c. carved Pisan pulpits.

Down we went into the old Jewish ghetto, with its close dark streets, always stopping at the terraces where people lounged, the most beautiful of which is the Bastion San Remy. We kept moving down the medieval stone streets, past a square where children played dodge ball with fond coaches. Ornate churches were filled with the drone of mass, its glum call and response, at this evening hour when everything reopens.

San Saturnino

San Saturnino

We went to Cagliari once more toward the end of our trip, to see the beautiful white stone San Saturnino, that had been built in the 6th c. and extended by the Victorini monks in the 11th. Cats gazed at us from the safety of the archeological dig, either nursing their litters or nestling together. Again we went up the rocky road to the Museum Citadel to see the Archeological Museum, which contains the treasures unearthed in the places we had been visiting throughout Sardinia. The Nuraghic art of the bronzetti, thin geometric bronze figures like tiny Giacometti sculptures, from about 850-500 BC, are perhaps the most striking and most native of anything in this large collection of masks, statues, gravestones and tiny burial objects that have been excavated from Sardinia's old earth. The sea has also yielded Roman, Greek, Egyptian treasures and art from throughout the civilized world of those times. Exquisite jewelry, Egyptian and Roman and Phoenician and Carthaginian accompanied people to the underworld.

Carthaginian necklace

During lunch at the outdoor café we watched as a troup of young people carrying paper shopping bags whisked past us and up to the pinacotheque where we were headed to see the few paintings collected there. What happened next was surreal.

Mercury

Bastion San Remy

When we entered the museum the 20-somethings all stood there, as many uniformed guards as there were paintings, hovering over us as we stopped at each, fairly unremarkable, work. Large healthy young people, they stood at attention like military officers, but not at our service. One guy began giggling uncontrollably, another turned his soulful eyes toward me. We moved the next level down and two of the guys marched past us officiously to take their posts ahead of us, so we moved to a further level down. We looked up to see 5 or 6 young women's heads looming over the banister at us. Was this a joke? A happening? Performance art? We'll never know. As we left they gathered around us once again, shoulder to shoulder. It was the best thing we'd seen in the pinacotheque.