Stintino

Stintino occupies a thin headland at the north-western edge of Sardinia, facing the narrow Fornelli strait and the island beyond it. The village itself did not exist before 1885, when the Italian state expropriated the population living on that island to build a prison and agricultural penal colony there. The displaced families resettled on this side of the strait, and the fishing community they founded kept the name of their old home in altered form: Stintino, from the Sardinian for 'small intestine', a reference to the long narrow port-canal that still splits the village in two.

The island prison closed in 1997 and the land became a national park the year after, now counted among the more strictly protected coastlines in the Mediterranean. Stintino remains its only point of embarkation. The village on this side stays small and largely seasonal: a working harbour, one main street, little more.

What draws people is two kilometres north, where the coast opens into the shallow-shelf beach and its watchtower. The arrangement is telling: a settlement built entirely by displacement, whose only industry now is ferrying visitors to the very island its founders were forced to leave.