The Pillars of Hercules

Santa Teresa was only on the map for its port and the ferry landing; it was otherwise ignored, and yet it was the sort of provincial place that I liked. It had a hill and a pretty church and a dramatic view of the sea; and everyone knew everyone else. The local dish, a man told me, was wild boar (cinghiale, he said, with big zanne—tusks), and it was prepared in a variety of ways.

“But I’m a vegetarian,” I said.

“You want vegetables? You came to the right place.” And then he remembered that he had an uncle in Vermont.

In daylight everything was simple: I changed money, I bought a bus ticket, I found out the times of the buses, and then I was headed east across the top of the island on my way to Olbia.

At Palau, the bus stopped for passengers and a coffee break.

“There’s a place in the Pacific called Palau,” I said to the driver.

“Another one! Amazing.”

After talking casually for a little while I nerved myself and asked, “There used to be a lot of kidnappings in Sardinia.”

“You mean, a long time ago?”

“No, fifteen years ago, maybe a little more,” I said.

“Yes, I’ve heard there were a few kidnappings.”

A few! In the 1970s kidnapping of foreigners had amounted almost to a cottage industry, and Sardinia was known to have developed a culture of kidnapping. The style of crime had deep roots in mountainous regions of the island. Almost anyone with a little money visiting Sardinia was snatched and held in a peasant hut in the mountains by semi-literates demanding millions from their desperate family.

“Kidnapping is labor-intensive,” a Sardinian, Questore Emilio Pazzi, told Robert Fox, who described the encounter in his chronicle of the modern Mediterranean, The Inner Sea: “A band needs at least twelve men to act as look-outs, messengers and negotiators, as well as seizing and guarding the victim. Unlike the Mafia families of Sicily and Calabria, the gang works together for one crime only, and then disperses.”

“So this was long ago?” I asked the driver. “Who was responsible?”

“Bandits.”

“I read that it was sheep-stealers”—I did not know the Italian term for sheep-rustling—“but they ran out of sheep to steal, and so they decided to kidnap people.”

“Who knows these mountain people?”

His pride dented, he had become a trifle cool towards me, because I had impugned something in his culture.

“More people get killed in America,” he said.

“So true,” I said.

“Let’s go.”

It was only an hour or so from here to Olbia. After we arrived I walked the streets like a rat in a maze, looking for a likely place to stay: quiet, not expensive. As in most of the towns I had visited since Spain, business was terrible and in this wintry low season there were plenty of available rooms.

The weather was pleasant, brilliant sunshine, mild temperatures, lemons on the trees; and March was only a few days off. Olbia was on a gulf, but the port that served it was about five miles away at Golfo Aranci, the end of the train line. Just to see where these Italian ferries left from I took the train and walked around Aranci, marveling at how easy it was—generally speaking—to travel in this part of the Mediterranean. There were several ferries a day to different parts of Italy. But my idea was to take a train the length of Sardinia and then get a ferry to Sicily.

The woman who ran my boardinghouse in Olbia urged me to go to a particular restaurant that night where they were serving Sardinian specialties.

“No wild boar, thanks.”

“Many good things,” she said.

The first dish I was served was, appropriately, sardines. The root is the same, related to Sardinia, just as the word for a Sardinian plant (“which when eaten produced convulsive laughter, ending in death”) had given us the word sardonic—derisive, sneering—because sardonios in Greek meant “of Sardinia.”

“People in the country around here eat these all the time,” the waiter said.

Squid with celery and tomatoes; chickpea and bean soup; goat cheese covered with dried oregano; seaweed fried in batter; then fish, grilled triglia, and finally pastries.

Normally I hated eating alone, but this was Italy, the waiter was talkative, and after the emptiness and general solemnity of Corsican restaurants, this one was noisy and friendly. It was not a fancy place, and yet several grinning middle-aged men were talking on cellular phones as they ate. It was not business, it was just yakking in Italian. Uh, and then what did she say? Oh, yeah? Did you tell her you had the money? You imbecile!