Sardinia

The healing current of an Italian island

Karolina Waclawiak is a documentary producer and the author of the critically acclaimed novels Life Events, The Invaders and How To Get Into the Twin Palms, which will be re-released as a New Classic by Two Dollar Radio on October 14. She lives in Los Angeles.

Two weeks after my mother died, I was on a plane to Naples.

In those two weeks, I had planned two funerals in two different states, written her obituary, received her cremains, and found her a burial site. But the first cemetery plot I picked was no good.

When I first called the cemetery manager on the phone, days after my mother had died, he had said the plot had “a view of a creek.” It sounded nice. I asked for pictures to show my brother and sister. My father said it was our choice. He was overwhelmed by everything else.

The pictures were dubious. I was unsure, but everyone was having a hard time making decisions. So I went with it.

When my father and I arrived at the hilltop cemetery deep in Texas Hill Country, the creek was more like a ditch and my father crossed his arms and said, “No.”

The cemetery manager used soothing tones when he told us there were other options. That he was happy to take us around. We got into a golf cart and began a slow roll around the cemetery, searching for somewhere that was good enough for our matriarch. My mother was a formidable woman. Here’s the short version: She was born in a tiny stone house in a small village in Poland, with an outhouse and dreams of America.

She met my father in university, got married, and had my sister and I not long after. We fled Communism as political refugees, ended up in a refugee camp outside of Vienna, Austria, before being sponsored by a church in San Antonio, Texas. We couldn’t speak English. We didn’t know anyone. My parents learned to tell our story in a tidy sentence: They came to America with two young daughters, two suitcases, and $200.

My mother really hated it when I led with the outhouse. Maybe it felt cheap to her. Shameful. But it was an important detail to me. As was the fact she and my father were born a few years after the war ended. It made clear that the poverty they grew up with was incomparable to the type of poverty we faced when we came to America. That I would never, ever get it.

My mother was the driving force behind all of our family’s striving and achievement. As my brother eloquently said in his eulogy for her, she was Jupiter and we were the moons who orbited around her, shaped by her gravity.

This woman didn’t belong next to a ditch in Texas.

My father and I sat next to each other in the golf cart as we quietly scanned the land, reading the headstones. He was not just looking for a place for her, but also a future spot for himself. We didn’t have to say it.

Every few feet the cemetery manager would slow the golf cart and say, “This spot’s pretty nice, don’t you think?” in a thick Texas twang.

My father, arms still crossed, would squint and say “no” each time.

My father met my mother when he was 19 and they hadn’t left each other’s sides since, save a brief, mandatory stint for him in the army, which was probably the longest my parents had ever been apart in the nearly 50 years they were together. Since her death, he had periodically been exhibiting signs of broken heart syndrome, or Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, named so because the weakened, constricted heart looks like a Japanese octopus trap.

The experience of broken heart syndrome is akin to having a heart attack — tight chest, difficulty breathing, and feeling like you’re dying. He had been oscillating between catatonia and gulping for air in the days since I watched him hold my dying mother in his arms on the floor of the room she and I had slept in together.

As we continued on the bumpy golf cart ride, he held his chest, waiting for another attack. We didn’t know what we were looking for but we weren’t going to stop until we found it.

As the cart made its way up a gravel road to the top of a hillside, we both stared at the rolling green hills stretched out in every direction. We stopped by a live oak tree and listened to wind chimes jangling in the breeze. We both gulped in the air, which smelled like mesquite.

The manager said something about the spot under the tree being one he had picked out for himself. I could tell he was trying to win us back after trying to sell us on the ditch being a premiere resting place. I had put down a deposit already so we had to make some kind of choice.

“This is it,” my father said.

“What?” the cemetery manager said.

“This is what I want for her,” my father said, pointing to the spot the man had just finished telling us was his.

“I picked it out for myself,” the man repeated. The way my father looked at him made it clear that the transaction was already done.

I flew back to California and then got on a plane to spend my birthday in Italy. It was 2019.

