Settling in in Sardinia

Italy Travelog #17
Chia, Sardinia - Tuesday, 27 May 2025, 4:30pm

Our flight from Rome to Cagliari this morning was uneventful. And mercifully short, at 1h15m. That's because we were cramped into average-minus economy seats— not that Aeroitalia even has roomier seats, except in the exit rows— and there was no wifi. Sigh. Yet another budget European carrier. At least so far they've only joked about having to pay €5 to use the toilet.

BTW, if you're wondering how to pronounce "Cagliari", it is not Cag-lee-ARR-ee. That's kind of an Anglo pronunciation. In Italian the g is basically silent when paired with an l. Thus the locals all say CAL-yah-ray. It sounds a lot like they're saying Calgary— the city in Alberta, Canada. But fortunately the weather here is better. It's sunny and around 80° today.



It was a long ride in a van from the airport down to our hotel. We're not in Cagliari/Calgary but in the small town of Chia, on the southern tip of the island of Sardinia. Parts of the drive were through fairly rural areas. The roads in this spread-out resort hotel are mostly dirt roads.

Once on the property, we checked in and stowed our luggage. Our room wasn't ready yet. We rode in a golf cart over to a hotel restaurant near the beach. There we met several colleagues and joined them for lunch. And to put our food on my sales VP's tab. 😅 Not that the company isn't paying for it anyway; this is Club.



We drew out lunch waiting for a text from the front desk that our room would be ready. Actually pretty much all of my colleagues were waiting for the same. Around 4pm I gave up because I felt like I was about to fall asleep and rode a golf cart back to the front. Our room was ready; they just hadn't texted us. 😒

The room is large, reasonably comfortable, but also kind of bland. The one interesting feature it does have is a large, private patio (see above). We're on the first floor, though, which kind of means no view.



I lifted my camera up over my head to look over the bushes around our patio. Yeah, we can kinda see the ocean from here. But this is not what I think of when I think "beach resort". I feel like my company either got rooked on picking this location... or cheaped out. I'm already reconsidering my choice to stay an extra day here at my own expense. It's not worth the nightly rate for this. 😔

Touring Sardinia

Italy Travelog #18
Chia, Sardinia - Wednesday, 28 May 2025, 10am

We've been in Sardinia for almost a day at this point. We've been taking it easy for the most part. Yesterday we had lunch with colleagues after arrival, then I crashed in our room for a few hours before the reception dinner. This morning we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast at the hotel then got ready for the day's outing— a cave tour. While we're en route to the cave I'm jotting down a few notes about Sardinia thus far.



The first is that it's beautiful here, and rural. Sardinia has a population of about 1.6 million. That may seem like a lot; it'd be a fair sized city, if it were a city. But Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean. A size comparison shows it's about the size of Vermont. ...Well, Vermont has 6500,000 people, so Sardinia is less rural than Vermont. Perhaps a better comparison would be to Sicily, the largest Mediterranean island, which is only slightly larger than Sardinia and has 3x the population.

Part of what makes Sardinia feel so rural is that the coast is very wilderness-y. There are no towns along the rugged coastline, no multi-million-dollar mansions, no high-rise resort hotels. I've heard accounts from two people now, including a local archaeology Ph.D., that the "no towns" thing is because of the historic threats of invasion and piracy. Occupants of the island from hundreds of years ago to thousands of years ago built villages inland so they wouldn't be so exposed to marauders; whether the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, the Moors, or the Spanish.

Speaking of the Spanish, it's actually the Catalans who've had a strong influence here. Our tour guide (the aforementioned archaeology Ph.D.) mentioned that with a broad smile because two of our companions on our little group trek are Catalan, from Barcelona. For hundreds of years during the Middle Ages Catalans ruled the island. There are still communities of Catalans on the island today, though they are in the north and we're traveling around the far south.

One other thing that strikes me as we're driving around these remote parts of the coast in Sardinia is that it looks and feels a lot like California. Except for the road signs being in Italian I could almost swear I'm on the central coast. It's the rugged coast, the mountains near the water, and the types of trees and shrubs all around us. Climate-wise, it's a similar climate.