I have been on the east side of Italy for most of the summer, and I did not notice what that had done to me until the first evening here.
The sun goes down in the wrong place.
That is not a clever observation, it is just true. All along the Adriatic and the Ionian the sun comes up out of the sea and goes down behind the land, so the evening happens behind you, over the hills, and the water goes grey and flat while the sky is still doing something. You get used to it without knowing you have.
Alghero faces west. There is nothing between this town and the Balearics.
So at half past seven I was standing on the wall with everybody else, and the whole thing went down into open water, and I had a moment of not understanding what I was looking at.
The wall is the reason to come here and nobody told me that either.
It runs the whole seaward edge of the old town, forty feet up, and somebody in the sixteenth century made the top of it flat and wide. So it is a defensive fortification that has spent four hundred years being a promenade, which is a good outcome for a fortification.
At seven the town comes up onto it. Not some of the town.
Families with pushchairs. Teenagers arranged against the parapet at angles designed to be seen. Three men in their seventies walking with their hands behind their backs, who I then saw again twenty minutes later going the other way, and again after that. Everybody passes everybody twice. That is clearly the point and has been for centuries.
I bought something cold from one of the bars along the inside edge, paid too much for the position, and sat facing out.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to.
The street signs are in two languages.
I noticed it on the walk in from the bus and assumed it was Sardinian, which would make sense, because the island has its own language and is fairly serious about it. It is not Sardinian. It is Catalan.
Aragon took this town in 1354 and rather than garrison it they emptied it, expelled everybody, and refilled it with people from Barcelona and Tarragona. Six hundred and seventy years later about a fifth of the town still speaks the language those settlers brought.
I read that on my phone sitting on the wall and then I put the phone down, because it is one of those facts that is more interesting if you stop reading about it and start looking.
The doorways are wrong for Italy. Pointed, plain, heavy, with a carved lump at the top and none of the fuss you would get on the mainland. The town turns its back on the island and faces the water. The whole street plan runs at right angles to the sea, so every fifth lane ends in a blue rectangle and a bit of wind.
None of that is decoration. It is what happens when you move a town six hundred miles and it stays moved.
Later I walked back through the lanes, which at eleven are full of tables and noise, and at one in the morning are completely empty.
The stone is pale and the lamps are iron and set high on the walls, and the light comes down in circles with dark between them. You can hear your own feet. Somewhere two streets over somebody was closing shutters, one after another, all the way down.
I stopped at a corner where a lane opened out and there was a doorway with the pointed arch and the carved boss, and a modern doorbell panel screwed into the stone beside it with six names on it.
That is the whole town in one wall, really. A fourteenth century Catalan door with six families living behind it.
My father would have wanted to know how the arch was cut. Whether the stone was local, whether it was worked on site or brought in finished, and he would have found somebody to ask before we got back to the hotel.
Earlier, on the wall, I had tried to work out why the sunset had thrown me so much, and I think I have it now.
It is not that the sun goes down over water. Plenty of places do that.
It is that there is nothing in it. No island, no headland, no far shore going blue. The horizon here is a single unbroken line and the sun simply drops through it, and the effect is that the town appears to be standing at the end of something rather than in the middle of a coast.
Which, historically, it was. This was the western edge, the port that looked back toward Barcelona and away from the island behind it, and everybody on that wall this evening was standing on a fortification built by people watching that empty horizon for something to come out of it.
Nothing did, in the end. The sea stayed empty and the town stopped watching and started walking up and down instead.
I went back out at about half one because I could not sleep, and the wall at that hour is a completely different object. No people at all. The lamps along the inside edge are on, so the stone glows a bit, and below you the water is moving against the rocks and you can hear it, which you cannot at seven over the noise of everybody.
A cat came along the parapet, entirely unbothered by me, and went down some steps.
There was one light on in a window in the town behind, quite high up, and somebody moving around in it.
I stood there for a while and then went to bed.
V.
