We celebrated S’s success at her conference with a day trip to Alghero — a 45-minute bus ride from Sassari. Public transit between nearby cities on Sardinia is easy — just buy a day pass for ARST on DropTicket. The bus dropped us off at Giardini Giuseppe Manno, a park adjacent to the main tourist area of Alghero, which feels a bit like a cruise-ship terminus, but having done zero planning for the day, we found more than we deserved.
Our first stop… oddly, was the indoor fish market. It was just one of those, “this seems representatively unique to Alghero,” moments, and expectedly odiferous. I felt bad clogging the aisles gawking at the day’s harvest. The walls of the market were covered in posters celebrating that the 100th Giro d’Italia started in Alghero… in 2017… clearly an enduring source of pride.
We made our way to the Coral Museum after a few false starts. It’s a small museum, but it provides a great deal of history relating coral harvest and artisanship to the town. Most of the coral on display is red coral, a genus of coral living mainly in the depths of the Mediterranean and not representative of my expectation of coral prior to the visit, either in color or structure. Red coral grows spindly branches, instead of reefs.
After visiting the museum we strolled old town. S & M were immediately entranced wares on display and salespeople came out to lure them into their stores, like sirens. An elderly salesman followed me a few paces down the road, explaining to me in Italian that his son in-law was a successful leathercrafter and begged me to stop while he fetch him. I can’t say who was more underwhelmed, the son in-law or myself, but S saved us all hauling her loot from the salesman’s store.
It was a hot day, so we had to stop twice for gelato. Oddly, a scoop or two of Italian gelato doesn’t trigger my lactose intolerance. My mother tells me it’s because the casein protein in European milk is easier to digest than the casein in American milk….
Between gelato feasting, we visited the Alghero Duomo, where there is the requisite display of relics charting European early Christianity. The duomo has the brightly-colored tiles common to cathedrals across Sardinia.
Arriving back in Sassari for our last night, M and I wanted to share with S the lovely dinner we had the previous night at Ristorante L’Ora, where our exuberance got the best of us and we ordered too much food.
