Sardinia with Small Kids

When I found out I was pregnant, I remember saying blithely to a colleague; Don’t worry, this won’t change anything!

Naturally, it changed everything. 

Working, really sitting down and writing, has become such a rare pleasure that it no longer feels like work. It feels like bliss. Acutely painful paradise. Painful because only when I sit down to it do I realise how behind I am, how unbelievably bad at working I have become (I was never particularly efficient at the best of times). It feels blissful because I really love my work. I’m not sure I ever realised that, until I couldn’t do it anymore. It takes someone taking it away from you for you to realise how much you love something. And the thing that took me away from it was becoming a mother.

I really love being a mother. But I also really love being a writer. I miss the mornings when I sat and read over cake and coffee for breakfast. I miss the evenings when I sat and scribbled ideas with a whole salami and a glass of wine.

School holidays are a special kind of hell, because there is literally no way you can work. And when I don’t work, I feel a bit sick. The only thing worse than writing is not writing.

However, school holidays happen, day trips happen. And I even enjoy them, if mostly just because I see how happy they make my son. So, I think, as we admire yet another bumble bee buzzing in the lavender, I will write about it.

I wanted to write about Sardinia, with kids, because I always write travel recommendations based on nice things to eat and drink and pretty things to see and that doesn’t really cut it with small kids. And because recently we had some good day trips (we don’t have half term but we have a cluster of days off in May). The kind that made everyone ridiculously happy and extraordinarily tired. The kind that meant he napped all the way home in his pants with a face red and greasy with tomato sauce and I looked in the rearview mirror and cried a little bit because I know this is one of the days we will both always remember, for all kinds of different reasons. But that’s motherhood. You cry all the time.

Don’t worry, this won’t change anything. It will change everything.    

Il Bosco da Fiaba

About an hour inland from where we live is Monte Arci, a dormant volcano which is now covered by dense forest. Here are spectacular views, hidden waterfalls, cool temperatures, giant and ancient cork trees.

In the middle of the forest, not far from a village named Pau where the streets are lined with linden trees, is the Forest of Fairytales. This comprises of a marked walk, through the woods, scattered with natural sculptures made from reclaimed litter or wood.

Through the dappled light, with glimpses of the giara below, we climbed, meeting huge owl’s faces, piping men and pouncing wolves. There was a hot air balloon, looking like it had just landed, with torn red material, its basket filled with pine cones. There was a hedgehog, a giant and imposing stag. It felt fitting considering we are reading little red riding hood, which my son loves, despite the gruesome ending. His version has a wonderful illustration of the wolf, post granny consumption, admiring himself in her flower printed bonnet.  

We stopped and ate a picnic of strawberries and pancakes, under the old oaks, and I remembered how much I miss trees. Not olives, which we have in abundance, but big, shady, dapply trees with straggly silhouettes, like the ones in stories. The kind that makes things seem a bit magical and Lord of the Rings-ish. England is so very good at those. It turns out Monte Arci is too.

We came home with a tin mug as a souvenir, blood red, with a wolf painted on it, and a little pop open card with Little Red Riding Hood hiding in the mouth of the wolf.

The walk is 3km, and doable for small children. The Tiny Saint managed it almost entirely on his own. I would come back once a week. Even if just to picnic under those trees.

San Leonardo

This place, which I think I may have mentioned before, is one of my favourite places to go. Anywhere where water sprouts magically from the mossy earth has to be pretty high up on the list of very special places. This is the sort of place that moves you. You can’t spend a morning here and not feel moved. Is it the sound of rushing water? The trees? The birds; blue jays, cuckoos calling in the poplars, and geese in the little lake, and terrapins, and Muscovy ducks which always seem extra magical because their name sounds like muscovado sugar. We admired their funny bulbous red beaks and christened one, extra tame one, Signora Ciliegina, as she had a big bobbly red bit on her beak like a prize cherry and she ate all the cherry pits which we spat on the ground.

The water springs from seven fountains, carved in the stone wall, where we filled our bottles, then runs down little brooks through the park carved in the stone. The Tiny Saint played for hours in the icy water, surrounded by what almost looked like snow, or goose down, a charmed white fluff which falls from the trees (these are poplar seeds, The Internet tells me).

Then we sat down to eat in the funny, red-canopied restaurant which is a bit like an ancient pub, but so specifically Sardinian. No one has changed the décor here for decades, and there are enormous gold framed painting of charging horses, manes billowing in the breeze, which are positively Victorian in their sentimentality, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. In the dining room on the side, which flanks the park, there is a huge flat screen tv showing the football, this, unlike the rest of the place, is brand new, the very latest technology.

The menu is always the same. Ravioli, mixed grill, chips, grilled vegetables.

There are photos of the couple that run it on the wall, of their grandchildren’s baptisms and christenings. The lady comes to take our order. Two portions of ravioli, she says.

Her husband is half watching the football, half fastening his apron. There is a tatty red armchair in the corner, in front of the huge open barbecue, like a medieval hearth that forms the centre of the restaurant. He has lit the fire. Two enormous, deep purple sausages lie waiting, expectantly. They are as fat as a cobra, and they look wonderfully, indisputably home-made. The fire crackles. The room is almost completely dark, apart from tge glowing orange frame. Around the huge fireplace, like tiles or framed pictures, are arranged empty pizza boxes. For decoration? Who knows.  

The husband, apron now loosely fastened around his ample belly, sits in his armchair and watches the football, waiting for customers who never seem to come. It is just me and my son in the dining room.

Meanwhile, the Tiny Saint is in his pants. He plays with the silky curtain which semi divides the restaurant from the open hearth. It is a deep red. He wafts himself back and forth through it, and the husband chuckles, watching him from his deep armchair. Then, the wife brings a white oval dish of ravioli. My son eats his ravioli in an extraordinary fashion, the whole giant square goes in, half of it comes back out again, shredded.

I eat my ravioli too. They are soft and salty, the ricotta is melting and sweet and tastes of fresh parsley. There is lots of chopped parsley through it, as generous as though it were spinach. The ragu they are served in is good, savoury and deep, and contains flakes of real meat, shreds, not tiny little grains, like mince. I wonder if they use the steaks they don’t grill. I am almost sure they do.

The cheese, which is brought in a little glass bowl, is a creamy, salty pecorino, freshly grated, so that it melts in the mouth. It has been grated with the lesser known side of the grater, the one that makes cheese snow, that melts the best on the pasta. My son deposits a whole teaspoon of it onto his tongue and looks at me, letting its saltiness melt on his tongue. Then he sprinkles three more spoons of it onto his ravioli.

This, actually, is my favourite sort of restaurant. Because it doesn’t really feel like a restaurant, it feels like an extended sitting room. As we leave, we see the waitor, the husband and wife sitting in the dining room, chatting about nothing much. Today, we are their only customers. The ravioli was 9 euros.

Like my father, I can’t help worrying how these places survive. But thankfully for us, somehow they do.

If you come, go.