As a child, growing up in Sardinia, my winter activities never involved skiing, or ice skating. It hardly ever snows in Sardinia in winter, so snow was a special occurrence and cause for celebration – but then again, us Italians will use anything as a cause for celebration, ’cause we love good food, good wine and good company, and a combination of the three is just too good to pass up.
I thought about it recently, when for two weeks straight there were piles of snow everywhere I looked, and it snowed almost daily. After two weeks I found myself exclaiming, exasperated: “Hello?!? I don’t remember moving to the North Pole! When is it going to stop snowing??” to which my husband laughed and looked at me half smug, half amused. No doubt he was thinking what a wuss his Island Girl is when it comes to snow.
Because that’s kind of what we are: a Mountain Boy and an Island Girl.
I grew up on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean, where already at the end of May it’s too hot to be in school, so we stop going as soon as we have made up for any bad grades we may have gotten during the semester.
He grew up in a place where May is really when Spring starts, because March is way too cold and April way too rainy to be considered Spring.
I had three solid months of summer vacation and went to the beach as much as possible. And once summer was over, back to school we went, dreading the fact that we woulnd’t have time off again until Christmas.
He had five weeks of summer vacation, with a bunch of other vacations throughout the year: Autumn Break, two weeks off in October, a nice time to go hiking; Sport Holidays, two weeks in February, when people usually go skiing/snowboarding and practice other Winter Sports more intensively than during the rest of the season; Spring Break, two weeks in March or April, when many people head South to Ticino and neighbouring Italy, where the weather is warmer and Spring has already arrived.
No one I knew practiced any “winter sports” in Sardinia, not unless you include improvising a sleigh during the occasional winter snow day, sitting on a piece of cardboard or anything that might slide down the hill relatively fast. ‘Cause why would you own a proper sleigh, when you only use it once every few years?
a section of the Gulf of Orosei, beautifully captured by DigitalTool
I grew up in a place where the most beautiful thing was the beach, the water, the rocky cliffs of the Costa Smeralda diving into the blue-green water of the Mediterranean. Meals in Sardinia always feature great quantities of fresh, sun-ripened produce: sweet, melt-in-your-mouth watermelon and cantaloupes; incredibly juicy, deep red tomatoes; beautiful peaches with a thin, slightly fuzzy peel and a nice orange pulp, with a scent so sweet it’s almost inebriating, and you can barely wait to bite into them when you pick one up at the market.
He grew up somewhere famous for mountains and rich food: chocolate, cheese, creamy sauces and hearty stews. His family is from Graubünden, the canton with the tallest mountains in Switzerland, with the famous skiing resorts like St. Moritz and Arosa; the canton Heidi was from. Heidi isn’t just a story here, she is treated like an actual historical character, with trails that take you to her little mountain hut, through the village of Maienfeld, where she went to school, according to the book. The whole area around there is actually called Heidiland, and it’s just a couple of villages away from where my husband’s family is from. The whole area is gorgeous, surrounded by mountains, with blue skies even in the dead of winter because of the warm wind, the Phön, that blows in from the south.
I remember studying the Alps in school, as a little girl, and wondering what they looked like. It’s difficult for an Island Girl to imagine these impossibly high mountains, with snowy tops year-round. What did they look like, I wondered.
Now I know.
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