Summer Escape: Costa Smeralda’s secret history

Costa Smeralda more than a place is an idea.

It is a stretch in Gallura - coast in the north of Sardinia - just twenty kilometers wide, but it has managed to become a synonym of wealth in Italian Culture. Thanks to its white sand beaches, the parties with Briatore, Berlusconi’s villa with an outstanding fake volcano and to the Russian oligarch's massive yachts, Costa Smeralda has gone from being one of the most unknown locations in Italy’s poorest region to a must visit for celebrities in the jet set. It is now a symbol of Italian trash and yuppy culture and at the same time an attraction for the richest people in the whole world.

This short guide of Costa Smeralda will go deeper on the reasons why Porto Cervo became famous, we’ll talk you through the golden era of the 90s and finally, we will give you some advice on how to make the most out of your holiday in this amazing place. 

It all began with a Persian prince and a French set designer

It seems that it all started back in the early '60s. Karim al-Husaynī, Āgā Khān IV, was flying over Sardinia with his private jet and by chance watched outside the window seeing this wild and rugged stretch of land and fell in love with it. Prince and 49th Imam of the Muslims Ismailiti Nizariti (in a dynastic line directed by Muhammad), Karim was 26 at the time and a recent graduated from Harvard, his girlfriend was a 20-year-old baroness, Anoushka von Mehks. He had millions to invest: his father was the legendary Aly Khan, Prince of Persian dynasty, Pakistani UN ambassador, Rita Hayworth's ex-husband; his mother was Joan Yarde-Buller, English highborn, former wife of a Guinness tycoon.
Costa Smeralda in the 1960s wasn’t called so, the region was almost uninhabited, used by random shepherds in winter. Aga Khan bought all the land for a bunch of dollars and decided to turn that forgotten place into the coolest holiday destination ever.

The list of things to do in order to make this happen was quite long. He first found a chic sounding and less Sardinian name to replace the previous one (Gallura), he then founded an association to manage the hotels and the towns. The Prince contacted the eccentric French set designer, Jacques Couelle to take care of the project. Friend’s with Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, Couelle created theatrical sets and had to improvise becoming a sculptor-architect with imaginative inclinations as well.

He imagined the building of an actual legend rather than just a project, the idea was to camouflage luxurious but rural villas within the vegetation and the colors of Sardinia. Couelle began to draw sketches with charcoal, taking inspiration from the most famous seaside architecture examples he could think of: the result is a real invention of a theatrical matrix, a mixture of Sardinian, Spanish, Provencal, Capri, and Amalfi forms and styles, Greeks, Apulians, Sicels and Maghrebis. The sublime summa of this madness is Cala di Volpe’s hotel in Porto Cervo, a mythologically inspired hotel: soaring towers, canals like in Venice, narrow windows of a convent and Moorish minarets. He even made up that the hotel had risen on the ruins of an ever-existing high-medieval convent, and today naive tourists admire its fake foundations.

In order to make his charcoal drawings concrete, he had to call proper architects, and he chose Luigi Vietti - former demiurge of the Italian dream holiday places popular in the 60s like Portofino and Cortina d'Ampezzo - he was actually the one to suggest to the prince the name of Costa Smeralda. Vietti - with the help of another great Italian architect such as Michele Busiri Vici- managed to bring the vision of Couelle into reality, imposing an architectural style that still dominates Costa Smeralda: light and sinuous curves, warm colors, exposed beams, ‘happy hour’ meeting squares breathing an irrepressible holiday air with a widespread welfare impression.

Smeralda Lifestyle 

It’s pretty common to think that Costa Smeralda is all about parties, yachts, and money. In the '60s and ‘70s Costa Smeralda was a reflection of the cosmopolitan soul of its founder, attracting personalities and VIPs from all over the world: Greta Garbo, Margaret of England, Gianni Agnelli, Jacqueline Kennedy, Ringo Starr, Juan Carlos, Harrison Ford, and Sting were among the first to go wild in the nights of Gallura. The unbridled hedonism of those years - still lacking paparazzi and Instagram stories - was shown in private parties, as he wrote in Corriere Della Sera Alberto Pinna, "the secret of Costa Smeralda, a mix of confidentiality and exhibitionism, and scapigliati artistic movement, label, and extravagances ".

Those who lived those years speak of parties and legendary people, from Peter Kent - aka Pedros - a gypsy friend of Amin, brother of Aga Khan who opened the first club of the Costa in a former stable, the wildness on the yachts of Count Cesare d'Acquarone in 1967 or the Greek shipowner Stavros Niarchos. Aga Khan had built a paradise for super rich kids, in which hedonism, drugs, and parties were granted. It was from the mid-80s that everything changed and Smeralda became the favorite place of Italian Yuppism.

