On the table in front of me is a bowl of Catalan fish stew, a zarzuela. It contains plump, juicy mussels, fresh white fish landed at the harbour a few hundred yards away, saffron and ripe tomatoes, and it smells absolutely delicious. But what fascinates me, as I take the first piquant mouthful, is that it is also a culinary microcosm of an island’s extraordinary history.

For I am not in Catalan Spain but in Italy, in the small fishing town of Alghero, in northern Sardinia. Not that you’d know it from the street signs, which are in Catalan first and Italian second, or from the language you hear on the streets, which is almost identical to that spoken in Barcelona. This corner of Sardinia was conquered by Spanish invaders in the 14th century and has clung to its dual identity ever since.

It isn’t just my stew that reflects this. The wine we are drinking, from the local Sella & Mosca vineyard, is called Parallelo 41 – named after the line of latitude that links Alghero to Barcelona like an umbilical cord. (Appropriately enough, it’s a hybrid – sauvignon and the local torbato.) And the most popular dish here is paella, closely followed by lobster cooked “in the Catalan style”, a sweet onion marinade.

Yet an interesting thing about islands is the way that, over time, history colludes with geography to create something new and individual. Take that stew: it has a rich, almost Arabic flavour I can’t initially identify. When Benito, the chef, passes, I ask him what it is, and he pulls an unfamiliar plant from a nearby floral display. “This,” he says simply. It turns out it is helichrysum, brought here by the Phoenicians and now growing wild all over Sardinia.

Another telling aspect of our meal is that when we arrived at Benito’s restaurant, Al Tuguri, in the heart of Alghero’s gothic old town, the only question he asked by way of settling the menu was whether we would prefer meat or fish. I chose fish, my wife meat, and each of us was given a set of four or five dishes that were completely different in their culinary influences. When invaders such as the Spanish arrived, the native Sardinians chose to retreat to the mountains that fill the interior of the island rather than submit. Here they became shepherds, beekeepers and cheese-makers rather than fishermen. Many of their dishes were flavoured with inland herbs such as myrtle, and cooked a fossa, in a pit, because that was the safest place to hide food you didn’t want stolen. The two cuisines evolved separately for hundreds of years – it’s only in the past decade or so that you have been able to get both fish and meat in the same restaurant.

Andreini, a few streets from Al Tuguri, is principally a meat place – we ate an excellent pasta with cinghiale, wild boar. This we washed down with red cannonau, another indigenous grape. The cheese was also good, ranging from aged pecorino sardo to young sheep’s cheeses so lactic they left a tingle on the tongue.

Just out of town, at Le Pinnette, a restaurant at the Monte Sixeri agriturismo, we were served some of the best suckling pig I have ever had, known locally as maialetto. The crackling was as crisp as slabs of toffee apple and the flesh tasted like milk – not surprisingly, since that was all the animal had ever eaten. When we asked about its provenance, we were invited to go and meet its mother and eight-week-old siblings in the farmyard behind the restaurant, not something that has ever happened to me in the UK. The Algherese are certainly serious about their food – there seem to be more decent restaurants here per head than almost anywhere else in Italy. One benefit to the visitor is that prices are fairly reasonable. Lobster pasta at Posada del Mar, in a pretty courtyard near the cathedral, will set you back £12 plus service; a seafood paella at the Mirador, on the old sea walls, £10.

However, this is still Italy: if you eat outside, you’ll find a supplement on your bill for the view. In Sardinia, this may seem less of a hardship than it does elsewhere, since the craggy, scrub-covered coastline, dotted with hidden beaches and fragrant pine woods, is remarkably pretty. In particular, the new 30-mile coast road between Alghero and picturesque Bosa, along which you will see more colonies of griffon vultures than you will houses, is as spectacular a drive as anything on the Amalfi coast.

During my visit, I was keen to track down some of Sardinia’s specialities. These include honey, which the Sardinians treat as seasonal – thistle in April, lavender in May, eucalyptus in summer and so on. The most celebrated is made from corbezzolo, an autumnal plant that produces a rare and expensive bitter honey, miele amaro, which the locals eat with cheese. I also wanted to learn more about something called casu marzu – rotten cheese – an organism so rank that its production has apparently been banned by the EU. Most of all, though, I wanted to sample the red lobsters of Isola Rossa on the rocky northern coast – according to reports, the only Mediterranean crustacea that can measure up to our cold-water Cornish varieties.

As it turned out, I ate cheese with corbezzolo the next evening, at the Gallura in Olbia. Normally, I avoid restaurants in hotels – they tend to be characterless and overformal – but the chef here, Rita d’Enza, has a reputation for her creative take on traditional Sardinian dishes. There was a buffet of many different antipasti, and during our meal the staff wandered around the cramped dining room with extra delicacies from the kitchen, which they pressed on anyone who wasn’t eating enough. One was a skewered prawn wrapped in fresh basil leaves and deep-fried, a combination that shouldn’t work but did, beautifully. The bread, embedded with dark florets of roasted thyme, was particularly memorable. And the corbezzolo was as strange as you would expect bitter honey to be – almost savoury, yet sweet and rich, another example of the curious hybrids that islands throw up.

