The New York Times ran a lovely article about D.H. Lawrence’s travels in Sardinia a few weekends back, and I’ve been meaning to share it here ever since reading it. Sardinia is a remarkable little place with a unique culture and history–as I learned when we decided to publish Viktorija Todorovska’s IACP Award-nominated The Sardinian Cookbook last year.
Like all of Viktorija’s books, this one illuminates the traditions and landscapes of her subject while first focusing on its food. If you like this amusing article’s story of how a present-day writer followed in Lawrence’s footsteps while visiting Sardinia (in which I also learned that many of the classic 1960s spaghetti westerns were filmed in Sardinia), I hope you will like The Sardinian Cookbook, for what it has to say about this special Mediterranean island.
And yet somehow it has retained its thorny, intransigent, particularity–“lost between Europe and Africa, and belonging to nowhere,” as Lawrence put it. It’s that very betweeness, at once central and marginal to history, that drew him.