HiddenMysteries: Next summer in Sardinia?

In November, it might seem odd to run a summer feature on an apparent preserve of the rich and famous. As Mona Anis discovers, however, forward planning places Sardinia within reach

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Clockwise from left: Giuseppe Garibaldi, hero of the two worlds, who spent his final years on the Isola Caprera in the Maddalena Archipelago in Sardinia; two scenes from the Isola Maddalena; and Antonio Gramsci, arguably Sardinia's most famous son

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If, like this writer, the reader is not a member of that class of people whose private jets and yachts converge yearly on Sardinia, fear not. The island still has much to offer those able to afford economy-class foreign travel. A cautionary remark, however: this is a trip for which visitors should plan well ahead. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to start looking into travel arrangements now, while everybody else is busy booking their Christmas holidays.

Another cautionary remark is to forget Costa Smeralda, Sardinia's Emerald Coast and the summer playground of the rich and famous. And especially to forget Costa Smeralda's most famous destination, Porto Cervo, where Italy's former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi entertains his guests in the 27-room Villa Certosa, surrounded by 100 acres of grounds.

But in a place so full of history, it should be easy enough to ignore Porto Cervo. There is a whole range of ancient and mediaeval sites to marvel at, not to mention stunning public beaches. I was in Sardinia recently, having been invited to a cultural festival on the Isola Maddalena. An enchanting space, this is the biggest of a group of Islands and islets off the north-easternmost tip of Sardinia.

Together, the seven larger islands and some ten smaller ones, constitute the La Maddalena Archipelago set in the Tyrrhenian Sea that separates Italy from France, with Corsica only 11 kilometres away across the strait of Bonifacio. Since my arrival in the Archipelago coincided with the start of autumn, the weather was quite unpredictable, there being bright summer sunshine one day, overcast and rainy skies the next. This combination of sun and rain, however, made it all the more prominent what a paradise the islands of the Maddalena Archipelago must be in the summer.

THE AMERICANS ARE LEAVING: The cultural event I attended on the Isola Maddalena was the "European and Mediterranean Sea and TV Festival", this year's round being the first in what is to become an annual event. The aim of the festival is to provide a platform for documentary, TV-format and animation films dealing with environmental concerns, with a focus on the Mediterranean Basin as a heritage shared by countries north and south of the Basin.

The festival was sponsored by the regional government of Sardinia and the municipality of La Maddalena, which has more than one reason to worry about environmental hazards and to campaign for a clean sea. While the Maddalena Archipelago has been declared a wildlife and sea reserve, or "Parco Nazionale", since 1994, unfortunately one of the seven large islands in the Archipelago -- the Isola Santo Stefano -- is a US naval base for nuclear submarines.

Greenpeace activists and politicians calling for the independence of Sardinia have long been campaigning for the evacuation of the island, staging a number of sit-ins at the base. In 2004 the protest campaign was stepped up following the release of a French study revealing that waters near the base were four times more radioactive than should be expected. In 2005, Renato Soru, Sardinia's present governor, scored a landslide election victory by adopting the slogan, "We are the friends of the Americans, but in the future we'd like to see them here only as tourists".

Now, however, the Americans are finally dismantling the Santo Stefano base and preparing to leave by the end of this year. US Ambassador to Italy Ronald Spogli told reporters a few months ago that "we've been on La Maddalena for more than 30 years, and it's been a very positive experience... The international situation has changed, of course, and now it's time we made the move we talked about in 2005". The activists hailed the news as "a victory for all the Sardinian people".

Not everybody is happy, though. For the residents of the Isola Maddalena, the only island that is inhabited all the year round, the departure of the US servicemen carries with it the threat of recession -- hence the attempt by the municipality to place the town firmly on the tourist map by hosting entertainment and cultural events such as the Sea and TV Festival. So perhaps there is now an opportunity to enjoy the place immediately after the Americans leave and while it still encourages economy-class travellers.

