Alghero
— the walls go gold when the sea takes the sun.
Not only on a wall.
“A Catalan town on a Sardinian shore. The street signs read carrer, not via. This is Barcelona's language, kept alive here for more than six hundred years after the rest of the island moved on. The old quarter is honey-coloured sandstone, walls and seven towers facing west, so the whole front of the town turns gold in the last hour before dark. People come out onto the ramparts to watch it. Below, the boats that still work the red coral the coast is named for. Nobody is in a hurry.
Alghero, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Alghero sits on the northwest coast of Sardinia, in the Metropolitan City of Sassari, a town of about 42,000 on a low shore roughly seven metres above the sea. The Genoese Doria family founded it around 1102; in 1354 Peter IV of Aragon took the town and resettled it with families from Barcelona, Valencia and Majorca. That Catalan colony held for more than four centuries, and its language outlasted the empire that brought it. Roughly a quarter of residents still speak Alguerès, the local Catalan dialect, and Italy recognises it as a protected minority language. Sassari lies about 35 kilometres northeast, with the planned town of Fertilia a short drive up the coast.
The old town is a compact grid of honey-coloured sandstone behind sea walls largely rebuilt in the 16th century under Ferdinand the Catholic, who reinforced the older Genoese and Aragonese defences. Seven towers and three forts still stand along the line, from the Porta a Mare gate to the Torre Sulis on Piazza Sulis. Inside the walls the streets carry Catalan names, carrer rather than via, and the churches keep the Catalan-Gothic manner the Aragonese builders brought from the mainland. The stone holds one warm tone throughout, so in low sun the whole quarter reads as a single colour rather than a patchwork of facades.
The coast north of town is the Riviera del Corallo, named for the red coral, Corallium rubrum, that has been harvested off these cliffs since Roman times and is still cut into jewellery in Alghero's workshops. The line ends at Capo Caccia, a limestone promontory about 186 metres high that closes the bay to the north. Cut into its base is the Grotta di Nettuno, Neptune's Grotto, a sea cave running roughly four kilometres into the rock around an underground saltwater lake. You reach it by boat from the harbour, about 24 kilometres, or on foot down the Escala del Cabirol, 654 steps pinned to the cliff face. The cape and its waters are protected within Porto Conte park.