As for the lobster, some phone calls and a helpful rep led me to Sagittario in Trinita d’Agultu. This is the sort of restaurant every visitor to Italy dreams of finding. It is situated a few miles inland, with no hint of tourism in the surroundings – the dusty village car park contained only a few battered Fiats and equally battered dogs, rather than pristine hire cars. And it’s always a good sign when you see the school bus bringing children home for lunch. But make no mistake, this is a serious establishment. Chef Paolo Muzzigoni’s training included stints at the Savoy and San Lorenzo in London before he came back to Sardinia to bring up his young family.

He brought us white wine made from vermentino, often labelled simply as aragosta – lobster – because of its affinity with shellfish, and told us he had cooked our crustacean first thing, so that the flavours would have time to infuse. By now, I was getting seriously excited. But first there was homemade pane carasau – thin flakes of bread, still warm from the oven.

“And some antipasto,” Paolo added, putting a dish of cold octopus soused in green olive oil onto the table. We were just agreeing that it was a very good octopus salad when the deep-fried sea urchins arrived, their batter as crisp and light as the original shells must have been. This was followed by shark with garlic and pine nuts, and then some mussels, before Paolo suggested pasta.

The lobster, when it arrived, had been cooked very simply – one half boiled, with some homemade mayonnaise, the other served in a Catalan-style marinade. It was smaller than a Cornish lobster and almost clawless, but the flesh was, indeed, remarkably delicate, with a faint perfume of the sea.

Paolo’s family are cheese-makers, so I asked him about casu marzu. It turns out that it can only be made in the hottest months. A sheep’s cheese, already good and ripe, is impregnated with skewers soaked in rancid olive oil. This in turn attracts flies, which lay their eggs in the holes. As the larvae eat the rotten cheese, it acquires – perhaps not surprisingly – a somewhat pungent bouquet. To eat it, you then simply spoon up the resulting goo, maggots and all.

I suggested that this might be an acquired taste, and Paolo nodded. “My wife, she’s not from around here,” he confided. “The first few times we gave it to her, we had to hide the worms in a sandwich. But she’s fine with it now.”

Conscious of the look my own spouse was giving me, I thought it best to move the conversation on. “But I heard it had been banned by the EU?” I asked. Paolo’s roar of laughter was a reminder that, on an island that has been dealing adroitly with invaders for centuries, some things never change.

Anthony Capella travelled as a guest of Just Sardinia. His book The Wedding Officer is published by Sphere at £6.99

Travel brief

Getting there: fly to Alghero with Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com) from Stansted, Liverpool, Nottingham and Dublin; or to Olbia with EasyJet (www.easyjet.com) or Meridiana (0845 355 5588, www.meridiana.it), both from Gatwick. Getting around: Auto Europe (0800 358 1229, www.auto-europe.co.uk) has a week’s inclusive car hire from £125. Or try Holiday Autos (0870 400 4461, www.holidayautos.co.uk ).

Where to stay: Hotel Villa Las Tronas (00 39-079 981818, www.hotelvillalastronas.com; doubles from £108) is an opulent former royal villa on a private promontory, 20 minutes’ walk from Alghero. Or there’s the smart Hotel El Faro (079 942010; doubles from £143) on a headland at Porto Conte, eight miles west of Alghero.

Tour operators: Just Sardinia (01202 484858, www.justsardinia.co.uk) has three-nights’ B&B at the five-star Hotel Villa Las Tronas from £199pp, including transfers but not flights. Or stay in an apartment, with a shared pool, at Monte Sixeri agriturismo from £277pp, including car hire but not flights. Or try Citalia (0871 200 2004, www.citalia.com) or Holiday Options (0870 420 8386, www.holidayoptions.co.uk).

Where to eat: in Alghero, Al Tuguri (Via Maiorca 113; 00 39-079 976772, www. altuguri.it; tasting menu £28 a head plus wine); Andreini (Via Ardoino 45; 079 982098; about £30 plus wine); Mirador (Via Manno 16, Bastioni Marco Polo; 079 973 4018; about £15 plus wine); and the Posada Del Mar (Vicolo Adami 29; 079 979579; about £15 plus wine). Or elsewhere, Le Pinnette (Monte Sixeri, Santa Maria La Palma; 079 999 9016, www.sangiuliano.it; about £25 plus wine); Gallura (Corso Umberto 145, Olbia; 078 924648; about £25 plus wine); Sagittario (Via al Mare 10, Trinita d’Agultu; 079 681469; about £20 plus wine, lobster from £12 per 100g).