Olbia

The name is Greek and means happy: it was given by the Phocaeans who founded a trading post here, but the town already existed, born of the coexistence of Phoenicians and local people, and before that more than fifty nuraghi had risen in its territory — so many that some argue the city itself is Nuragic in origin. In 535 BC, in the waters between this gulf and Corsica, sixty Greek ships met the joint fleet of Etruscans and Carthaginians: the battle of the Sardinian Sea is held to be the first great naval battle of the West.

Then came the Romans, and here Acte was exiled, the freedwoman Nero had loved before marrying Poppaea: she held great estates and a brick factory stamped with her name. In the Middle Ages Olbia was the capital of the Giudicato of Gallura, one of the island's four independent states, and until the nineteen-forties it was called Terranova Pausania; in Sardinian it is still Terranoa. Today it is the gate of Gallura, the twenty-third comune in Italy by area, with the airport and the port that every summer pour the world towards the Costa Smeralda, twenty minutes from here. The Romanesque basilica of San Simplicio, the lively main street and the archaeological museum with its Roman wreck tell the rest; the gulf closed off by the island of Tavolara — the mountain that rises out of the sea — offers one of the most powerful sights in the Mediterranean. Fish and vermentino make the dinner.