La Maddalena Archipelago
— wind-worked granite, and the sea holding every blue at once.
Not only on a wall.
“Sixty-odd islands of pink granite, scattered across the strait between Sardinia and Corsica, worn smooth by a wind that never quite stops. The boats leave Palau every few minutes and thread between them: Caprera, where Garibaldi spent his last years; Spargi; Budelli, whose one pink beach has been closed to landings since the nineties so the sand can be left alone. The water reads a different blue over every depth. People drop anchor in a cove, swim, and mostly keep their voices down.
La Maddalena Archipelago, 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.
The Maddalena Archipelago sits in the Strait of Bonifacio, the band of sea that separates the northeast tip of Sardinia from Corsica. It is roughly sixty islands and islets of granite and schist, seven of them large enough to name, wrapped in about 180 kilometres of coast. Only La Maddalena, Caprera, and Santo Stefano are inhabited; the rest belong to the wind and the boats. Car ferries cross from Palau, on the Sardinian mainland, in about fifteen minutes, running through most of the day. Since 1994 the whole archipelago has been a national park, the first in Sardinia, covering more than 20,000 hectares of land and sea.
The islands are granite, lifted and then worked for ages by the wind that funnels through the strait. The same weather that roughens the crossing rounds the rock into low domes and hollows and scoops shallow caves into the cliffs. Cala Coticcio on Caprera and Cala Corsara on Spargi sit in coves where the granite runs almost white down to the waterline. Mediterranean maquis and myrtle hold the thin soil between the outcrops; the park counts more than 700 plant species across the archipelago, around fifty of them endemic, roughly a quarter of all the endemic flora of Sardinia. Caprera is reached not by boat but by a causeway from La Maddalena.
The archipelago's most particular colour is the pink of Spiaggia Rosa, a small beach in Cala di Roto on the island of Budelli. The rose tint comes from Miniacina miniacea, a single-celled organism that lives among the roots of the Posidonia seagrass meadows offshore; when it dies, the waves grind its pink calcareous shells into the white sand. The colour made the beach famous enough to harm it, so since the 1990s landing, swimming, and anchoring within roughly seventy metres have all been banned to let the sand recover. Elsewhere the open water reads turquoise over sand and deep blue over the granite floor, kept clear by the same seagrass beds. Boats can still anchor off Budelli to look, just not approach.