Before the wind picks up: Sardinia, D.H. Lawrence and the epic of American folk song

By Umberto Veronesi
A few summers ago, I embarked on a road trip down the west coast of Sardinia, the Italian island known for its wonderful seaside destinations, white Caribbean-like beaches and blue-green waters. The prospect was certainly a very tempting one, all the more in light of the scorching Sardinian heat, which in those days had been intensified by a heatwave of the kind that we are getting more and more used to. As I stepped out of the airplane in Alghero, a small and picturesque town on the north-western coast, I was literally punched in the face by a wall of heat that sucked all...