I hadn’t been to Italy since I was a teenager, when my mother took me to Rome in hopes of being blessed by Pope John Paul II, who for any Polish family, might as well have been God himself.

When someone who serves as the force of gravity in a family dies, the lesser bodies of mass scatter. Or, at least, that’s what happened in our family. Old wounds opened up, fissures happened, the gravitational force of grief took hold and we spun away from each other.

Our mother ruled the stars and the sky of our lives and without her, I was left to learn who I was and what system of values I wanted to live by. I could create my own code of conduct now.

Or, as my brother liked to say, “We have no one left to impress.”

I had no idea who I wanted to be now. Or what was even possible.

My brother is a decade younger than I am, the only member of our family born in America. After I moved across the country to California to go to college years ago, our relationship has mostly been over the phone while he bounced between Texas and Connecticut. We share memes and memories of our mother hyping each other up in ways only she would have — an immigrant mother telling us to get over ourselves in brutal and uncompromising ways.

My brother’s best friend, Sean, who had been hanging around our house since he was 8 years old, joined one of our text chains one day and our group chat was born. As the pandemic spread, my brother, Sean, and I all lived in our group chats just like everyone else in isolation. Most of my group chats have ebbed away, but The Villa-ins GC, inhabited by me, my brother, and Sean, still remains vibrant.

We each have our purpose. My brother and Sean do the hard work of foraging through online detritus looking for memes that speak to our moods and whatever level of doom we happen to be feeling. (Don Draper has made frequent appearances.) We annihilate each other with our close reads, we share posts from X to keep each other up to date with the most fucked up thing happening at any given moment. We hype each other up. They curate; I consume and comment. They mock me. It’s the perfect symbiotic relationship.

I almost hate to write about it, it’s that sacred a space.

During the pandemic, when we were all grounded seemingly indefinitely, we began sharing all the places we’d like to go. My brother and Sean had been traveling together for years — Portugal, Croatia — but I had yet to join them. In fact, I had only gone on one trip with my brother — to Paris, as his college graduation present from my mother. We had been on a budget. When we visited the catacombs, we got one self-guided audio tour to share. He listened and as we traversed the dark corridors, he narrated the tour in a hushed voice for me.

We ate camembert and bread in the park. Drank 2 Euro rosé. We had a nice time. We got in a fight in another park and I searched the city for him until I found him in our hotel room, acting as if nothing had happened at all. We hadn’t been on a trip together since.

When my mother and I went to Rome back in those teenage years, she woke me up at 7am every morning so we could get through another chapter of her Lonely Planet book. She was an adventurer, and by the time we left, we had seen every fucking thing in the Eternal City.

We went to the Vatican twice. I saw Pope John Paul II both times. She was too short to see over the crowds of other Polish women who had taken buses across Europe to lay eyes on him. I held our camcorder trying to get a shot as those women bullied me in Polish to let them see too.

As an ornery teenager, I didn’t appreciate my mother’s thoroughness, but I grew up to be a “planner,” too. My friends call me both an adventure bully and a travel Dom: I love making itineraries. If I’m somewhere new, I want to see it all.

My mother had big plans for her retirement. She wanted to see the fjords in Norway, take a boat down the Danube, and see the world. When she got sick, she still asked me to send photos of wherever I happened to be. My brother and I always brought her along on our trips in our group chat with her. The top of some hike in Yosemite; a gin and tonic in Porto. She hadn’t gone anywhere in retirement and my brother and I were determined to make sure we didn’t wait too long to see the places we wanted to see.

Which is how we landed in Sardinia.

My Instagram feed has long been populated with photos of the soft white sand and impossibly blue water of beaches in Sardinia. It was a place that has beckoned me more insistently than anywhere else in the world.

It’s where I wanted to go on my honeymoon. And although we didn’t end up there, in the years after my divorce, it took on an almost mythological quality of all that could have — and should have — been.

During the pandemic, after another endless late night doom scrolling, I posed the idea of the three of us meeting in Sardinia to decide if the island was going to be our final resting place — the place we’d retire, or more relevantly, the place to escape to if and when our lives ever started to fall apart.

