Sardinia

Sardinia operates on a different timescale from the rest of Italy — an island that resisted Romanisation longer than anywhere else, that has maintained its own language and its own food traditions with a stubbornness that reads, to the visitor, as profound self-possession. The Barbagia in the interior, where the shepherding culture still functions as it has for millennia and the spring festival involves costumes that predate the comune by several centuries, is a world apart from the turquoise-water coast that appears in luxury travel brochures. Both are real; both are worth understanding.Our Sardinia coverage goes beyond the Costa Smeralda to the interior, the nuraghi, the Vermentino vineyards, and the island food culture that has produced some of Italy's longest-lived and least-known traditions.