Orgosolo

The approach to Orgosolo from Nuoro is a road that winds up through ilex oak forest and granite moorland for twenty kilometers, the landscape becoming progressively wilder and less concerned with accommodating you. By the time the village appears — stone buildings clustered on a slope, the church tower visible from a distance — you understand intuitively that you are somewhere that formed its identity through difficulty and has not subsequently softened it.

The murals begin at the village edge and they do not stop. On every wall, on the sides of houses, on the stone outbuildings, painted scenes accumulate: Che Guevara in a beret; Palestinian refugees on the move; a family losing their land to a landlord; Gramsci in profile; a shepherd with a rifle; scenes from the Vietnam War; scenes from the Sardinian independence movement; scenes documenting what happened here when the state tried to create a firing range on these mountains in the 1960s and the villagers blocked the road and refused to move. The murals were started in 1969 by a local schoolteacher named Francesco del Casino, and the village has been adding to them ever since, each decade’s preoccupations layered over the last.

The murals make Orgosolo sound like a place that is entirely about ideology, but the street-level reality is quieter and more domestic. In the village bar in the afternoon, the television shows football and the men play cards and the conversation is in Sard, which sounds nothing like Italian, and the coffee is strong and the glass of mirto they pressed on me afterward — the dark myrtle liqueur — tasted of pine resin and something sweet and medicinal. The women who run the small shops sell vacuum-packed pecorino sardo in various ages, from fresh and mild to the stagionato that crumbles at the pressure of a finger and smells of the mountain pasture.

The landscape around Orgosolo is the Supramonte — a high limestone plateau where rain and time have worked on white rock for millions of years. The walls of it are vertical and pale, dropping into gorges that feed the rivers eventually reaching the sea at the Gulf of Orosei. Walking into it from the village, even for an hour, changes your understanding of why a community in this location would develop such a fierce sense of territory and such a complicated relationship with any authority that arrived from outside.

The history of banditry in the Barbagia, and of Orgosolo specifically, is something I had read about before visiting and found flattening — a single narrative applied to a complex situation. What the murals tell you, if you spend time with them, is that the violence had context: land dispossession, neglect from Rome, a pastoral culture with different rules about justice and territory. The murals do not excuse any of it. They explain the conditions in which it made a kind of internal logic. Spending an afternoon walking the village walls, reading the images slowly, amounts to something like an education in what happens when the state fails a place for long enough.

When to go: September and October are ideal — the autumn Cortes Apertas festivals in the Barbagia bring the villages to life, and the cooler temperatures make the mountain roads and the mural-hunting more comfortable. Spring also works well. Avoid the peak of summer when the heat on the mountainside becomes extreme and day-trippers from the coast outnumber the murals.