This week’s travel dream: A ride along the Sardinian coast

Sardinia is a corner of the Mediterranean little known by Americans, said Stanley Stewart in National Geographic Traveler. Lying roughly between the Italian mainland and the Tunisian coast, Italy’s second-largest island seems worlds away from the mainland. This is not the Italy of “supine meadows and soft rolling hills, of neat vineyards and well-plowed fields.” Sardinia is a wild land of “pink and gray granites, of thorny prickly pear and juniper, of hidden coves with pocket beaches—a land magnificently apart.” I rented a Ducati ST3—an iconic motorcycle that is “as much a part of Italian identity as pasta”—to explore its sights and smells.

My road trip began on Sardinia’s “Emerald Coast,” a storied northeast seafront that is “heralded as much for its celebrity­ ­vacationers as for its beauty.” Its un­official capital, Porto Cervo, seems like a ­“re-creation of a Mediterranean village”—only instead of “butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers,” the storefronts along the cobbled streets are filled with Prada and Gucci boutiques. “Yachtfuls of film stars and models, playboys and princes” dock along its pristine shores year-round. But Sardinia’s true jewel is the island’s rugged northern coast, locally known as Costa Paradiso. I wound the Ducati past sleepy villages like Castelsardo, every bend of the dazzling drive offering “another expansive panorama of azure seas, of stark granite headlands, of beaches framed by fragrant juniper and oleander and myrtle.”

From Porto Cervo I sped inland, into the “embrace of the mountains,” to find traces of old Sardinia. In Tempio Pausania, I discovered a town nothing like the glamorous Emerald Coast. Citizens strolled arm in arm, smiling at their neighbors. Gentlemen draped their coats over their shoulders like “extras in The Godfather.” I climbed back onto my bike, to finally reach the top of Monte Limbara, and looked down to see my route in its entirety. With the “whole coast of Sardinia spread out below me,” I couldn’t imagine a place “more extraordinary.”

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Contact: Sardegnaturismo.it/en/index.html