But how many faces does Cagliari have?

«It is a beautiful city, rugged, stony, with changing colors among the rocks, the African plain, the lagoons, with a history all written and apparent in the stones, like the signs of time on a face: prehistoric and historical, capital of the Sardinians and colonial capital of the Aragonese and Piedmontese, one of the most destroyed by the bombings of the last war and, in a few years, one of the most completely rebuilt…». Thus the writer Carlo Levi immortalized Cagliari in 1964 in his travel book "All the honey is finished", dedicated to Sardinia. Levi captured the geographical and historical dimension of our capital with short brushstrokes, that dimension that immediately strikes the visitor, even the most distracted.

Instead, to discover the soul of the city you have to immerse yourself in its streets, smell flavors and smells, meet people and sneak into lesser-known corners. It is what helps us to make “ 111 places in Cagliari that you really must discover ” (Emons, 2022, pp. 305), much more than a simple tourist guide, written by the journalist Sergio Benoni and enriched by the photographs of Daniela Zedda .

The hidden heart of a city with shy features emerges in the book, which loves to hide between the old walls and the long tongue of white beach, the Poetto, on which the Sella del Diavolo stands out. A city that is really difficult to pigeonhole as the English writer David Herbert Lawrence had grasped in his 1921 volume “Sea and Sardinia” when he wrote: «Lost between Europe and Africa, it belongs nowhere. It belongs nowhere, having never belonged anywhere. To Spain and the Arabs and the Phoenicians, most of all. But as if he never really had a destiny. No fate. Left out of time and history».

So Cagliari is not from the south, from the center or from the north; she is Italian but capable of escaping and escaping the rules of stereotyped Italianness. As Sergio Benoni writes in the introduction to the book, it is a «mixed city, contemporary and ancient, noble and popular, where a language with a cheeky cadence, in the alleys of the port, mixes with the languages of half the world».

For these reasons Cagliari is both fascinating and viewed with suspicion by the rest of Sardinia, because it is a port city of return trips, because it has been able to open its doors to multiculturalism by offering hospitality to pilgrims and stateless people looking for a home in which to feel good bastardizing a bit that "Sardinian" character that distinguishes the island and its inhabitants.

A book, that of Benoni, which finally proves to be useful not only to the passing visitor, but also to the authentic Cagliari citizens, often critical of their city. Cagliari , in fact, has been at the top of the rankings and surveys on the quality of life for some time. Ideal buen retiro, the perfect place not only to go on holiday but to come back, stay for a long time, perhaps set up home. It is one of those cities that can be defined as being on a human scale : neither too big nor too small, immersed in a nature that fortunately does not seem to want to give way to human initiative and recklessness.

The Latin poet Claudiano, after fifteen hundred years, could still write of Cagliari: «It stretches out in length and insinuates a small hill between the waves that fringes the opposite winds. In the middle of the sea a port is formed and in a large shelter, protected from all winds, the lagoon waters calm down». And that's no small thing these days.