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One's head in the clouds

If you too have been scolded all your life for having your "head in the clouds", and always been exhorted to remain firmly planted on ground and walk quickly towards objectives reachebles only with shoes on your feet, in Porto Rafael you can finally free yourself from ballasts, slowly lifting you up, while an unexpected panorama of life, shapes and colors opens up above and below you.

A few inches from ground, when just started your timid ascent, like children disobeying their strict preceptors, you are likely to narrowly miss the head of a cormorant coming out of the sea, with a small fish in his beak, before he resumes his taut flight along water. Funny mix of terrestrial and aquatic nature, cormorant prefers sheltered seas, avoids deep waters even when close to the mainland and rarely moves away from shores. It spends a lot of time on land, perched on rocks, cliffs, sandbars, shipwrecks, poles or bare trees.

So don't be offended if he just bless your journey with a long questioning look: he is barred from altitudes, and ignoring where you are going, he even doesn't know he should envy you.

A little further up, you are almost certain you are about colliding against a lonely pink cloud. Shortly before the crash you may close your eyes, ready for the soft and inevitable recoil, before realize it only deals with a flock of flamingos in flight, probably frightened to see you floating in the sky like them, highlighting danger with the many expressive calls their species own.

Your bizarre presence will not go unnoticed even by ducks, coots, storks, sultan chickens, black-winged stilts, kestrels, buzzards, peregrine falcons, queen's falcons, griffons, Sardinian partridges; and if by chance you extend your flight until late at night, owls and barn owls will keep you company. You will discover air is by no means the catastrophic void someone had described you - synonymous with debauchery, laziness, carelessness -, but it rather contains an infinity of stable roads through which multitudes of winged beings move safely, following millenary and infallible trajectories, a carriageable passage projected by a barefoot Engineer with unrivaled talent.

Shaken by a shiver of awareness and wonder, maybe you realize you have climbed too high, or maybe you only remember that tonight you have guests for dinner at Villa Aidan, and that you still have to pick up the roasted suckling pig from Oggiano's butcher downtown. Don't be scared. Trust that the right wind starts blowing, the Sardinian air is full of them: Mistral, Ponente, Scirocco, Grecale, Tramontana. Take the first one that comes along, they are Palau's sky-cabs. Your guests will be surprised to see you a little distracted while dining, looking strangely dreamy.

Someone will report having see you "with head in the clouds", don't pay attention.

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In 1960, when Rafael laid the first stone of his village, Italian television broadcasts one single channel, channel one precisely. In 1961 channels broadcasted become two, followed very shortly by Italian Swiss Television. Since 1971, the new black is receiving at home channels one, two, Switzerland and Koper, strictly in this order.

Porto Rafael Shire

By Danielle Sassoon • March 20, 2023

If after an intense day at the beach you feel nostalgic for the old farmhouse in central Italy where you used to spend summer, and you feel like sipping the excellent wine your grandfather used to get, never been able to drink elsewhere; if today you wish to sit once more under your figs, listening the farmer saying anecdotes about your family, even if always the same and repeated hundreds times; in short, if you would like to swap perfect sunset which stands now in front of Villa Aidan with a less performing sun, when it intertwines with trees and breaks behind the hills, releasing long and shady twilights; well, do not abandon the island. It is our duty to inform you that the farmhouse of your childhood is now surrounded by anonymous residential complexes delimiting city boundaries, which are now close and looming.

Porto Rafael, a rash decision

By Danielle Sassoon • February 17, 2023

Winter, as we know, makes us melancholy. Holidays are a distant memory, and even more distant seems the flight to some beach where forget cold. Among the ones more eager there is a person we’ll call The Type: woman, around 45 years old, living on the continent in an industrialized town. She is married or separated, has two children or none, works in a communication agency or volunteers. She would like to be now on a boat, but the only possible crossing in these gloomy hours is the one navigable on search engines. Her smartphone is waiting for a simple gesture of her fingers to sail anywhere, but today she doesn't feel like pulling up even the anchor of her virtual sea. Maybe is this thick and thin rain, or the night outside despite it's just 5pm. She feels a hundred years old. She types the word "old age" on the phone with the same ambiguous curiosity one may have for a scary movie. First link appears on the screen, and at the same time a stairlift advertisement starts, in which a happy old lady transports

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Sardinian spoken

By Danielle Sassoon • February 17, 2023

Infrequently, but it does happen, in Porto Rafael people complain about Sardinians, blamed for every single hitch. Owners and tenants when meeting occasionally at the market - one of the best in the area, with an excellent selection of products aimed at Italians and foreigns - by glances and half-words make an appointment at Harry's Bar outside, to talk freely far from the ears of the three market owners: Grazietta, Ilaria and Giulia. Once the shopping is over, while Ilaria has just finished advising an uncertain English lady on the best oil to buy, here come vacationers by groups of two or three, go ordering a cappuccino to Diego (over which there would also be a lot to say, but he is from Rome, and for the moment he will be spared).

Not only salt

By Danielle Sassoon • December 15, 2022

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a group of people are toasting with wine glasses

Dining out in Porto Rafael

By Danielle Sassoon • February 27, 2020

Going out to dinner in Porto Rafael is a pleasant alternative to dinners at home, from where you hardly want to go out, but some addresses are really valid for deciding to close the kitchen or to give your private chef a free evening, always assuming he is not taking it personally.

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By Danielle Sassoon • February 26, 2020

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