Was I on the right mountain?

I told myself it shouldn’t matter, since only about 15 feet of altitude separated Punta La Marmora and its barely less lofty twin, Bruncu Spina, the two highest peaks on the island of Sardinia. And it didn’t matter - not when I considered my surroundings. The May sky was bright blue, and an array of jagged peaks stretched for miles in every direction. That far above tree line, the panorama spreading beneath me was equally vivid. From the summit cairn, where I sat next to a cross made from welded iron pipe, I could see a queue of sheep straggling through the gorse a half mile below, and two dogs holding them to their path.

The tinkling of the sheep’s bells, a liquid-silver sound that seemed to come from immensely far away, drifted uphill on the breeze. If there was a shepherd I did not see him; very likely, he had just finished milking and had sent the sheep and dogs to the high spring pastures. I thought of the shepherd making cheese, like the pecorino I was enjoying with crisp native flat bread and a bottle of Sardinian wine there at my 6,000-foot aerie. Whether on Punta La Marmora or Bruncu Spina, the cheese and wine would have tasted just as good.

I was lucky to be alone up there. Just a few days before, at the pier in Naples where I had waited to board my ferry for Sardinia, I had found myself surrounded by at least a hundred men in identical plaid shirts and feathered Tyrolean hats. Some of them carried tin cups on their belts. One of them had an accordion, and after warming up with a few Italian songs, they roared into "Roll Out the Barrel" with all the gusto of the best bowling team in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. As they sang, I read the patches on their shirts. They were members of the Abruzzi chapter of the Italian National Alpine Association, and I immediately suspected what they were up to. They were going to get on my boat, and they were going to climb Punta La Marmora the same day I was.

But instead they got on the ferry to Sicily. And so I was alone by my iron-pipe cross, in the emptiest part of Europe that I know.

The high peaks of the Gennargentu massif in east-central Sardinia are the sort of mountains that are easy to climb, once you’ve managed the far-more-complicated business of getting to the trailhead. The road from Aritzo, my village base, was almost laughably tortuous -- a rutted, stream-crossed cow path that no one in their right mind would inflict on anything but a rental car. It really was a cow path. At several places, I had to wait for the beasts to hoist themselves onto their feet and off the road before I could pass, and at one narrow spot a horn nearly poked into the open window of my Fiat. I am used to horns when I drive in Italy, but not that kind.

Nuraghe Arrabiu

The rural interior of Sardinia, especially the region known as the Barbagia, of which the Gennargentu is the rugged rooftop, might easily be mistaken for a land in which cows, goats, innumerable sheep -- and the three horses that skittered away as I approached my mountaintop – have abandoned humanity and gone off to live a life without history and beyond time. The business of tending herds and flocks is very much an invisible pursuit, so much so that I was almost surprised to come across two men milking goats in a farmyard at the dead end of a wrong turn way up in the hills. The terrain around them -- sere, vertical, with limitless grudging pasture and spotty stands of chestnut and oak -- was a landscape indifferent to people.

But people have been there for a very long time, long before they built the tight clusters of tile-roofed houses that make up villages like Aritzo. All of Sardinia, and particularly the Barbagia, is dotted with the prehistoric ruins called nuraghi , cylindrical towers constructed of mortarless stone masonry and slightly narrower at the top than at the bottom. The towers date from the Bronze Age; most were constructed between 1800 and 800 BCE.

There are some 7,000 nuraghi on Sardinia, in various states of ruin, preservation, or restoration, and there had been a lot of debate over what they were used for. Various hypotheses have been offered: that they were forts, sun temples, astronomical observatories, or simply the living quarters of tribes or extended families. A model at the Museum of Archaeology in Cagliari, Sardinian’s capital, showed what a nuraghe would have looked like with a wooden parapet, and lent credence to the fort theory. As for temples or observatories, 7,000 seemed like a lot.

After visiting Nuraghe Arrubiu, a site on a wind-blasted plain between Cagliari and the Barbagia, I came down on the side of the living-quarters hypothesis. The stone compound hardly looked comfortable, but it might have served a Bronze Age family well. In the end, I discovered that the leading theory suggests they were strategically placed fortifications inhabited by local families.

Fragments of Mycenaean pottery, which the ancient Sardinians acquired in trade, date Nuraghe Arrubiu to the 14th or 15th century BCE. It was abandoned about 600 years later, and aside from the nearby ruins of a Roman winery, it seemed hardly to have changed since then.

