Chapter 14
OLBIA’S OUTSKIRTS WERE A LOT of asphalt and concrete, and for a second, I worried that perhaps La Maddalena wasn’t going to be the paradise I’d imagined.
But then we were on the open road and heading into the mountains, which were thick with cork and chestnut trees.
Periodically, I could make out these incredible vistas—undulating hills covered in juniper and rockrose—that reminded me of the wakes of two motorboats headed in different directions.
Somewhere beyond these hills, I knew, was the sea.
“Oh, look!” I said when I saw a goat out my window, but by the time Paul and Tom turned their heads, he had disappeared into a ravine.
“The thing about Sardinia,” Tom explained, “is that the whole island is one big sheet of granite. It’s a miracle they manage to grow so much as a grape here.”
“Do they really grow grapes?” said Paul.
“Sardinian wine is second to none.”
I had read Paul’s welcome packet cover to cover, and there had been a section specifically devoted to dispelling our notions of a year-round summer.
June, July, and August would be hot and dry, but in winter, it was rainy and the temperatures dipped into the low fifties.
“I read it gets really windy,” I said, more a statement than a question.
Tom nodded. “Especially on La Madd, where all the trees were cut down a couple of hundred years ago.”
I had never heard the island referred to as La Madd, but over the next couple of years, I would hear the moniker constantly.
I didn’t love it, even in the beginning, but it took me a while to figure out why.
Here was this island with this gorgeous name—named for Mary Magdalene, of all people—and it was like we Americans were those kids in high school who give you a nickname you didn’t ask for, then convince everyone to call you by it.
As we gained altitude, the road narrowed.
Tom stuck to his lane, but the same couldn’t be said for everyone else.
We were passed by mopeds; peculiar three-wheeled trucks that I’d later learn were Piaggio Apes; and large lorries, which shot big black clouds of diesel exhaust in our direction.
The fumes, combined with the hairpin turns, made me want to throw up, so I moved to the center of the car and tried to keep my eyes on the road in front of us.
“Up here in the mountains is where the oldest Sardinians live,” said Tom. “People who can trace their ancestors back to the Bronze Age. Once we get back down to the coast, it’s one villa after another, all of it owned by the Aga Khan and his cronies.”
I didn’t have the slightest clue who the Aga Khan was.
Later, I learned that the Aga Khan wasn’t the name of a person but was instead an honorific title, like His Royal Highness or Commander in Chief, and that it was bestowed on the spiritual leader of the world’s more than one million Ismaili Muslims. In 1974, the Aga Khan was thirty-seven-year-old Shah Karim al-Hussaini, a Harvard-educated prince turned businessman who had taken one look at Sardinia’s Emerald Coast ten years earlier and bought up the whole thing.
What I needed to know about the Aga Khan was simple.
His investment in northern Sardinia, which had included the construction of resorts, restaurants, and nightclubs, had turned our new home into a playground for the rich.
Now there were yachts the size of small cruise ships puttering around Sardinia’s many inlets, and the seaside towns that dotted the coast were charging exorbitant sums to rent even the most modest apartments.
In Porto Cervo, where the Aga Khan had built his own villa, a Givenchy had just opened its doors, and this—more than anything—was a harbinger of things to come.
Tom warned us that while La Maddalena was no Porto Cervo, the rents still shot up in the summer months, and we might not be able to find a place to live until after the tourists went home in September.
“We’ll get you over to the Housing Support Office first thing tomorrow morning,” he said as we coasted down the Via Nazionale and into Palau. “But first, let’s eat.”