::: Sardinian scents

... slowly, slowly spring arrived, but it was not like the ones I knew. They were beautiful, but exploded with difficulty and sometimes caught you out with the last blows of ?the tail of winter. This, instead, was a prelude of summer that promised wonderful days.

The smells... the scents that I picked up whilst wandering around this new land were intoxicating; often, when I was driving with the window down, I had to stop along the road and enjoy the scents of the Mediterranean bush that filled the air so intensely. I found myself? trying to guess what the plants were, that seemed to be elbowing each other in order to show themselves or better still, be smelt. And at times, together with the solitary panoramas,? I found them quite moving, and their scent filled my heart with a strange feeling of ancient solitude.

Yes, ancient solitude. I don?t know how this word association has come to me, but I recognize that for me these two words associate well with this land, I certainly do not speak about the coasts, that in summer are filled with tourists and where there is not even a shadow of solitude!

But inland..... the inland has something that must be witnessed first hand, perhaps some of you have had the same feelings, but for many others this land is only sea and sun, and it will make you smile to hear me say that if you listen to it, but above all if? you smell it, you can still pick up the sound of? ancient flocks and stories of solitary shepherds.

I wanted this section because it is the smells that have made the most impact on me; you will not hear me speak about coasts, of white beaches and high cliffs, no!, you will hear me speak about its inland! The coasts, the beaches, the bays, are a context that came later, with the advent of tourism, but the true Sardinia, the one that marks your soul and heart, is the inland. Its history, its ups and downs, its way of life and of having lived history. Yes, because effectively Sardinia has had its own way of? living history, with its characters, famous and infamous and most times it has been found against its will, at the centre of the attention of history.

But it is not about history that I want to speak, that can be read in books ( which most times tell a distorted truth) but about the tastes; of those tastes that have bewitched me and many others like me.