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In the Wilds of Sardinia

Some years ago, Piers Plowright of the BBC, my partner Norman Thomas di Giovanni, and I were in Rome waiting to board a plane for Sassari, in the north of Sardinia. We were making a programme for Radio 3 about the island’s 1927 Nobel Prize winner, the novelist Grazia Deledda, and were on our way to her birthplace, in Nuoro.

While we chatted away waiting for our flight to be announced, a barely-audible or barely-heard announcement came out of the blue. Sure I had caught the ominous word sciopero – strike, the bane of Italy in those days – I scurried to the counter for verification. Sure enough, there was a wildcat strike affecting our flight. When I explained our predicament, the woman at the airline counter merely shrugged and asked why we didn’t take the flight to Cagliari instead, which was leaving shortly. Sassari was in northern Sardinia; Cagliari in the south. It amazed me that the strike covered only that one flight and no other part of the airline’s operation. To us, it hardly made any difference whether we made our way to Nuoro from Cagliari rather than from Sassari.

Our taxi driver dropped us off at a Cagliari hotel, we enquired about where to eat dinner and were pointed to a restaurant across the street. It was too early, so we booked a table for three and returned an hour or two later. We told everyone why we were in Sardinia, and the proprietor of our eating establishment, charmed to have the BBC there, and interested in Grazia Deledda to boot, served us a feast of at least six very different pastas, each in abundance, and would not hear of our paying for any of it.

More, he introduced us to a friend, one of his regulars, who owned a new resort hotel not far from Nuoro. The man gave us his card, asked where we planned to stay in Deledda country, and said that in a few days’ time he would send a van to pick us up. We, the BBC, simply had to see his place. Of course, we never gave it another thought until, a few days later, a stylish van drove up and whisked us off up winding roads into the mountains. As it was dusk, we had no idea even in which direction we were headed though I gathered we were somewhere in the wilds of Gennargentu, Sardinia’s highest range of mountains.

It was a long drive, and we knew we were in bandit country – we knew, at least, that it was in this general area that kidnappers operated, holding their victims, especially foreigners, for ransom. We got to the hotel, a great pile, a place of several stars, but we were the only guests. There was a complete staff, but the place itself was empty. Not even the proprietor was there.