Sardinia

"There is not in Italy what there is in Sardinia, nor in Sardinia what there is in Italy."

"This land resembles no other place. Sardinia is something else. Enchanting spaces and distances to travel-nothing finished, nothing definitive. It is like freedom itself."

"Sardinia is out of time and history."

"In the late 1800s, Europe had a peaceable bull’s-eye in the northern industrialized countries (Great Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, and the Low Countries), bordered by slightly stroppier Ireland, Austria-Hungary, and Finland, surrounded in turn by still more violent Spain, Italy, Greece, and the Slavic countries. Today the peaceable center has swelled to encompass all of Western and Central Europe, but a gradient of lawlessness extending to Eastern Europe and the mountainous Balkans is still visible. There are gradients within each of these countries as well: the hinterlands and mountains remained violent long after the urbanized and densely farmed centers had calmed down. Clan warfare was endemic to the Scottish highlands until the 18th century, and to Sardinia, Sicily, Montenegro, and other parts of the Balkans until the 20th. It’s no coincidence that the two blood-soaked classics with which I began this book—the Hebrew Bible and the Homeric poems—came from peoples that lived in rugged hills and valleys."

"People inevitably think of themselves as Sardinian first and Italian second (or sometimes even third, after European). A book written once about Sardinia was entitled The Unconquered Island, and it's true. Invaded and exploited it has been, yes, but not conquered."

"Sardinians as a race are prone to a very non latin, almost celtic wistfulness and melancholy."

"In part, the Sardinian outlook on political matters is a feature of their heritage of medieval independence. Even to peasants and herdsmen, the close, convivial world of the giudicati had great advantages over the more exploitative rule of Pisans, Genoese, Aragonese and Spaniards, and the Sardinians never forgot that they had once been in charge of their own destinies. The long wars for independence of Mariano IV and Eleonora of Arborea against Aragon created a sense of nationhood that never entirely disappeared, even though the Sardinians lost."

"The Sards themselves are not a talkative race (unless you get them going on politics or some other subject dear to their hearts). Nor are they theatrical or gregarious like other Italians, but they look frankly in the eye and treat you as a human being first before they judge you as anything else. D.H. Lawrence wondered at the boldness of women. You will probably never meet an obsequious Sard."

"The Sardinians are a sturdy race, but at the same time alert, lively, and brave, even to rashness; firm friends but implacable enemies; quick of understanding, of vivacious imagination and passionately fond of poetry, zealous in maintaining their rights and liberty, but loyal and fond of their King and Country."