As Lele Mora recounts in one of her letters from prison until the 90s there was nothing to do at night for tourists, if you were not invited you wouldn’t be able to attend those parties otherwise. There were only three places: historic Sottovento, Pevero and the Ritual (which is literally carved into the rock, designed by the architect Andres Fiore), while Umberto Smaila had just opened his first nightclub Smaila's, in Poltu Quatu. In those days, only the rich, the illustrious faces, the great capitalists would go there.

At Pevero Fiorello was a regular, he became famous hosting the tv show ‘Karaoke’. In the late nineties, Formula 1’s manager Flavio Briatore opened the Billionaire. A place that, with a very unique choice of the name, has launched a brand linked to money ostentation, getting rich and personal success. World-famous VIPs from the world of sport, entertainment and politics from Ronaldo to Bernie Ecclestone, from Phil Collins to Silvio Berlusconi to continuing with Jennifer Lopez, Naomi Campbell, and Rihanna.

Today, those who go clubbing at the Billionaire do so at their own risk, I quote a news of August 3, 2018:

An American rich man once went to the Billionaire and popped two maxi "Mathusalem" champagne bottles, 30 thousand euro each. Just to begin with. Obviously.
Then a pyramid of 50 bottles of Dom Perignon followed the weekend after, being offered to all the attendants that seemed to have appreciated with lots of screams and whistles. The weekend ended with some shopping at Flavio Briatore's boutique".

The private parties and the legendary episodes of scorn and betrayal were the highlights of Italian gossip magazines; Lele Mora remembers one of the parties he had thrown, you could find in the same room Lenny Kravitz, Mike Tyson, and Gigi D'Alessio.

The following year I turned my villa into a maxi Parisian brothel. At the entrance, a hundred girls wearing thongs and a hundred bare-chested toy boys would welcome guests. And on the side drag queens straight from Paris would rock wonderful outstanding costumes. There were, just to mention a few, Lenny Kravitz, Gigi D'Alessio and Mike Tyson, who enjoyed himself like crazy. An unforgettable party.

The Costa Smeralda attracted all sorts of international VIPs: from Micheal Douglas to Madonna, footballers and oligarchs, it soon became a status symbol for the world's ruling class. Silvio Berlusconi built his Villa Certosa there, a pharaonic villa of over 4,500 square meters, with 126 rooms and a 120-hectare park, and put Costa Smeralda on the international political map. There Berlusconi Premier would welcome Tony Blair, Vladimir Putin and the Spaniard José Zapatero. Matteo Garrone filmed half of his movie ‘Loro 1’ in this legendary location where the Italian premiere would party around his fake volcano in the middle of the garden. 

The end of an era arrived just before the economic crisis, from the early 2000s something broke, the parties were no longer the same and the process of trash was completed. The film by Jerry Calà Vita Smeralda - released in 2006 - showed how the myth of Smeralda was over, becoming more a populist aspiration, inaccessible due to the lack of places to go to and absurd prices. Then came the time of the Russians and the Arabs, who were spending like crazy in boutiques of Porto Cervo  with their Black American Express credit cards.

Some advice if you go to Costa Smeralda in 2018

Well, after having bored you with the history of Smeralda, the moment has finally arrived: things to do if you go to Costa Smeralda this summer. As a small hint, something strange happens in Smeralda and if you go to Porto Cervo during the happy hour you will notice it immediately. It is about metaturism, that is, tourists who are attracted only by other, richer, tourists. This stroller is formed on the quay of the Yacht Club where the metaturists watch the rich boat owners with their dreamy eyes while sipping a cocktail. It looks like a real staging of the stories of Instagram, and if you're more fascinated by tourists on the quay than the boat, well, you'll become a 3-degree metatologist.

Sorry, here’s the advice you were looking for, the wait is over. 

Beaches

- Principe Beach - Porto Cervo

- Piccolo and Grande Pevero - Porto Cervo

- Long Beach ( from € 100 per day)

- Marinella - Porto Rotondo, beachside key location for "Blu Beach" drinks

- Island of Mortorio - Porto Rotondo

- The Valley of the Moon - technically we are far from Smeralda, but if you go to northern Sardinia you cannot miss watching the sunset on the sea with the bongos of the hippie community in the background.

Clubs

Unfortunately, Costa Smeralda does not offer different ranges of prices, and as you can imagine they are very expensive. Anyway:

- Country Club - Porto Rotondo

- Ritual - Baja Sardinia

- Phi Beach - Baja Sardinia

- Billionaire – Porto Cervo

- Just Cavalli – Porto Cervo

Where to eat

- Porto Rotondo cafè

- A sandwich with octopus at Pappafico in Golfo Aranci

- Sandwich with Porceddu pork meat da Onofrio at the entrance to Porto Rotondo

- Stazzu Li Paladini in Olbia. Try the authentic cuisine of the area. Guys, try to avoid the car: it's challeging to leave sober