Barbagia

The turn inland from the Nuoro road is unremarkable — a junction, a sign, a change in the quality of the asphalt — but within ten minutes the coast Sardinia is entirely gone. The landscape becomes granite and scrub oak and the occasional cork tree with its bark stripped in panels of reddish-orange, and the villages, when they appear, are small and stone and arranged on ridges as if still half-expecting a threat from the valleys below. This is the Barbagia, the mountainous interior region that the Romans called Barbaria because they could not conquer it, and the name has stuck, stripped of its original contempt, worn now like a badge.

The best entry into the Barbagia’s character is autumn, specifically October, when the Cortes Apertas festival moves through the villages in sequence — Oliena one weekend, Orgosolo the next, Gavoi, Desulo, Tonara — and families open their courtyards and ground floors to strangers. Tables appear on cobblestones loaded with seadas (honey-drenched pastries filled with sheep’s cheese), with roasted porceddu (the whole suckling pig, skin crackling), with handmade pasta in meat sauces that have been cooking since morning. Cannonau di Sardegna, the local red wine made from Grenache grown in the granite soils, is poured in ceramic cups and tastes of dark fruit and something almost smoky.

What surprised me about these festivals was the absence of performance in the negative sense. The textiles displayed — the nuragic-patterned weaving that Barbagia women still produce on wooden looms in many villages — are not theatrical. They are used. The traditional costumes worn by older women for the processions are not rental costumes; they are the same garments worn for feast days for generations, maintained with the care you give something you intend to keep. I watched a woman in Oliena, perhaps seventy years old, adjust the headscarf of a girl of about eight with a briskness that spoke of long habit rather than ceremony.

The landscape itself has a quality I find difficult to describe without resorting to the word elemental — by which I mean: the granite outcrops, the forests of ilex oak, the high plateaux of the Supramonte, the smell of wild lavender and juniper that rises in the afternoon heat — all of it feels less like scenery and more like the conditions that produced the people. The villages have a relationship to their territory that is not romantic, not staged for visitors, but functional and historically loaded.

The villages themselves are often quiet in a way that can initially feel like absence until you realize it is something different: a self-sufficiency, an inwardness, a culture that has functioned on its own terms for long enough that the tourist gaze sits at the edge of it rather than penetrating it. In a bar in Gavoi, a man explained to me in careful Italian — he assumed, correctly, that I did not speak Sard — that the village was known for its literary festival in the summer, which brought writers from the mainland and the world to a place with perhaps twelve hundred residents. “We are not closed,” he said, which I understood as a correction of something he had heard too many times.

When to go: October is the gold standard — Cortes Apertas, autumn light, the chestnut harvest. May and June are also excellent for walking the plateau trails before the summer heat. December through March brings occasional snow to the highest villages, which transforms them into something Nordic and rather beautiful, though many restaurants close.