At four o’clock I was standing in a lane in Castello that has been a lane since the Pisans, with washing over it and a cat asleep on a step.
At twenty past five I was looking at several hundred flamingos.
The thing in between is a city bus. One euro fifty.
I want to put that down plainly because when I described it to somebody later they assumed I had hired a car and driven somewhere, and I had not. You walk down off the rock to Piazza Matteotti, which is the scruffy end of things by the station, and you get on the PF with everybody’s shopping, and about twenty minutes later there is eight kilometres of white sand out of the window.
Poetto is a city beach in the literal sense and I had not properly understood what that meant. It is not a resort beach that a city happens to be near. It is where Cagliari goes after work on a Tuesday. There were men still in work shirts with their trousers rolled, and a woman doing a proper swim, out and back, the way you do when it is simply your beach and not an event. Teenagers being loud in the way teenagers are loud everywhere. Somebody’s grandmother entirely unbothered in the shallows with her hair still done.
The bus stops at the western end, near the headland, so that is where everybody gets off and that is where everybody stays. There are kiosks and rows of sunbeds and a reasonable amount of noise.
I walked east for about fifteen minutes.
Same sand. Same water. Almost nobody. There is no trick to it and no secret. People simply stop where the bus leaves them.
I swam, and it was the sort of swimming where you are not doing anything, just standing in water up to your ribs looking back at a city on a ridge with a fort on top of it, thinking that this is a strange thing to have twenty minutes from a cathedral crypt.
The water stays shallow for a long way out. You can walk and walk and it does not get serious about it.
I got out and let the salt dry on and sat with my back against my bag and read four pages of a book I have been not-reading since the ferry, and the light started going the way it does.
Then I put a shirt on over everything, walked back up to the road, and got on the same bus going the other way.
You get off at Ospedale Marino. It is a hospital stop, which is an unglamorous place to begin anything. Then there is a ten minute walk along a perfectly ordinary road, past a pharmacy and some flats with air conditioning units on them, and a gate, and then you are in the Molentargius park and there are sixteen hundred hectares of old salt pans behind the beach, free, open until dusk.
I had one hour of light left, which turns out to be exactly the right amount.
They are not far away. That is the part I was not ready for.
Everything I have ever seen of flamingos was shot with an enormous lens, so I had them filed as a distant pink smudge you squint at. Here they were feeding twenty metres from a wooden boardwalk with their heads fully under and their backsides in the air, which is not the posture the photographs prepare you for. They make a low constant noise, a sort of muttering, like a room of people who have all been talking for hours and are not going to stop for you.
Pink is also wrong. Up close they are mostly a dirty white with a shocking coral at the wing, and you only see it when one of them decides to move and the whole edge of it opens.
Teddy would have counted them. He would have stood there and actually counted, and then told me the number as though it settled something.
I stayed until the water and the sky were the same colour and it got difficult to tell where the birds were standing. A man came past with a proper camera and a tripod and we said good evening and neither of us said anything else, which felt correct.
Here is what I keep turning over.
This is free. It is open from dawn. It is on the beach bus. And in an hour there I saw perhaps nine other people, two of whom were local and out for a walk with a dog.
Meanwhile, two hours north, there is a coastline where the car parks fill by ten and people pay a great deal to photograph water.
I am not going to pretend Cagliari is a secret, because it is a capital city with an airport and a football team and traffic. But it is not performing. Nobody here is doing the island for you. The beach is the beach because people need a beach. The birds are there because the salt pans are there, and the salt pans are there because for hundreds of years this was where the salt came from.
I got the bus back with sand in everything and my hair ruined and sat next to a man holding a cake box flat on his knees with both hands the whole way, which is the most Italian thing I have seen this week.
Up in the lanes it was properly dark by then. I ate standing up at a counter in the Marina because I could not face sitting down, and walked back up the steps, and at the top I turned round the way you always do.
Yesterday I said the flamingos were out there somewhere in the dark doing whatever it is they do at night.
They were muttering. I can report that now.
V.
More images from Cagliari
This is a diary from Cagliari in Sardinia. The beach, the buses and the climb up the headland are in my guide to Poetto beach and the Devil’s Saddle, the city itself is in my complete guide to Cagliari, and the first day here is in the salt behind the beach.
