I'm just back from a week in Sardinia, staying at the excellent Mandra Edera riding establishment. Here's my base for reading and writing when I wasn't doing anything else. The hotel stands in a small park, a haven of tranquillity around which grazing horses wander, with a nice swimming pool at the far end. (The pool has a sloping entry, like a beach, nice for people and presumably helpful to facilitate the exit of any horse that might manage to get in.) My reading, somewhat at variance to the rural quiet, included Sholokhov (And quiet flows the Don) and von Clausewitz (On War). Both Russia and strategy interest me currently.
K and I enjoyed excellent traditional food, and lovely wines that seemed to exude the essence of the Sardinian countryside. It was, therefore, a particularly good week.
The horses are trained in a classical dressage style, quite unlike my usual quasi-Western manner of riding. That took a little adapting to. It's a while since I've ridden with relatively short stirrups, short reins, and a contact all the time. Probably about twenty years! The horse that I rode did go forward very well, and was quite keen and enthusiastic.
It was also interesting to watch a Sardinian farrier at work. He arrived in a well-equipped truck, and proceeded to hot-shoe several horses. Two unusual features, compared to what I see in the UK, were using eight nails per shoe (rather than six) and bevelling the upper outside edge of each shoe using an electric grinder before fitting (to reduce the risk of a losing a shoe). The landscape is stony, with basalt rocks of all sizes made into walls around the fields, buildings, and even scattered Bronze Age dwellings. Robust shoeing is a necessity.

The hotel started as a breeding centre for Anglo-Arabian horses, quite some years ago, and the current herd comprises strong, athletic horses that are used for lessons and rides out. I should have asked more questions about the breeding of the horses that are there today.
We drove from the airport to the hotel, two hours along a modern highway in a hired Fiat 500 the diminutive stature of which contrasted with the remote and scenic mountains. However, I did want to fit in even a brief train ride, so we travelled on a 1950s train that provides short tourist trips on a mothballed narrow-gauge line by the sea.
Here's a view through the driver's cab as we approached the exit from a tunnel. The ancient rolling stock, sharp curves, and dense vegetation covering an arid hilly landscape are so typical of the minor railways of Sardinia. The older roads are analogous, only even steeper, more serpentine, and without tunnels.
The train was full of families out to enjoy the scenery, the children inordinately excited by the prospect of going through a real tunnel. It was all rather jolly, finishing in time for lunch on the waterfront and a paddle in the delightfully warm Mediterranean sea.
