Sardinia is bigger than the photograph
Somebody sends you the picture in February. Water the colour of a swimming pool, pale sand, a cliff behind it, nobody else in the frame. You book a flight into Olbia because it was cheap that week, and you find a place to stay in the south because that one had a terrace. The photograph was taken somewhere in the middle. It is four hours from both.
Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean and it does not behave like an island. The interior is mountains and stone villages and long empty road, and crossing from one coast to the other takes most of a day if you stop for lunch, which you will. The distances are real distances. People plan for a small island and arrive on a large one.
The coasts do not agree with each other
The northeast is the Costa Smeralda, built deliberately in the 1960s to be expensive, and it still is. Yachts in Porto Cervo, granite headlands, water that genuinely looks the way it looks in the photographs.
The east coast holds the Golfo di Orosei, which is where most of those pictures actually come from. Cala Goloritzè, Cala Mariolu, coves reached by boat or by a hike down through the rock. Several of them now limit how many people come in a day, and the booking has to happen before you arrive rather than at the harbour that morning.
Alghero in the northwest speaks with Catalan in it, left over from centuries under Aragon, and the street signs still carry both. Down the coast Bosa sits along a river in stacked colours, and the drive between the two runs along cliffs with almost nothing on them.
Then there is the inside of the island, which most visitors never see. Barbagia, the Supramonte, shepherds' country. Scattered across all of it are the nuraghi, bronze-age towers built dry-stone without mortar, thousands of them, standing in fields next to grazing sheep as though nobody thought to mention it.
August is a different island
Italy takes its holiday in August, and around Ferragosto in the middle of the month the mainland empties into places like this. Ferries from Genoa, Livorno and Civitavecchia book out months ahead if you are bringing a car, and the car is the whole point, because the bus network was built for people who live here rather than people passing through.
Prices move too. The same room in June and the same room in the second week of August are not the same room in any way that shows up on a booking site until you put the two numbers side by side.
June and late September give you the water without the crowd. The sea is warmest in September, which nobody believes until they swim in it.
Where the trip actually goes wrong
Not at the beach. At the layer above it.
A Sardinian week usually ends up as a flight, a ferry or a car hire, two or three places to stay because the island is too big for one base, a couple of beach reservations that had to be made in advance, and a restaurant somebody recommended that only takes bookings by phone. Six or seven confirmations, all from different companies, all arriving weeks apart.
This is the shape of modern travel almost everywhere now. The industry unbundled itself. Flights sold separately from rooms, rooms separately from cars, experiences separately from all of it, each piece cheap and efficient and completely unaware of the others. What used to be one folder from one agent is now eleven emails from eleven companies, and the work of holding them together moved quietly to you.
Most people carry it in their head and in a search bar. It holds until the morning something changes.
A week that works
Pick two bases and stay put. Somewhere on the east coast for the water, somewhere northwest for Alghero and the drive down to Bosa, and accept that the south is a separate trip.
Book the boat trips and the capped beaches before you go, in the same week you book the flight, while you are still thinking about it.
Leave one day with nothing in it. On Sardinia the road tends to decide that day for you anyway, and those are usually the ones that stay.