Inland: Barbagia

Met at Olbia and driven two hours south through the cork forests to Oliena, a white village pressed against the limestone wall of the Supramonte. A late lunch of culurgiones in the village square, pasta parcels you only really find on this side of the island.

Their base for the chapter is a stone stazzo above Orgosolo: three bedrooms, a wood-burning kitchen, and a view down a valley with no other house in it.

Morning drive up onto the Supramonte plateau with Antonio, a shepherd we've worked with for years. He walks them through his flock, six hundred sheep, and answers, patiently, every question the children ask.

Lunch is at his ovile: roast lamb on a spit, ricotta he made that morning, bread baked the night before, his own Cannonau. Four hours at the table. No phones, no signal.

An early start with an archaeologist who specialises in Bronze Age Sardinia. Together they hike three hours through the Lanaitto valley to Tiscali, a nuraghic village built inside the collapsed mouth of a mountain, invisible until you are standing in it.

Picnic at the site. Slow walk back. The family is quiet for most of the descent.

A late morning at the workshop of one of Mamoiada's last hand-carvers of mamuthones masks, the wooden, soot-stained faces of the village's mid-winter ritual. He talks about his father; he lets the children try one on.

Lunch at a cantina built into the rock, followed by an unhurried tasting at a Cannonau producer whose vines are over a hundred years old. They drive back to the stazzo in the late light.

Morning at leisure at the stazzo. A late drive to Gavoi, a small lake village, for the farewell dinner: a private home where a chef we know cooks for eight, and only on the nights she chooses.

After dinner, a slow drive back through the mountains in the dark. A driver to Olbia at dawn for the morning flight.