The site consisted of five towers clustered around a central tower that still stood 50 feet tall. Shouldering sideways through narrow openings - nurgahe dwellers were apparently not quite as well nourished as I am – I explored the central tower’s first-floor room, crept down a dark corridor straight out of a Saturday matinee, and edged my way up a cyclopean stairway in one of the side towers. But despite the best efforts of the weather, I couldn’t muster up a sense of mystery.

Instead, I was put in mind of someone poking through the ruins of my house 3,500 years from now. Very odd construction techniques, they might say, but when all is said and done, it must have been some family’s home.

Far stranger, although lit far more clearly by history, was the Roman amphitheater I had toured back in Cagliari. I hesitate to say "ruined," since the great stone semicircle -- most of which was gouged from the rock -- was still in such good shape that it was rigged with a concert stage. My guide led me through the puzzle of rooms beneath the 1,800-year-old structure, some of which were Carthaginian cisterns dating to pre-Roman times.

"This chamber," he explained at one point, "is where severely wounded gladiators were brought after a combat. If they were beyond help, they were put out of their misery here."

Then he pointed up. "Do you see the soot marks on the ceiling? They’re from the cooking fires of people who lived here."

"When was that?" I asked.

"After the Second World War, for 10 or 15 years. They had lost their homes in the bombing."

It was hard to relate the cosmopolitan Cagliari of today, with its outdoor cafés and buzzing Vespas, its shops selling Prada and Bruno Magli, its 13th-century duomo and 21st-century graffiti, with such abject postwar misery. But the soot on that ceiling, and the resiliency of life as I had found it in the hinterlands, made me see in the amphitheater-dwellers more than a touch of resourcefulness and ultimate indifference to Allied bombs, Carthaginians and Romans, Saracens and Spaniards, and all the other vagaries, human and otherwise, of life on this island over the past several thousand years.

Roman ampitheatre in Cagliari

Of course, today’s Sardinians are an amalgam of many of those ethnic influences. Their strongly distinct dialect of Italian -- many would call it a language of its own -- is said to be the closest modern European tongue to Latin. But under-girding the mixed cultural antecedents was something elementally Sardinian, which was clear in the way the islanders spoke of Sardinian honey, Sardinian cheese, and Sardinian mountains with an ancient and innate pride.

Not far from my hotel in Aritzo, I came upon an outdoor mural of a man on horseback with mountains in the background; both horse and rider looked immensely proud. Alongside the mural was a poem. I could translate only fragments, but I understood enough to be reminded of a simple line of Latin carved in the stone threshold of an inn where I’ve stayed in Vermont: Montani Semper Liberi , it said. "The mountains -- or mountain men (the word can mean either) -- are always free." It was certainly true here: Up in the Barbagia, the natives held out even against Christianity until well into the sixth century.

Driving north from Aritzo, I steered for the hill town of Tonara, one of several Sardinian sources of torrone, a great treat from my mezzo-Italian childhood in New Jersey. Produced in various guises around the Mediterranean, torrone is a nougat candy studded with nuts and coated with a thin white wafer that, as kids, we always said looked and tasted just like the Communion host. When I heard torrone was made in Tonara, I saw my chance to crack the mystery of what exactly goes into nougat.

Before I found out, I lucked onto the answer to another mystery – the question of whether, other than on festival days, anyone ever wears what guidebooks love to call "traditional costume."

The main road into Tonara rode the crest of a long sloping hill, with splendid views westward across a broad, deep valley. I was glancing in that direction as much as Italian driving prudence would allow, when, just past the Bar Harley-Davidson, I saw her -- a woman in her 60s, all in black, with a wide black headdress and a black cloth-wrapped parcel balanced on her head. Older women in black are not uncommon in small-town Italy, especially in Sardinia, but this lady was different. She wore a bright red apron-like cloth, square and starched, and she wore it not in front but in back. In 11 trips to Europe, it was the first time I’d seen anyone in traditional costume, not counting Bavarian hikers in lederhosen and Englishmen in tattersall shirts.

My torrone revelation was no less serendipitous. Having picked up the business card of a local maker at the tourist office, I was off in search of the address when a man on the street asked me the time. I told him and then showed him the card, which he looked at as if it were the logo of a disfavored soccer team.

"You don’t want to go to that place," he said. "You want to go to Signor Peddes, right down this street."

