Award-winning historian Jeff Biggers opens a new window into the hidden treasures of Sardinia in a groundbreaking travel narrative that crisscrosses one of the most enigmatic places in Italy
After three decades of living and traveling in Italy, Jeff Biggers finally crossed over to Sardinia, uncovering a treasury of stories amid major archaeological discoveries rewriting the history of the Mediterranean.
Based in the bewitching port of Alghero, guided through the island’s rich and largely untranslated literature, he embarked on a rare journey around the island to experience its famed cuisine, wine, traditional rituals and thriving cultural movements.
“Sardinia is something else. Enchanting spaces and distances to travel,” D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1921. On the 100th anniversary of Lawrence’s visit, Biggers opens a new window into the history of the island, chronicling how new archaeological findings have placed the island as one of the cradles of the Bronze Age. From the Neolithic array of Stonehenge-like dolmens and menhir stone formations to the thousands of Bronze Age “nuraghe” towers and burial tombs, the vastness of the uninterrupted cycles of civilizations and their architectural marvels have turned Sardinia into the Mediterranean’s “open museum.”
Beyond its fabled beaches, reconsidering how its unique history and ways have shaped Italy and Europe today, Biggers explores how travelers must first understand Sardinia and its ancient and modern history to truly understand the rest of Italy.
In the tradition of Mark Kurlansky’s Basque History of the World, Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones: A Journey Through in China, and Frances Mayes’ and Tim Parks’ narratives on Italy, In Sardinia is a major new addition to travel writing and literature in Italy.
Jeff Biggers is an American Book Award-winning historian, journalist and playwright. Based part-time in Italy since 1989, he is the recipient of the David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting, the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year for Travel Writing, a Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, and other honors. Author of ten books of cultural history and investigative reporting, his work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Salon.com, and on National Public Radio and Public Radio International. For more information, visit: www.jeffbiggers.com
In Sardinia is an indispensable and necessary international guide. To discover a Sardinia still little known outside the national borders and to reveal its multiform riches and diversity. It is no coincidence that this opens with the Ogliastra artist Maria Lai and closes with the poet of Desulo, Montanaru, just as it is no coincidence that, in this almost intimate text, the many ”Sardignias” are represented through a kaleidoscopic variety of languages and cultures, landscapes and knowledge, sounds, tastes and encounters. In Sardinia is an unmissable journey that starts from an inner story to be shared with the vast world. A journey capable of filling that profound void, which makes that stone thrown into the Mediterranean a teeming patch of land yet to be revealed. — Paolo Fresu, legendary Italian jazz musician and composer