Having spent a week on the Isola Maddalena, the present writer can testify to the affordability of accommodation and services. Local buses and boats are a pleasant means of transportation around the islands of the Archipelago, where the combination of snow-white beaches and intensely coloured waters is breathtaking. There is no place better than Italy to combine leisure, history and culture, the Maddalena Archipelago being no exception

BONAPARTE IN LA MADDALENA: By the end of the 18th century, La Maddalena was already an important naval base for operations in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1793, Napoleon Bonaparte participated in a French campaign against the Kingdom of Sardinia to punish its king for his hostility to the French revolution.

The principal objective of the campaign was the city of Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, and a fleet sailed from Toulon to Ajaccio commanded by Admiral Truguet. A smaller, secondary expedition was also planned, which would attack the northern islands of the La Maddalena Archipelago, which lie only a few kilometers from Corsica.

The main attack on Cagliari and other places in southern Sardinia was defeated during a week of fighting in which islanders played an active role in the armed resistance to the French called for by the clergy and described as "a crusade" against the "devil" advocating "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité".

When on 22 February 1793 the smaller expedition composed of 16 small boats escorted by one corvette sailed to La Maddalena, the French Commander in Chief was Colonna-Cesari. On board the corvette, called "La Fauvette," was a young officer, Napoleone di Buonaparte, who in 1796 would change his name to "Bonaparte". Buonaparte disembarked with his Corsican volunteers and his small battery of three pieces of canon on the island of Santo Stefano, 700 metres opposites La Maddalena, from where he commanded the shelling of the island.

The first shot hit the roof of the church of Santa Maria Maddalena, provoking the frightened escape of the islanders who were taking refuge there. The shelling lasted throughout the day and continued during the night with incendiary balls. The battle continued for two more days causing great damage to existing buildings. One of the shells used is now housed in the small museum at the Maddalena Town Hall.

However, the French invaders were finally defeated by the islanders, and Buonaparte came very close to being taken prisoner. Fleeing back to Corsica, he wrote a detailed report to the Minister of War in Paris, blaming the commander of the expedition, Colonna-Cesari, for its failure, and accusing him of conspiring with his uncle, Pasquale Paoli, who favoured the separation of Corsica from France and its annexation by Great Britain.

Britain was in fact interested in establishing indirect control over Sardinia and Corsica, which for a long chapter of its history has been a part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Thus, Britain was in contact with Corsicans having separatist sympathies, such as Paoli. In 1795, Paoli fled Corsica to London, where he lived as a royal pensioner until his death.

This part of the Mediterranean was -- and perhaps still remains -- an important strategic location for any super-power, such as Britain was in the 19th century. In 1804, Admiral Lord Nelson himself stayed with his fleet at the Maddalena Archipelago, though islanders say that typically he never disembarked. Operations that began at the time would only end at Trafalgar, where Britain dealt Bonaparte a crippling defeat.

And if these two historical names are not enough to provoke an appetite to visit the place, Benito Mussolini was also held prisoner in La Maddalena in 1943.

GARIBALDI'S WHITE HOUSE: To be able fully to comprehend the close ties linking Sardinia and the south of France, one needs only to remember that while in the late 18th century a Corsican was able to rule over France, in the mid-19th century a native of Nice, Giuseppe Garibaldi, was the hero who led the Italian uprising that unified the country and made of it a nation-state. Born in Nice in 1807 (then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia), Garibaldi is perceived by some historians as Bonaparte's idealistic alter ego. The English historian AJP Taylor, for example, once described him as "the only wholly admirable figure in modern history."

It was in 1855 that Garibaldi bought half of the second-largest island in the Archipelago, Caprera, using a small sum of money he had inherited after the death of his brother. Caprera, the greenest of the islands, is now linked to La Maddalena by a 600-metre bridge.

It is a splendid, rocky island, with a dense pine forest in the middle. At the far edge, there is a modest white house, the Casa Bianca, which is the house built by Garibaldi. The latter had told his friends when young that, "Robinson Crusoe was certainly the happiest man in the world; if one day I have ten thousand lire, I shall buy an island." The money he later inherited was just enough to buy half an island, the other half being owned by a British couple, the Collins. When Mr Collins died, British admirers of Garibaldi -- and he had many, especially among people with republican sympathies -- bought the other half from his widow and donated it to Garibaldi.