I found Natalino Peddes and his wife, Antoinietta Marotto, in a big sunny workroom on the ground floor of their home, surrounded by torrone and its ingredients. When Mr. Peddes heard that I had been an enthusiast of the confection for just about as long as he had been making it – 43 years -- he got out a bottle of wine and poured us each a glass.

"There are 11 torrone makers in Tonara," he told me. "We have a consortium, and we make torrone the old way. Some factories on the mainland add flavorings, but ours is all natural."

But natural what, I asked. What goes into torrone?

What goes into Mr. Peddes took a sip of wine and pointed to one of two industrial mixers with waist-high bowls. "Into here go egg whites and honey – our good Sardinian honey," he said. "There is a little gas flame under the bowl, and the egg white and honey are stirred and cooked for five hours."

"That’s all - just those two things?"

"And nuts. We make four kinds of torrone, with walnuts, with hazelnuts, with peanuts or with almonds." He pointed to shelves filled with boxes of nuts.

At a nearby table, Antoinietta Marotto was packing the warm, gooey nougat into plastic-lined boxes, smoothing each scoopful and layering it with nuts. When the creamy, sticky mass cooled, she would slice it and sandwich the slabs between sheets of ostia, the wafers.

"You call it that, too -- like the host?" I asked her.

"Sure. It’s just like the host. It’s the only part we don’t make. It’s from the mainland. Here, try this." She spooned a blob of nougat onto a torn sheet of ostia and handed it to me. It tasted like warm honey ice cream that couldn’t melt; it was ambrosial.

From the sweet torrone of Tonara, I wandered into a realm of decidedly sharp-flavored politics in Orgosolo. At first glance, the hamlet was just another Barbagia hill town, its old quarter a tight warren of steep, narrow streets surrounded by more spaciously arranged blocks of modern flats, many still under construction. But those central streets were enlivened by one of the frankest and most unusual displays of political folk art in the world -- the famous murals of Orgosolo.

Public murals are common in Sardinia, although in many towns they primarily serve a pictorial or folkloric purpose -- the proud mountain horseman I’d seen in Aritzo was an example. In Orgosolo, though, mural painting acquired a special political pungency after 1975, when a local art teacher inspired his students by beginning a series of works that only after a decade began to veer from polemicism.

Mural in Orgosolo - preventive medicine fights hunger and disease

The politics of the Orgosolo murals have an Old Left tinge; they are in a vein not extensively mined in the United States since the 1930s, the heyday of artists like Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. The first one I encountered chronicled important moments in the life of Antonio Gramsci, the Sardinian-born founder of the Italian Communist party. Ironically, I had learned the year in which the party was established -- 1921 -- only the night before, while watching "Chi Vuol Essere Milionario?" (Who Wants to be a Millionaire?) on the TV network owned by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The painters of the Orgosolo murals wouldn’t have wanted to be millionaires, and they wouldn’t have had much use for the billionaire Berlusconi. On wall after wall I encountered Marx and Lenin, Che Guevara, and the heroes of a strike at Italian auto factories in 1920. There was a faded mural of the Ni−a, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, with the legend "Colombo assassino" (Columbus, murderer). Another eulogized the radical German leftists Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, creators of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof Gang. Yet another, on the wall of a butcher shop, portrayed a throng of workers and peasants in Picassoesque style and proclaimed, "Né pocos, né locos, né male unidos"(neither few, nor crazy, nor poorly organized).

Since disembarking from my ferry at Cagliari, I had not seen the sea. I might have thought that odd on an island, even an island as large as Sardinia (at some 9,300 square miles, it is about the size of Vermont), but my map had revealed the paucity of Sardinian coastal towns other than a few port cities, and I had read that in the past Sardinians had associated the sea with pirates and invaders. The guide of an English hiking party I had met in Aritzo, however, suggested I visit the coastal town of Santa Maria Navarrese, which was home not only to small, low-key resort hotels but also an excursion boat or two that made scheduled runs up the otherwise inaccessible shoreline along the Gulf of Orosei.

To reach S. M. Navarrese from the north, I decided to follow Route 125, the Orientale Sarda, through a rugged, sparsely populated region lying largely within a national park. The 125 wound south from the town of Dorgali along the edge of a precipice, with limestone parapets soaring above me on the east side of the road. To the west, the cliffs descended to a vast, arid valley whose fields of vines and olive trees lay so far below me that they seemed to lie not merely at a different level of elevation but on a different plane of reality. At several places along the road, the guardrail had broken away. After some 30 miles of what, for once, could accurately be called drop-dead scenery, the Orientale Sarda culminated at Baunei. The town hung on the lip of a great green bowl of olive trees 1,500 feet below Baunei’s main street, which was lined with houses that were not for the acrophobic. From there a side road descended to the plain and S. M. Navarrese.

