A postcard from the Sardinian coast, where time slips like saltwater between your fingers
Hello, dear readers. I’ve missed you.
These last few days on the Fertilia waterfront have stretched and shrunk in that strange way only summer days know how to do. I’m writing to you from Velmarì, with the salt still drying on my skin and the Mediterranean stretched out in front of me like a piece of blue silk someone forgot to fold.
Let me tell you where I am, and why it matters.
A Small Town with a Bigger Story
Fertilia sits a stone’s throw from Alghero, on the northwestern coast of Sardinia. To the casual eye, it looks like just another quiet seaside village — pastel buildings, fishing boats nodding in the harbour, the smell of sun-warmed pine drifting in from the coastline. Look a bit closer, though, and the place starts whispering.
This town was actually built as a new town during the Italian fascist period, part of a colonisation project that aimed to reshape peripheral areas of the country . You can read it in the geometry of the streets, in the rationalist architecture, in the slightly too-orderly squares. History doesn’t always shout — sometimes it just hums underneath your feet while you walk to the gelateria.
I find that fascinating. A town born from a political idea, now living a completely different life as a slow, sun-bleached refuge for travellers like me.
My Days in Slow Motion
Mornings here belong to the sea.
I’ve been getting back into the water with my float again — that beautiful, ridiculous, life-giving piece of plastic that lets me bob in the Mediterranean like a happy cork. The water is so clear you can count the pebbles three metres down. The sun, today especially, is beating down with that particular Sardinian intensity that turns everything gold and makes you understand why the ancient Romans worshipped it.
For someone who navigates the world in a wheelchair, the sea has always been a quiet kind of liberation. Down there, with the float beneath me, gravity becomes a polite suggestion rather than a rule. I float, the salt holds me up, and for a few minutes I’m just a body in the blue.
The afternoons? They belong to Mirto.
If you’ve never tried it, Sardinian Mirto is a liqueur made from myrtle berries — dark, herbaceous, slightly sweet, with a finish that tastes like a Mediterranean garden at dusk. (A small note from your friendly neighbourhood physicist: I’ll spare you the chemistry of the anthocyanins responsible for that deep purple colour, but trust me, nature did some elegant work there.) Sipped cold, it’s the official soundtrack of every proper Sardinian afternoon.
And the evenings… the evenings are where this island really shows off.
Moonlight on the Water
Last night, the moon climbed up high and laid a long silver road across the sea. I sat there on the waterfront, glass in hand, and watched it for what felt like an hour but was probably three. There’s something about the sound of small waves on a Sardinian beach — soft, rhythmic, almost like breathing — that rearranges your thoughts and puts them back in the right order.
I thought about all of you reading this back home. I thought about the strange privilege of being here. I thought about how fast time runs when you’re happy.
The day I have to leave is sneaking up on me, inexorably, like the tide.
What’s Next: Alghero Calling
On Thursday, I’m packing up and moving the operation to Alghero for my final three days. If Fertilia is the quiet little brother, Alghero is the older sibling with stories to tell — a town with Catalan roots, sea walls that have watched centuries pass, and narrow streets that smell like grilled fish and salt.
I want to go beyond the postcard version. I want to find the small alleys, the hidden courtyards, the locals who’ll tell me what their grandparents told them. A town with such a grand history doesn’t surrender its secrets to people in a hurry, and I plan to be wonderfully unhurried.
A Small Reflection Before I Close
Travel does something strange to a body and a mind that have spent a lifetime negotiating with limits. Every trip I take is a quiet conversation between what I can’t do and what I can do anyway. The float, the wheelchair-friendly waterfront, the kindness of strangers who hold a door or offer a hand — these aren’t obstacles overcome. They’re the texture of the journey itself.
Never give up. I’ve written it before and I’ll write it again, because some truths only get truer with repetition. The world is enormous, beautiful, and strangely accessible when you decide it is.
I’ll be back soon with stories from Alghero — the secrets, the colours, the food, the history. Until then, picture me on the Fertilia waterfront, glass of Mirto in hand, the moon doing its silver trick on the sea, missing you a little but smiling a lot.
A presto, amici. The sea is calling me back for one more swim.
— Gerd, from Velmarì, Fertilia