Sardinia became the place for us to run away to. If our day or week was shit, the news cycle too overwhelming, the memes in the group chat became progressively darker. Inevitably, one of us would counterbalance the despair with images of sailboats floating on glass-like clear water casting ghostly shadows on the white sand drifting below. How could things be completely hopeless when Sardinia existed two flights away? We could liquidate everything. Who cared about trying to be good at capitalism? Everything was meaningless. We had no one left to impress.

Still, we felt tethered to our careers and to the lives we were intent on building. Each morning, like clockwork, the group chat would fill up with images of Don Draper drunk and disheveled in a bar, in an office screaming “That’s what the money’s for,” or in a car driving toward oblivion lost in some kind of existential despair. And again, we’d find ourselves egging each other on to just… go. Nowhere held the same sort of appeal as Sardinia. But no one was going to jump first.

In Spring 2023, my life imploded when the newsroom I was helming shut down. Suddenly, my entire identity was in limbo. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I had spent my adult life tying my identity to achievement and it had mostly worked. But, now it seemed I had not been able to fulfill my promise of being worth leaving your homeland and entire life for.

I was just glad my mother was not alive to see it.

What was I supposed to do in the face of public humiliation? Every part of me felt a need to disappear. In succession, I had lost my marriage, my mother, and now my career.

I had two choices. I could rush to find another job and keep pretending like hitting the markers of adulthood mattered, even though I was well past the point of burn out, or I could just drop out of my life for a while and see who I wanted to be moving forward. There was freedom starting to emerge from all of this loss.

I bought a one way ticket to Italy for the end of the summer. I was going to live out of one carry-on suitcase and one weekender bag. I didn’t know how to speak Italian. It was also the first time I had traveled solo out of the country not for work. But did I really expect a one-way ticket to change my life? Of course not. I was a realist.

My itinerary started in Milan, then Naples for a month to start the book I had been putting off since 2020. But as my trip went on, the itinerary got looser and looser. For one, I didn’t know where I’d be sleeping in Venice in November. (It ended up being in the back of a friend’s gallery in the Guidecca.) This wasn’t my typical way of traveling or moving through the world, but after the rigidity of my life didn’t pan out the way I hoped, I was open to trying something else.

I had no real plan. For the first time in decades, my drive had disappeared. Maybe, finally, it was time to face the fact that the promise of all my promise in America had reached an end. I sent the group chat photos of my wandering streets alone. I had recently made an itinerary for my brother and Sean’s trip to Naples based off of one of my own and I was retracing their steps and cataloging it for them.

I had shared my location with them so they’d periodically ask me how my dinner was, or ask me to send a photo of wherever they would find me. I was never really alone. But I was still working through a kind of chosen alienation. I knew it would get old to be swimming in my head day after day, though.

But in late September, near the anniversary of my mother’s death and brother’s birthday, Sardinia awaited. The group chat had sprung to action and bought tickets to meet me there. We were doing it, finally.

My flight from Naples to Olbia was delayed because of a thunderstorm that had overtaken the city. Still, the group chat was hyped — my brother and Sean were waiting to board their flight to Olbia from Milan and we were giving each other constant updates from our respective airports.

By the time I had arrived in Olbia, there were seemingly no rental cars left. We waited and waited, and finally a beat up car appeared. It didn’t matter. It had four wheels.

Our first stop was Cannigione, a small town on the northeastern coast of the island about 9 km from Porto Cervo, the ritzy coastal town where billionaires park their yachts for the summer. I had seen a steady stream of celebrities jumping off their boats into the sea on my feed and was surprised by how sleepy the area was by late September.

Sardinia is a Blue Zone, meaning a high concentration of the population lives past 100. The reasons are simple — good food, a strong sense of community, low stress, and lots of physical activity. It’s the opposite of a place like America, where we’re all mainlining cortisol on a daily basis and our life expectancy has started to decline since the pandemic.

