Sardinia, older than Rome and in no hurry to say so

Long before Rome existed, long before the Greeks arrived in Sicily, a Bronze Age culture on Sardinia was building stone towers on a scale found almost nowhere else in prehistoric Europe. Archaeologists call it the Nuragic civilisation, after the nuraghi, the truncated conical towers of dry-stacked basalt and limestone that survive, in various states of ruin, in numbers estimated at somewhere around seven thousand across the island. The oldest date to around 1900 BC, making them older not just than Rome's founding but than most of what is generally thought of as classical antiquity.

Nobody is entirely sure what the nuraghi were for. Some clearly served as fortified dwellings or watchtowers, their thick corbelled walls narrowing towards the top in a technique that predates the true arch and needed no mortar to stand. Others may have had religious or ceremonial functions, particularly the larger complexes such as Su Nuraxi near Barumini, a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose central tower is surrounded by a warren of later additions built up over centuries of continuous use. The Nuragic people left no written script that has been deciphered, so almost everything known about them comes from the buildings themselves and from what has been dug up around them: bronze figurines of warriors and priestesses, weapons, and evidence of trade links reaching across the western Mediterranean.

A coastline that came later, and looks very different

The Sardinia most visitors actually reach for today is a different proposition altogether: the Costa Smeralda, the "Emerald Coast", a stretch of the island's north-east shoreline developed from the 1960s onward into one of the more exclusive resort coastlines in the Mediterranean, its granite headlands and turquoise coves a world away from the nuraghi's grey stone interior. Porto Cervo, its principal town, was largely built rather than grown, planned with a deliberately Mediterranean-village aesthetic from the outset, which makes it feel older than it actually is.

An island that keeps both stories going at once

What makes Sardinia worth a longer look than a beach holiday alone is how easily the two stories sit side by side. A short drive inland from the Costa Smeralda's marinas and yacht clubs turns up nuraghi standing quietly in olive groves and scrubland, largely unvisited compared with the coastline a few miles away, along with the island's older inland towns, where Sardinian, not Italian, remains the language most often heard in daily conversation, and where shepherding and traditional cheese-making continue much as they have for generations. The island's isolation, cut off from the mainland by a stretch of open sea that discouraged casual conquest for most of its history, is a large part of why both the ancient towers and the more recent traditions have survived as intact as they have.

That same interior, particularly the mountainous Barbagia region, has drawn a different kind of attention in recent decades: researchers studying human longevity identified it as one of a handful of places worldwide with an unusually high concentration of people living past a hundred, a pattern generally attributed to a combination of diet, an active outdoor life and strong extended-family and community ties rather than any single cause. It sits at an odd angle to the yacht-club coastline a short drive away, and is part of the same island's stubborn habit of keeping its older ways going quietly, without much interest in making a show of it.

May, June, September and October give the most comfortable weather for combining coast and interior: warm enough for the water, without the full heat of a Sardinian July and August, when the coast is at its busiest and the inland towns, largely without air conditioning, are at their most sensible avoided in the middle of the day.