One year. They call it the Paper Anniversary, so we chose Easyjet boarding passes.
For five days we wandered around the capital of Sardinia, Cagliari. We meandered through colourful cobbled streets, queued for the best restaurants down in hidden alleys, and revelled in agenda-less days and bright blue cloudless skies.
We tried the local Sardo cuisine, from ‘pasta-bombs’ stuffed with pecorino and nuts (culurgiones), roasted pig (su porcheddu), tiny circular pasta that looks like lentils in a seafood stew (sa fregula), more pecorino, dried meat, and more pecorino. It was delicious, but somewhat…heavy.
We stayed in an Airbnb, a few streets removed from the main centre of the old town, so we did spend a fair bit of time speaking Ital-nish in corner shops to buy tickets, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible (or lack of adherence to) timetables and running after the number 6 bus. The public beach, Poetto, was absolutely packed with Italian families and their deckchairs. We took our trusty volleyball with us every day, which was a surprising (to me at least, who has never taken more than a book to the beach before) amount of fun.
Luckily we did manage to escape the hustle of the city one day, as we went on a little adventure with our good friends H & Q, who were also holidaying in the same spot. They had hired a car and so we went off to find a more secluded beach. Obviously, being August in Italy, this was no easy task, but we managed to find a beautiful spot on the rocks. We spent the day snorkeling, reading and eating ice-cream.
Cagliari wasn’t the most picturesque of all spots I’ve visited in Italy, and felt a bit run down. But it had some wonderful details that stuck out: pink flamingos flying in the distance at over the deepest orange and crimson sunsets, poems typed on papers stuck to the walls of the city, all the ways possible that you could ever eat pecorino, ice cold spritzes, and on our final night, a local man named Carlo who overheard us speaking Spanish and saw an opportunity to practice the language he was learning, showed us the city from a special viewpoint, taught us some words of Sardo (the local language), and introduced us to the mayor of Cagliari. Wonderful.
Above all, it was a perfect opportunity to spend quality time together, and reflect on and be grateful for our first peaceful and happy year of marriage. On that note, I revisited my favourite words from our wedding ceremony, written and led by my dear sister-in-law one year ago:
“We are here to celebrate the wisest and holiest paradox of humanity: that the greatest individual freedom can only be achieved by connecting us with, and committing to, other human beings.
This is the profound truth we are here gathered to acknowledge and to celebrate:
that the best of us can only be achieved with the help of an Other.
An-Other, who, like a mirror of clear water, can return us to ourselves. Because we cannot stand face to face to ourselves.
An-Other, who puts our lives at risk: who makes us question all we thought we knew about ourselves, suffer the loss of our identity and become someone we never thought we could or would be.
An-Other, who is willing to embrace our continuously changing selves, not out of worn-out or prescribed loyalty, but because they know our transformation also brings them forward.
An-Other, who does not expect us to follow them till the end of time, but who would ‘simply’, humbly, wish our company on their way to eternity – so long, and as long, as we want to.”
To my Other, felice anniversario!
in nooks and crannies 