In Sardinia, people live in the present moment and it inspired me to put my phone away too. Did I really need to know what the latest disaster overtaking the world was? We were fresh off the heels of Covid, already in the midst of an endless war in Ukraine, and things were increasingly getting worse at an unprecedented pace. After working in the media for over a decade, I decided I didn’t really need to know anything anymore. At least, not for a little while.

On our first night in Cannigione, we found an osteria near the town’s harbor. We were starving, and it was our first meal of the day, so we ordered a veritable feast: pecorino and bread (after devouring the pane carasau that came to our table immediately upon sitting down), lobster pasta, mussels in tomato sauce, fish stew, a spaghetti with bottarga (a briny fish roe that I don’t love, despite it being a local delicacy), grilled fish caught fresh that morning, and several bottles of Vermentino produced on the island. All that was left after our meal were crumbs and oil stains on the paper table cloth. We were toast.

By the time we got back to the house, it was dark and the feral cats who lived there encircled us. The house was out of a storybook — stone and 100-year-old wood beams, atop a hill overlooking the beach, the endless water, and mountains around us. There was a pool in case we didn’t feel like venturing down to the beach every day. The stone paths were littered with olives from the olive trees which lined the property. In the morning, neon purple morning glories and hot pink bougainvillea crept up the house and the faraway sound of roosters crowing awaited us. We drank Crema e Gusto coffee overlooking the harbor as the cats rubbed against our legs.

The charm of Sardinia is in the island cats, whether in front of your local Conad grocery or in an alleyway or on your lawn. There are wild pigs too, and bandits. Whoever welcomes you to the island will tell you to watch out for bandits — rural criminals — and seem to know whether or not the hunters have cleared your particular area of pigs. There have been bandits on the island seemingly since the beginning of time. We were told they are opportunists, so gates must be closed, and you know… you might get pulled over on a country road and have to pay or else. I chose to ignore the possibility of being kidnapped for ransom as they talked about it all with a shrug, as if they were simply a necessary part of life.

At night, with the windows open, I could hear at least one wild pig snorting and rummaging around outside looking for morsels of food that may have dropped from our table. I fell asleep thinking about bandits.

We were finally in paradise. So of course, my brother and I fought. We were two people who only knew how to be around each other with distance. The ease we found in the group chat had disappeared and we took turns jabbing at each other, with Sean as referee. It didn’t matter how beautiful the backdrop was. We were still our feral, grieving selves.

The island is unspoiled and wild. It feels like a place that time has forgotten. Rolling, rocky hills with ancient megalithic Nuraghe remain untouched, random stone watchtowers along the coast are reminders of the many invasions the island has had to endure, and menhirs dotting open fields still evoke the ancient people who had religious ceremonies celebrating the spirit of their ancestors. The island has reminders of your insignificance everywhere.

Since her death in 2019, towards the end of summer,_, my brother and I will inevitably start texting each other that something feels very wrong. We’re stuck in a loop waiting for the bad thing, but we circle around what that bad thing is. It’s a kind of amnesia, perhaps a post-traumatic grief response. We fill the group chat with nihilistic memes and ask why it feels impossible to get out of bed. Sean always knows what’s coming. Grief functions like muscle memory. Right, she’s dead. Of course.

We often find ourselves recounting the days that led up to the bad thing. Then, recount having to celebrate my brother’s birthday days after her death. Then my father’s. Then mine. Then, our wish to be flung into oblivion instead of pretending that any of these standards of being reasonable adult humans matter anymore.

Every September, we have tried to leave the country — and ourselves — around her death anniversary. But we’d never chosen to spend those bad days together before.

After days of sniping at each other, on my brother’s birthday, we called a truce. I hired a catamaran to take us around La Maddalena Archipelago. They call a nearby stretch of the beach “Little Tahiti” for a reason. Azure, emerald, neon blue, there aren’t enough Pantone shades to convey the hues on display.

Most of the beaches I went to had powdery white sand and neon blue water, and when we dropped anchor the water was so clear you could see the long shadows of the boats on the bottom of the water like ghost ships floating on glass. Because we were there at the end of September, there were only a handful of boats floating in this part of the archipelago but our captain told us that in the height of the summer season 30-40 boats fight for access to this float.

