The thing that makes Alghero unusual among Italian beach towns is that the good beaches are on a public bus for about a euro. That sounds like a small administrative detail. It is not. Most of the best coast in…
Archives for September 2026
Getting to Alghero and Getting Around
Alghero is the easiest place to arrive in Sardinia, and one of the few where you can have a good week without hiring a car. That is unusual on this island. Most of Sardinia’s coast assumes you are driving. Alghero…
The Best Time to Visit Alghero
September, and it is not a close decision. The heat has broken but the sea is still around twenty three degrees. The Italian holidays end in the first week and the crowds thin within a fortnight. The town holds its…
Where to Stay in Alghero: The Best Areas
There are really only two decisions to make in Alghero, and the second one is about a car. Stay inside the walls and you get the town: the lanes, the restaurants at your door, and the evening on the ramparts…
Where to Eat in Alghero: What to Order
Alghero eats differently from the rest of Sardinia, and the reason is the same as everything else about this town. Six hundred years of Catalan settlement left a kitchen that is not quite Italian and not quite Spanish. The signature…
The Best Things to Do in Alghero
Alghero is small enough that you can see the whole of it in a day and interesting enough that you should not. The old town is about six hundred metres end to end. What fills a stay is not the…
Victoria’s Complete Guide to Alghero
There is a moment, walking into the old town of Alghero for the first time, when you look up at a street sign and find it written twice. Italian on top. Underneath, in smaller letters, something that is not Italian…
Syracuse, and the Only Ancient Thing Still Working
Syracuse is several cities standing in each other’s footprints, and only one of them still has a job. I went to the market on the second morning because I had run out of fruit and stayed for two hours because…
Cagliari, and the Salt Behind the Beach
Nobody flies to Sardinia to see Cagliari. They land here and they are driven away, north, to the coast that was built to be photographed. I stayed. The city is on a ridge of limestone and everything about it follows…
The Best Day Trips from Cagliari
Cagliari sits at the bottom of an island most people only see the top of, and the day trips from it fall into three kinds: archaeology, beaches, and the inland Sardinia that almost no visitor bothers with. All three are…
Su Nuraxi di Barumini and the Nuraghic South
There are around seven thousand nuraghi on Sardinia, stone towers built between roughly 1800 and 1100 BC by a civilisation that left no writing, and nobody is certain what they were for. Su Nuraxi di Barumini, an hour inland from…
Nora: The Roman City on the Water
Nora is a three-thousand-year-old city on a promontory forty-five minutes from Cagliari, and part of it is under the sea. You walk between column stumps and mosaic floors with water on three sides of you, and at the edge of…
