DISCOVER ITALIA!

56 ITALIA! March 2007
Paradise regained

After 15 years Paul Pettengale returns to Sardinia where he fell in love with Italy, and his wife. Only this time he’s got a couple of additional travelling partners...

Sardinia had a lot to live up to. Perhaps too much – a 15-year-old memory of paradise on Earth; a reminiscence of a week spent in the north, camped next to a rolling sea, with my wife (then girlfriend) on our very fi rst holiday together. It had been my fi rst real experience of Italy. We were at university and had decided to hitchhike across Europe during the summer break, though we didn’t really get that far. From Bath we shared lorry cabs to Paris for a brief stay before moving on to Lyon. We caught the train across the Alps and worked our way down from Milan to Rome, where we spent a week with my wife’s childhood friends. We still had time left before the new term started and wanted to continue – maybe to Greece, we thought. No, we were told by our Roman guides, we should do as the Italians did and spend the twilight of our holiday on Sardinia. We hadn’t really even considered the island slap bang in the middle of the Med. I am ashamed to admit that I hadn’t even heard of it (I was not, I hasten to add, studying Geography like my wife). And so, late one Friday evening, our friends taxied us to Civitavecchia and we boarded the night ferry, sleeping on the deck because our £6 ticket didn’t permit us into the boat itself. We didn’t get much sleep. Moths the size of small birds fl itted around our tired heads, and I have a phobia of moths. That, coupled with our thin sleeping bags and a chilly September night, made for an environment that wasn’t particularly conducive to sleep. When we arrived early in the morning, we did as we’d been advised and took a bus to Palau on the northern tip of

Allphotographs Paul Pettengale

March 2007 ITALIA! 57