And suddenly there is Cagliari: a naked town rising steep, steep, golden looking, piled naked to the sky from the plain at the head of the formless hollow bay. It is strange and rather wonderful, not a bit like Italy. The city piles up lofty and almost miniature, and makes me think of Jerusalem: without trees, without cover, rising rather bare and proud, remote as if back in history, like a town in a monkish, illuminated missal.
There is a very little crowd waiting on the quay: mostly men with their hands in their pockets. But thank heaven, they have a certain aloofness and reserve. They are not like the tourist parasites of these post-war day, who move to the attack with a terrifying cold vindictiveness the moment one emerges from any vehicle. And some of these men look really poor. There are no poor Italians more: at least, loafers.
We climb a broad flight of steps, always upwards up the wide, precipitous, dreary boulevard with sprouts of trees. Looking for the hotel, and dying with hunger.
At last we find it, the Scala di Ferro: through a courtyard with green plants. And at last a little man with lank black hair, like an Eskimo, comes smiling. He is one brand of Sardinian-Eskimo-looking. There is no room with two beds: only single rooms. And thus we are led off, if you please, to the “bagnio”: the establishment wing, on the dank, ground floor. Cubicles on either side of a stone passage, and in every cubicle a dark stone bath, and a little bed. We can have each a little bath cubicle.
After a really good meal we went to see the town. It was after three o'clock and everywhere was shut up like an English Sunday. Cold, stony Cagliari: in summer you mast be sizzling hot. Cagliari, like a kiln. The men stood about in groops, but without the intimate Italian watchfulness that never leaves a passer-by alone.
Strange, stony Cagliari. We climbed up a street like a corkscrew stairway. Cagliari is very steep. Half-way up there is a strange place called the bastions, a large level space like a drill ground with trees, curiously suspended over the town, and sending off a long shoot like a wide viaduct across above the corkscrew street that comes climbing up. Above this bastion place the town still rises steeply to the Cathedral and the fort. What is so curious is that this terrace or bastion is so large, like some big recreation ground, that it is almost dreary, and one cannot understand its being suspended in mid-air. Down below is the little circle of the harbour.


Facciata della Cattedrale di Cagliari come era sino al 1902.

The Cathedral must have been a fine old pagan stone fortress once. Now it has come, as it were, through the mincing machine of the age, and oozed out Baroque and sausagey, a bit like the horrible baldachine in St. Peter's at Rome. None the less it is homely and hole-and-cornery, with a rather ragged high mass trailing across the pavement towards the high altar, since it is almost sunset, and Epiphany. It feels as if one might squat in a corner and play marbles and eat bread and cheese and be at home: a confortable old-time churchy feel. 


Facciata nuova della Cattedrale di Cagliari (1930)

CHILDREN

There fluttered out three strangely exquisite children, two frail, white-satin Pierrots and a white-satin Pierrette. They were like fragile winter butterflies with black spots. They had a curious, indefinable remote elegance, something conventional and "fin de siècle". But not our century. The wonderful artificial delicacy of the eighteenth. They were frail as tabacco flowers.  