We spent the afternoon jumping off the side of the boat into the water, eating pecorino cheese and sliced salami, and drinking chilled Vermentino wine. I considered how much our mother would have marveled at a place like this. But she was gone.

Our captain took us past the famous “pink sand” beach of Budelli Island, made rose-colored by tiny pink sea creatures that die on shore and mix in with the sand. We looked, but we did not touch. The island had only ever had one inhabitant, a squatter, really. Mauro Morandi, who had moved to the island in 1989 to get away from it all and just decided to stay. Even facing eviction notices, he stayed. He finally left in 2021, after 32 years. In an interview, he said he had "always been a bit of a rebel” and was “quite fed up with a lot of things about our society.” So he just opted out and chose nature instead.

From the catamaran, I stared out at the island he had lived on for 32 years and imagined him watching the slow encroach of more and more summer boats in the archipelago. Like the one I was on.

What to do if you’re part of the problem and looking for the same solution?

From Cannigione, we drove to the southern tip of the island to Cagliari, on quiet roads through the center of the island. We stopped for lunch in Oristano, where my brother and Sean were hoping to eat the local specialty: horse. They were sold out, so I stuck to another specialty, Culurgiones in tomato sauce, pasta filled with potato, pecorino, and mint.

We pressed on to Cagliari, which I might be derided for describing as kind of like Naples but without the edge of feeling like you might die at any moment. (I have found myself in a dark alleyway in Naples, lit only by the neon glow of Virgin Mary shrines, walking quickly away from a dark figure who had been following too close, more than once. You know when something bad is about to happen to you. Cagliari doesn’t give you that feeling.)

Its historical center sits atop a giant hill called Castello, a medieval-walled section of the city that overlooks the rest. We had an apartment in the Castello district and all the windows overlooked the bay, with more boats and tankers and flamingos that migrated there from North Africa. In the morning, I’d sit on the balcony to sip my cappuccino while watching flamingos fly back and forth. The apartment had high tin ceilings, windows that looked out as far as Tunisia, and was owned by two sisters whose bookshelves were lined with books by Annie Ernaux.

After we arrived, we trekked down our castle mount for dinner on a rowdy pedestrian stretch to have beef carpaccio with truffle and three kinds of risotto at a place inexplicably called Crackers. The establishment’s name threw us off — we couldn’t have predicted how good the meal could be, and how plentiful the wine was at a place called Crackers. Or maybe we were just stoked to be alive and among young art goths crowding a nearby tattoo parlor which had turned into a sidewalk party. I wanted to be 19 again. I wished I hadn’t thrown my Doc Martens away in college. The city is young and hip and artsy and was the perfect next stop after the sleepy northern coast of quiet beach towns. We strode through the streets like hooligans, back to Castello through narrow alleyways lined with house plants and more cats.

We were starting to know how to be around each other, finally.

Our standout meal in the city was at the punk rock restaurant, Old Friend, created by two friends who believe in “gastronomic anarchy.” We had the Stand By Me 8-course tasting menu with wine pairing — and anarchy is indeed the perfect word for it. Whether you’re eating a lemon rind and bottarga amuse bouche, fish soup with geraniums, or sweetbreads with turnips, shitake and licorice, you are in for a once-in-a-lifetime experience in flavor chaos. While the meal requires trusting in the chaos, the chef Dario Torabi is a true artist. Every dish is impeccably put together and full of humor, down to the chocolate desert mixed in with a pile of river stones, leaving you to guess which is which. There is a reason it’s in the Michelin guide.

The next morning, though we didn’t want to leave, my itinerary demanded we press on for our final stop on the island as a trio, to an agriturismo in the province of Alghero. The island has a number of agriturismos, they’re all over Italy in fact, and they’re worth staying at for the farm to table and vineyard experience anywhere you might find yourself in Italy.

As we pulled up to our agriturismo, four kittens ran under a rusting farm truck. Horses galloped around a fenced in open field surrounded by apple trees. In the distance, we could see pens with donkeys, goats, ponies, chickens, and roosters. Around our little house were the herbs that would go into our food each evening. The family who has run the inn for decades greeted us with Vermentino. Everywhere we went, people were happy to see us, and curious how we found ourselves there.

