Cagliari

Cagliari doesn’t get talked about the way the rest of Sardinia does. Everyone I know who’s been to the island talks about the Costa Smeralda’s yachts or the granite coves of the north, and almost nobody mentions the capital, which I think is a mistake, because Cagliari might be the most interesting city on the island precisely because it isn’t trying to be a beach resort. It’s a working port city with Phoenician, Roman, Pisan, and Spanish layers stacked on top of each other, arranged around a limestone hill that the locals simply call il Castello.

I climbed into Castello on my first afternoon, up through the Bastione di Saint Remy — a grand white stairway and terrace built by the Piedmontese in the nineteenth century that functions as the city’s best free viewpoint, looking out over the rooftops toward the Gulf of Angels. Castello itself is ringed by walls and towers the Pisans built in the thirteenth century when they controlled this stretch of coast, and two of those towers, the Torre dell’Elefante and the Torre di San Pancrazio, still stand guard at either end of the district, their pale stone weathered but unmistakably medieval in their proportions. Narrow streets inside the walls wind past the Cattedrale di Santa Maria, whose facade was redone in a neo-Romanesque style in the twentieth century but whose interior still holds a pulpit carved in the eleventh century, moved here from Pisa itself.

Underground Cagliari

What surprised me most was what’s underneath the city. Cagliari sits on soft limestone riddled with cavities, and the Italians used this to their advantage during the Second World War, carving air-raid shelters directly into the rock — some of which are open to visit today, cool and damp and eerily preserved. More striking still is the Roman amphitheater, carved partly out of the living rock in the second century AD, which held gladiatorial games for a provincial capital that Rome considered important enough to fortify heavily. Standing in its bowl, half-quarried and half-built, gives a strange sense of a city that has always worked with the stone underneath it rather than simply on top of it.

The Lagoon and the Flamingos

The other Cagliari, the one I didn’t expect, is the wetland just south of the city center. The Molentargius-Saline Regional Park, a former salt pan turned protected lagoon, hosts one of the largest colonies of greater flamingos in Italy — thousands of them, feeding in shallow pink-tinged water within sight of apartment blocks and the airport approach. I biked out there one morning along the causeway and stood for the better part of an hour just watching them wade and occasionally lift off in loose formation, the improbable contrast of urban Cagliari on one horizon and this wild, briny expanse on the other doing more to explain the city’s character than any museum could.

Evenings in Cagliari belong to the Marina quarter, down at sea level below Castello, where fish restaurants serve fregola con arselle — Sardinia’s own toasted, pearl-like pasta, cooked with tiny clams — and the passeggiata fills Via Roma with families walking off dinner along the harbor. It’s an easy city to underestimate and a hard one to leave without wanting to come back.

When to go: April, May, or October, when the flamingos are most active in the lagoon and the Castello’s stone stairways aren’t a furnace under the summer sun.