Curious the children in Cagliari. The poor seem thoroughly poor, bare footed urchins, gay and wild in the narrow dark streets. But the more well-to-do children are so fine: so extraordinarily elegantly dressed. It quite strikes one of a heap. Not so much the grown-ups. The children. All the chic, all the fashion, all the originality is expended on the children. And with a great deal of success. Better than Kensington Gardens very often. And they promenade with Papa and Mama with such alert assurance, having quite brought it off, their fashionable get-up. Who would have expected it?                                           
It is a market day. We turn up the Largo Carlo - Felice , the second wide gap of a street, a vast but very short boulevard, like the end of something. Cagliari is like that: all bits and bobs. And by the side of the pavement are many stalls, stalls selling combs and collar - studs, cheap mirrors, handkerchiefs, shoddy Manchester goods, bed - ticking, boot - paste, poor crockery and so on. But we see also Madame of Cagliari going marketing, with a servant accompanying her, carrying a huge grass - woven basket: or returning from marketing, followed by a small boy supporting one of these huge grasswoven baskets - like huge dishes - on his head, piled with bread, eggs, vegetables a chicken, and so forth.
It is market day. We turn up the Largo Carlo Felice, the second wide gap of a street, a vast but very short boulevard, like the end of something./.../ we follow Madame going marketing, and find ourselves in the vast market-house, and it fairly glows with eggs: eggs in these great round dish-baskets of golden grass: but eggs in piles, in mounds, in heaps, a Sierra Nevada of eggs, glowing warm white. How they glow! I had never noticed it before. But they give off a pearly effulgence into the air, almost a warmth. A pearly-gold heat seems to come out of them. Myriads of eggs, glowing avenues of eggs./.../ There are splendid piles of salted black olives, and huge bowls of green salted olives. There are chickens and ducks and wildfowl: at eleven and twelve and fourteen francs a kilo. There is mortadella, the enormous Bologna sausage, thick as a church pillar: sixteen francs: and there are various sorts of smaller sausage, salami, to be eaten in slices. A wonderful abundance of food, glowing and shining. /..../ up we went – and found ourselves in the vegetable market. Here the q-b was happier still. Peasant women, sometimes barefoot, sat in their tight little bodices and voluminous, coloured skirts behind the piles of vegetables, and never have I seen a lovelier show. The intense deep green of spinach seemed to predominate, and out of that came the monuments of curd-white and black-purple cauliflowers: but marvellous cauliflowers, like a flower show, the purple ones intense as great bunches of violets. From this green, white, and purple massing struck out the vivid rose-scarlet and the blue-crimson of radishes, large radishes like little turnips in piles. Then the long, slim, grey purple buds of artichokes, and dangling clusters of dates, and piles of sugar-dusty white figs and sombre-looking black figs, and bright burnt figs: basketfuls and basketfuls of figs. A few basketfuls of almonds, and many huge walnuts. Basket-pans of native raisins. Scarlet peppers like trumpets: magnificent fennels, so white and big and succulent: baskets of new potatoes: scaly kohlraby: wild asparagus in bunches yellow-budding sparacelli: big, clean-fleshed carrots: feathery salads with white hearts: long, brown-purple onions, and then, of course, pyramids of big oranges, pyramids of pale apples, and baskets of brilliant shiny mandarini, the little tangerine oranges with their green-black leaves. The green and vivid-coloured world of fruit gleams I havenever seen in such splendour as under the market roof at Cagliari: so raw and gorgeous. And all quite cheap...

‘Oh!’, cried the q-b, ‘if I don’t live at Cagliari and come and do my shopping here, I shall die with one of my wishes unfulfilled.’

MEN IN CAGLIARI

I see my first peasant in costume. He is an elderly, upright, handsome man, beautiful in the black-and-white costume. He wears the full-sleeved white shirt and the close black bodice of thick, native frieze, cut low. From this sticks out a short kilt or frill, of the same black friese, a band of which goes between the legs, between the the full loose drawers of coarse linen. The drawers are banded below the knee into tight black frieze gaiters. On his head he has the long black stocking-cap, hanging down below. How handsome he is, and so beautifully male! He walks with his hands loose behind his back, slowly, upright, and aloof. The lovely unapproachableness, indomitable. And the flash of the black and white, the slow stride of the full white drawers, the black gaiters and black cuirass with the bolero, then the great white sleeves and white breast again, and once more the black cap - what marvellous massing of the contrast, marvellous, and superb, as on a magpie. - How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression...There is another peasant too, a young one with a swift eye and hard cheek and hard, dangerous thighs. he has folded his stocking-cap, so that it comes forward to his brow like a Phrygian cap. He wears close knee-breeches and close sleeved waistcoat of thick brownish stuff, that looks like keather. Over the waistcoat a sort of cuirass of black, rusty sheepskin, the curly wool outside. So he strides, talking to a comrade. How fascinating it is, after the soft Italians, to see these limbs in their close knee-breeches, so definite, so manly, with the old fierceness in them still. One realizes, with horror, that the race of men is almost extinct in Europe...The old, hardy, indomitable male is gone...But that curious, flashing, black-and-white costume! I seem to have known it before: to have worn it even: to have dreamed it. To have had actual contact with it. It belongs in some way to something in me - to my past, perhaps. I don't know. But the uneasy sense of blood-familiarity haunts me. I know I have known it before.