I found a seaside hotel whose spring clientele from northern Europe was just beginning to trickle in. The local attractions included a tower built by the Saracens and a celebrated olive tree budding in its 1,000th year. As I walked past a soccer field, the boys in yellow jerseys scored a goal. And, yes, there was a small excursion boat.

I showed up at the dock the next morning at the appointed time and found only Andrea, the captain, and Enrico, the mate. They were a perfect captain-and-mate pair; Andrea was 30ish, more serious and reticent; Enrico was in his early 20s and had an entirely devil-may-care way about him. They were both sailor-swarthy, both built as if they could tow the boat to Naples by swimming with ropes in their teeth. No one else was around.

"Am I the only passenger today?" I asked Enrico.

"No. There’s a group of Inglesi. Here they come now."

I looked up the ramp leading down to the dock. There were the English hikers I had met in Aritzo, with their guide who had told me about this town. The plan, I learned, was to drop them off an hour up the coast; they would then hike through the mountains for five hours, while the boat -- and I, its only other passenger -- would head to a cove farther north.

As we motored to the hiker’s drop-off point, I learned from the guide that I had, as I half suspected, mistakenly climbed Bruncu Spina instead of Punta La Marmora. It mattered less than ever on that bright day on a calm sea, with the bottom visible 10 fathoms down, limestone spires straight out of Gaudi shooting up from the shore, and an offshore breeze carrying the fragrance of the macchia -- the herb-heavy Mediterranean coastal brush -- down from the cliff tops. An hour after Andrea ferried the hikers into their cove by dinghy, we anchored again at the Spiaggia dei Gabbiani (the beach of gulls), where I got a private dinghy ride to shore and was left to swim, lie in the sun, and explore a strand framed by bizarrely weathered formations of creamy-colored calcareous rock. By the time Enrico came to pick me up, though, it was beginning to cross my mind that no one had said anything about lunch.

I needn’t have worried; back on the boat Andrea was in the galley. Enrico and I set up a table and benches on deck, and soon the three of us were sitting down to spaghetti with a marinara sauce based on sun-dried tomatoes; Sardinian flat bread drizzled with fragrant green olive oil and topped with slabs of pecorino and thick-sliced dry prosciutto; and a half-gallon bottle of inky homemade wine that was all body and flavor, complexity be damned. I thought about American boat trips I’d been on, where a deckhand might sell you a Saran-wrapped sub and a soda.

When we were finished, Andrea lay down for a nap. Enrico went into the galley and came out with a basket of small oranges.

"Blood oranges," he said. He cut one in half, and the flesh was bright red. "Did you ever squeeze them into your wine?"

Torrone makers in Tonara

"Do they make wine in America?" Andrea piped up from his bench along a gunwale.

"Some," I said. "Not like this, except the old Italians." And to Enrico, "No, I’ve never squeezed blood oranges into my wine."

"Here," he said, and he crushed half an orange into my glass. Delizioso. We killed the basket of oranges and the rest of the wine, and I talked with Enrico while Andrea dozed off. He spoke of the tourists they carried: "The English are always particular, and the Germans, you can always tell the Germans because they go in the water no matter what time of year it is." He told me about the local sea cows, the bue marino, nearly extinct now. ("Too many people, not enough fish.") And I asked him about the part of Sardinia best known to the rest of the world, the string of fabulously exclusive resorts along the Costa Smeralda to our north.

"Do they ever come down here?" I asked him. "The people from the Costa Smeralda?"

"No," he answered, with a dismissive northward wave of his hand. "Anyway, we have it better than them. We don’t have to live by the law of the jungle like they do; we live beautifully without much money. Life here is healthy, tranquil. We can see the Via Lattea -- the Milky Way. We live to be old."

It was time to go back and pick up the hikers. "Poveri Inglesi" -- the poor English -- I said to Enrico. "They don’t have any spaghetti up there in the rocks; they don’t have any wine or blood oranges."

"Solo panini e acqua," Enrico answered with a smug little grin. Only sandwiches and water. Weren’t we the lucky ones, we both agreed. Poveri Inglesi -- no, poor everybody who wasn’t at that moment bobbing on the pellucid Tyrrhenian Sea, squeezing blood oranges into their wine and eating the fresh white cheese of the sheep of Sardinia.