Despite an active revolutionary life that took him around the world, a life which continued well into old age, Garibaldi spent many of his later years in Caprera, especially when, at the end of the 1870s, he was forced to move onto a bed because of arthritis. When Garibaldi died in Caprera in 1882, he was still campaigning for universal suffrage and the abolition of ecclesiastical property and of a standing army under the banner of the "Democracy League," a revolutionary society which he had founded two years earlier.

On his deathbed at the age of almost 75, Garibaldi asked his family to place him near a window looking in the direction of Nice, the city where he had been born and where his mother was buried. However, his final wishes for a simple funeral and cremation were not observed. Today, the Casa Bianca is a national museum dedicated to the "Hero of the Two Worlds," as Garibaldi is called. The museum houses possessions and mementos of Garibaldi, who is buried in nearby woods under an imposing granite boulder.

And before leaving Garibaldi, Taylor's "wholly admirable figure", it is perhaps fitting to mention that less than ten years after Garibaldi's death Sardinia gave birth to another courageous and admirable figure, the writer and activist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). Gramsci lived and died for many of the ideals Garibaldi embodied, and he is today arguably Sardinia's most famous son.

OLBIA AND PALAU: As is the case in many Italian regions, Sardinian, an island which boasts four thousand years of recorded history, is so much larger than the few summer resorts tourists -- rich, or not-so-rich -- frequent. Whether talking about Costa Smeralda or the Archipelago of La Maddalena, these are destinations with a very insignificant history compared to the main island.

The islands of the Archipelago of La Maddalena were totally deserted until few hundred Corsicans inhabited the Isola Maddalena in 1770. The Costa Smeralda itself is a very recent invention, developed some 40 years ago into residential summer villages by millionaires such as the late Aga Khan, who founded Porto Cervo.

Unlike Costa Smeralda and the Archipelago of La Maddalena, Olbia was chosen by the Romans in the 3rd century BC as their main trading port in Sardinia. And since, with its airport and harbour, Olbia is the main entry point into summer destinations in north Sardinia, then it would be a good idea to use the opportunity while there to get a taste of the culture and history of the main island.

And if the visitor is really curious about the life style of the super-rich of Costa Smeralda, then he or she can do what the present writer did and have a peek from a distance, taking advantage of the many rocky cliffs and magnificent promontories dotting Olbia and Palau.

While in Olbia, the traveller can dedicate a day or two to touring nearby sites, booking a night in one of the many affordable small hotels in the city while doing so. Olbia's many attractions include ancient and medieval monuments such as the ruins of a Punic quarter, a paved Roman road and several remains of the Bronze Age Nuragic Civilisation, among them the famous Tombe dei Giganti (giants' tombs) on the outskirts of the city.

Those interested in sampling the delicious Sardinian cuisine will not regret time spent in Olbia. Seafood cultivated in the Gulf of Olbia is famous worldwide, specialities including lobsters, prawn-stuffed squid, mussels, clams and very meaty mullet fish served with aromatic herbs. The confectionery shops in the centre of the town sell delicious "candelaus"(candied fruit sweets made with a thin layer of dough covering a mixture of almonds), and macaroons, a typical Sardinian sweet made of honey and marzipan.

To reach the Isola Maddalena, visitors take a bus from Olbia to Palau, another port city 44 km away, from where a ferry service runs hourly during the day. The journey to the Isola Maddalena itself takes a further 20 minutes. On the road from Olbia to Palau, and in the city itself, there are many attractive sites and well-preserved Roman monuments. The famous Capo d'Orso, a granite hill sculpted by wind into the shape of a bear, is not to be missed, if only for the breathtaking panoramic view it offers of the Corsican and Sardinian coastlines.

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg

Next summer in Sardinia?

Friday, November 09 2007 @ 02:13 PM CST