Between August 1916 and April 1926 The National Geographic Magazine published three articles about Sardinia (Wright 1916, Costa 1923, Grosvenor 1926), and nearly eighty years later a fourth contribution about the Mediterranean island (Buettner 2005); the four texts are the only articles about Sardinia printed by the American magazine to date. Although writing in different periods, the four authors of the texts travel to Sardinia in order to offer their American readers a representation of the island and its inhabitants from a (privileged?) external perspective. On the one hand, they describe Sardinia as a postcolonial land which has finally broken free from the age-old rules of Phoenicians and Carthaginians, Romans and Byzantines, Spaniards and Piedmontese. Nevertheless, on the other hand, the authors’ depiction consists not only of objective historical and geographical information, but also, if not mainly, of biased stereotypes about a land and a people considered backward and picturesque, stereotypes which are clear indicators of a colonial gaze from a viewpoint, that of the authors, implicitly regarded as socially and culturally commanding. In my paper, I will analyse the four articles through the linguistic tools provided mostly by corpus stylistics and the relevant software and, by means of the examination of the key words and syntactic structures in the texts, I will try to identify the main conventions and clichés which are used to misrepresent postcolonial modern Sardinia as if still colonial.