Sardinia

For centuries the Sardinian coast meant malaria and raiders, so the villages were built inland and the cooking grew up away from the sea. The heart is the Barbagia, around the Gennargentu massif, shepherd country. The Campidano is the wheat plain; the Sulcis, the Gallura and the Montiferru fill in the rest. The island grazes around a third of Italy's sheep, more than any other region, and almost everything follows from that: Pecorino Romano, despite the name, is overwhelmingly made here, alongside Pecorino Sardo and Fiore Sardo, the only one made from raw milk and smoked.

Bread records the shepherd's life. Carasau is rolled paper-thin and baked twice so it keeps for months and travels in a saddlebag, food for men who stayed weeks in the hills. Softened in broth and layered with tomato, pecorino and a poached egg, it becomes pane frattau. Alongside it are the dense round civraxiu of the plain, the hard pistoccu of the Ogliastra, and the woven ritual breads still made for weddings in some villages, which are closer to sculpture than to food.

The inland cooking is spare and lightly seasoned. Porceddu is suckling pig turned on a spit over myrtle wood. Culurgiones from the Ogliastra are sealed with a wheat-ear pleat and filled with potato, pecorino and mint. Malloreddus are semolina shells made with saffron, which Sardinia genuinely grows, at San Gavino Monreale. Su filindeu (three layers of hair-thin hand-pulled threads cooked in mutton broth) is made by a handful of people, mostly for a pilgrimage at Lula. And seadas, fried pastry parcels of tart fresh cheese under bitter arbutus honey, summarise the island in one dish.

Where the sea enters, so does another language. Cabras, on its lagoon, makes bottarga from grey mullet roe, salted and air-dried, the most expensive thing on the island. Carloforte, founded by Ligurians who had been living on an island off Tunisia, still speaks a Genoese dialect and cooks tuna and a local couscous. Alghero is Catalan-speaking, which is where lobster alla catalana comes from. In the Gallura the dish is zuppa gallurese (bread, cheese and broth, baked rather than poured) and the wine is Vermentino di Gallura, the island's only DOCG. The reds are Cannonau and Carignano; at Oristano, Vernaccia is still aged under a yeast veil, like sherry.