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…
Supporting Guide
The Best Beaches Near Cagliari
The best beaches near Cagliari are the ones people picture when they picture Sardinia: white sand, rounded granite, water that runs from clear to jade to deep blue within thirty metres of the shore. They are about an hour from…
Poetto Beach and the Devil’s Saddle
Poetto is the reason Cagliari is unlike other Italian capitals of their size. Seven or eight kilometres of pale sand, water that stays shallow and clear for the first hundred metres, and a bus from the middle of the city…
How to Get to Cagliari and Around It
Getting to Cagliari is easier than getting to most of Sardinia, because the airport is seven kilometres from the centre and there is a train from inside the airport grounds that reaches the city in about six minutes. Getting around…
The Best Time to Visit Cagliari
The best time to visit Cagliari is late March to June, or September to November. May and June are the best months for the city itself. September and October are the best for swimming, because the sea here holds its…
Where to Eat in Cagliari
Where to eat in Cagliari is really a question about what to order, because Sardinian food is not mainland Italian food with a sea view. It is a separate cuisine with its own pasta shapes, its own bread, its own…
Where to Stay in Cagliari
Where to stay in Cagliari comes down to one decision made four ways, because the historic centre is four quarters and they are genuinely different places to wake up. Castello is on top of the ridge and involves stairs. Marina…
The Best Things to Do in Cagliari
The best things to do in Cagliari divide into three groups that have almost nothing to do with each other: a medieval upper town on a limestone ridge, an eight kilometre beach with a flamingo colony behind it, and one…
The Perfect Cagliari Itinerary: 2 to 3 Days
Two days is enough to see Cagliari properly. Three is enough to see it and get out to one of the archaeological sites without spending the whole day looking at your watch. This is how I would spend them, in…
A Costa Smeralda Itinerary: 3 to 5 Days
Three days is the minimum that works here, five is the sweet spot, and a fortnight is a lot unless lying still is the whole point of the holiday, which is a perfectly respectable position. The reason three is the…
What the Costa Smeralda Actually Costs
Every guide to this coast tells you it is expensive and then declines to say how expensive, which is not much use to somebody trying to work out whether they can come. So here are numbers. They are for a…
The Nuraghi and Tombs of the Giants at Arzachena
Ten minutes inland from a coast where a hotel room can cost four thousand euros a night, there is a stone tower that was already ancient when Rome was a collection of huts, and on the morning I went there…
