Half past seven, and there was nobody on the road.
Not quietly. Not fewer cars than usual. Nobody. I drove for about ten minutes between two bays on the Costa Smeralda and did not pass a single car in either direction, on a coast where in the middle of the day you can wait twenty minutes to get out of a car park.
It happens every evening and it is the easiest thing in the world to miss. At that hour everyone is still lying on a beach refusing to admit it is over, or they are already sitting down somewhere with a menu. The hour in between belongs to nobody, so nobody takes it.
I have been taking it all week.
I pulled onto a gravel bit at a bend, the kind with a dented crash barrier and a broken bottle in the weeds, and turned the engine off, and sat there with the door open.
Here is what happens, and it is very simple.
The light comes in flat off the sea. The granite, which all day has been grey, and frankly a bit dour, goes a pale rose. Not gold. Not the orange everyone photographs. Rose, like the inside of a shell, and slightly chalky. It holds for about twenty minutes and then it stops, and the stone goes back to grey, and the whole thing is over.
Twenty minutes. Free. On the most expensive coastline in Italy.
I sat on the rock rather than standing about looking at it, took my sandals off because the day was still in everything, and did not photograph it for the first ten minutes. I have got better at that. There is a version of this trip where I spend the good part of every evening deciding how to describe the good part of every evening.
Down below, a bay had emptied out completely. Rake marks still in the sand. Every umbrella folded and taken in. One set of footprints going down to the water and not coming back, which I assume means somebody walked along the shoreline, though I preferred the other reading.
I did notice that this is the second time this week I have found the best part of a day by accident and the second time it cost nothing. I am aware of how that sounds. I am not going to build a philosophy out of it. Some things are simply cheap and good, and on a coast like this one that reads as a statement when it is only the weather.
Later I drove on to Porto Cervo and climbed up to one of those bars built into the rocks above the water.
You go at seven. That is the whole trick and everyone who lives here knows it. At seven the tables are laid and empty, the sun is about to go, and you can have one drink on a terrace that at eleven will have a minimum you would need to think about. I had a glass of something cold, and a small dish of olives arrived that I had not asked for, and I watched the light do the thing it had already done for me an hour earlier, from higher up.
Two old men were playing cards at the next table.
They had the look of men who have sat at that particular table for forty years and would be mildly put out if somebody else were at it. Very brown. Very unbothered. A half bottle between them and two small glasses, and an argument going on that clearly was not a real argument. One of them laughed at something and looked over and caught me watching, and I got caught properly, the way you do, and he did not seem to mind at all.
I thought, not for the first time on this coast, that the people actually enjoying themselves here are almost never the ones the place is famous for.
By half past eight the terrace had filled up behind me and the register had changed. More linen. More arriving. A boat somewhere below running its engine for a long time for no reason I could see. I put a note under my glass and went down the steps while it was still the evening I had come for.
The marina at blue hour is genuinely beautiful and I am not going to pretend otherwise out of some reflex. The hulls go white against the dark water and the cabin lights come on one at a time, and crew in white polo shirts move about doing competent things with ropes. It is a spectacle and it knows it. I walked the quay for a while, past the closed shops with their windows still lit, nobody in the arcade at all, and then I got in the car.
The drive back is nothing. Headlights, dry scrub, one road. I stopped at a place with plastic chairs and a hand-written board and a dog asleep under a table, and had a small beer and something fried, and the woman who brought it asked where I had been and then told me I should have gone to the other bay, which is what everyone tells you everywhere.
Three days here now. Inland on the first, on the water on the second, and this evening, which was the one I did the least in.
My mother would understand this entirely. She has never in her life been early for anything she did not want to do, and she will rearrange a whole day around being somewhere particular at a particular hour for no reason except that the light will be good. I used to find it maddening. I appear to have become it.
The granite went grey again while I was driving. I did not stop for that part.
V.
This is a diary from the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia. Where to be at that hour, and what the evening actually costs, is in the nightlife guide, the village itself is in my guide to Porto Cervo, and the coast as a whole is in my complete guide to the Costa Smeralda.