I took my Vermentino and walked over to the horses, who came to the fence to see if I would feed them. We plucked apples from the trees and handed them over on our open palms. We were taken around the grounds and shown where the suckling pigs that we’d be eating as part of our dinner were roasting.

Dinner at Sa Mandra, which is also in the Michelin guide, was epic, endless, and must be finished in order to not offend. The tasting menu starts with pecorino cream and ends with piles of suckling pig, which keeps coming if you don’t tap out. In between, are dishes with ingredients drawn from the farm and surrounding farms — ricotta and pecorino with honey and rose jam, a pickled zucchini I still dream about, cured meats, sweetbreads with bright green peas, a farm egg poached in a honey bath, fregula in a creamy, salty broth, fried ravioli, and a silky lasagna that had put us all over the edge. The owner came by the table asking what was wrong with the lasagna that we had only half eaten. We looked at each other. Someone was going to have to do it and it wasn’t going to be me. I stared down at the farm cats who had been circling our legs. We took turns slowly making our way through our lasagna, chased with more house Vermentino, and sweating.

The pork came in heaps, with skin that had been perfectly roasted to a crisp. We did what we could and stumbled back to our house to have crazy dreams. We had two more nights of the tasting menu ahead of us. The next morning I asked the owner if I could opt out of eating everything and he laughed and patted me on the back. “No,” he said.

The only antidote to too much pork was more beach. I left the guys to drive the windy farm roads to Stintino and the famous Spaggia La Pelosa. I hauled ass away from the agriturismo determined to eat nothing all day in preparation for tasting menu night #2. When I got to La Pelosa, one of the most Instagrammed beaches in all of Sardinia, it was already crowded. In order to control the crowds, the beach requires a pass, bought through an app, which I couldn’t figure out how to download. The only solution was anytime I saw beach police walking up to people near me I ran into the water to hide.

There is no reason to get out of the water, ever. I spent hours walking around the sandbar and contemplating how I could spend a lifetime there. Staring at the horizon, where blue meets blue can feel like a singular transcendent experience, even if there are other people around you.

In some ways, the water feels like a call to disappear. I had spent weeks trying to figure out what I would do when this trip would inevitably have to come to an end. I would run out of money at some point. I had a life somewhere else, even though it felt tenuous.

I have been plagued with a feeling of wanting to be somewhere else as long as I could remember. Perhaps a product of not being attached to the place I was born — where I had come from.

Now I was in the place I had longed for but it didn’t necessarily feel like home either. Since the pandemic, I had taken an even more transient approach to my own life and the entire trip felt like the apex of that. Although I seemingly couldn’t even be around family anymore, it was getting tiresome to be alone all the time, too. Italy was — and wasn’t — providing a path forward of who I wanted to be. But it was starting to show me what I could be if I didn’t obsessively attach my identity to achievement.

Sardinia had provided a temporary reprieve. It showed the possibility of another life, where ambition isn’t a must, where your income and your job title barely matter. Where you can daydream about swimming out to an island to become its rebellious single inhabitant because life has begun to feel too much. Did Mauro Morandi find what he was looking for? I wonder where he is now.

At the end of the two weeks with my brother and Sean, I drove down country roads on a fog-thick morning, hit a bird taking a turn too fast, and dropped them off at the Olbia airport. Their part was done. I had one more week on the island alone.

We had escaped the sadness of my mother’s death anniversary by swimming through it. But we knew the sadness would surprise us as soon as we entered late summer again. And then we would need to start planning a way to escape ourselves all over again. Maybe separately, rather together.

Now, because the algorithm knows me so well, my social media feed features dozens of posts about Sardinian towns willing to pay remote workers to move and help rehabilitate them. There is a reason why the 1 Euro house in Italy story always goes viral online.

Perhaps we’re all dreaming of an alternative life where ambition isn’t a must and just being is enough. Or maybe that’s just me.