The Costa Smeralda

The Olbia Airport was undoubtedly created for jet-set tourism. The airport's pizza stand is outdoors with luxury wicker chairs under the wide sky, where fragrances began to assail us, the wild freesia and the prickly maquis, tart and heady smells. The smoking lounge is also a courtyard under the sun, with luxury wicker furniture that does not blame you at all for smoking. That jet-set's destination is the Costa Smeralda, the northeast of Sardinia whose sublime shades of blue and green, sea and sky, are knit together with gargantuan tawny and red rocks, sculpted by wind and time into extraordinary creatures. The bristly maquis and the overflowing abundance of wildflowers fill the air. The roads are not punishing, especially when we arrived, which was quite off-season.

Costa Smeralda was not our first glimpse of Sardinia, but it was pretty much our second glimpse. Even before picking up our rental car, which absorbed almost a full day of research till we found an incredible price, about 16 euros a day, we took a heavenly, winding bus ride to Palau under gloomy skies to a gleaming white ferry, clean and Greek, where we feasted on salted peanuts at the bar and stood in the challenging cold to watch immaculate islands sail by. The most beautiful was Caprera, where Garibaldi died, but which we skipped even though it is a lush wildlife preserve. Others include St. Stephano, where the US had a submarine base. Our destination was La Maddalena, pristine and somewhat open for business.

Ile of Caprera

La Maddalena climbs in umbre increments up a green hill that rises to a soaring indigo sky, touching the brilliant turquoise sea. The immaculate harbor front of 19th c. Italian noble houses now covered with ads for tourism businesses, still has its bedraggled drunk or two. The harbor on one side blows with a stiff wind, on the other basks under a flattening sun. Steps and stone streets climb up to a featureless neo-Baroque church, which was closed, and past genteel colorful houses where Italian teenagers dressed like punks ride motos. It is an immaculate village in perfect gold and rose facades, with legant baroque details and the usual discount shops of "Cina" (China). An esplanade of palms runs along the harbor of clean, rocking white masts.

We walked back and forth where all was too orderly to be interesting, and had seafood salads sheltered from the wind but under a merciless sun. Back in the soaring ferry into the rough wind, but now the sea was pure turquoise and the rising rock islands pink and gold and a velvety forest curved along the shore. Matisse's Mediterranean. We walked along the harbor and small white beach of Palau, with its perfect clumps of reeds and groves of trees that appeared like velvety green heads of hair from a distance, like a Maurice Sendak drawing. The woods whistled in eerie stillness surrounded by the strong wind, like the sound of death. White billowing clouds pierced by blue cloud plateaus, pure white boats and ochre houses climbing the hills. Then we sat in the full sun of the harbor till the bus wound back among the heights of surreal rock formations and deep green brush of the legendary Costa Smeralda.

Two days later we got our rental car back at the airport from two sharp Italian boys who, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, had already set up their baksheesh by leaving us a scratched car without recording the scratches, and disappearing before we could talk to them about it. (We emailed the company and had no problems when we returned the car, 3 weeks later.) Free at last we stopped at a EuroSpin discount market where I consulted a matron with huge hair about the size of the underpants on sale. And then we took off, winding along the coast where spectres of granite rose in hazy blues from the sea, and the wildflowers blew their fragrance into the car.

Though much of the luxury tourism was still not open, there were more modest restaurants with the same white beaches and breathtaking sea colors (Mama Beach, Mama Pizza). We got out on an overlook. Down a path was a strange little shack - Attenti di Cano, the sign said. A little dog came out and looked at us welcomingly, but Jacquess insisted he would be okay without us so we left along winding lost roads to immaculate white srony beaches in a a cool wind overlooking the sea 's gradients of turquoise. We walked on crumbling, glittering mica and whitest rock to the transparent waters lapping at the beach.

Golfo Arancia is a forbiddingly banal development at the exquisite bay at Capo di Figaro, but drive further along the old brown railroad tracks where an old white dog bellows, past colorful little blocks of fisherman's houses, along a dirt road where brilliant yellows and golds grow and there is an enormous ferry to Corsica and timeless blue rock islands humping all along the sea's horizon.

We drive on to Porto Rotondo, where the jet-set keep houses crowded in a sort of cluttered adult summer camp for the rich and famous, including Berlusconi. Everything is made of the red tan rock giving a feeling of clunky density that distracts from the beautiful landscaping of olive or poplar trees, now in their hairnets. We take stone walled path to the white beach.

There is a small harbor of enomous boats, (but only squat toilets). The overall impression, notwithstanding the setting's clientele of rich and famous people who come here to be seen, was not that different from Walnut Creek or any number of attractive California shopping malls.

But driving along Costa Smeralda among scrub and maquis is amazing. Olive trees twist over velvet green trimmed by herds of sheep, or cows, tan and golden, matching the contorted rocks that bear the curves of wind-sculptures or rise in pink glow under a shaft of sun. The luxury developments with their Italian tiled roofs are surrounded by ribbons of dusty road, soft and golden as the bubbling rocks., and among ruins of ancient roofless stone houses and a huge rustic crucifix.

Flowering blue rosemary, butter white blossoms and explosions of yellow and gold, the freesia pouring its scent into the moving car, bristling maquis and enormous dandelion bushes, thick enough to hide fugitives as happens in the center of Saridinia, but not here. We are driving on the Costa Smeralda.

Porto Cervo, more dignified than the nouveau riche flavor of Porto Rotondo, has an old port owned by the Agha Khan who has protected the region's wildness for luxury tourism. Here the deep green and warm brown rocks support a kind of Andalusian architecture, more refined than Porto Rotondo. Here you have another mall of adobe, stuffed with luxury shops, but only serving staff can be seen, preparing for the glamorous ones to come and be seen. And, like Porto Rotondo, the public toilets are the squatting kind.

Where the Agha Khan fell in love with the coast

The Agha Khan discovered the coast as a 22-year old student who fell in love with a beach that we visited, Poltu di li Cogghji (that's not Italian, but the Sard language). It is still remote, difficult to find, a hike away from the unmarked road where only hotels have signs, and completely undeveloped. We only saw an elderly couple having a picnic, and some rough Sards fishing.

Stella Maris

The church of Porto Cervo is interesting and beautiful. Called Stella Maris, it is of a neo-mediterranean architecture that looks like an adobe church from New Mexico on hallucinogens, of a stark brilliant white, with a kind of Andalusian appearance. Inside the decor was simple, of the sea, except for a dolorous Madonna by El Greco, with large blue eyes. As we left the church, a crowd of German tourists inside, we heard choral music swelling its white curving walls.

Poltu di li Colgghji

Notwithstanding our guidbook's hyperventilation about the beaches of the coast, we skipped most of them, to proceed to an older and stranger land of the Sards.