History of Sardinia

Grazia Deledda, from the illustrated monthly supplement of SECOLO, 25 September 1891:

Our mountains!  In the warm months one goes up there with the excuse of the novena of the white and dear Madonna, but it is really to enjoy a strange nine-day feast.  There all live united, rich and poor, gentlemen and ordinary people; there rose-coloured idylls of love are interwoven amongst the bushes, the moss and the lentisk and the song of the magpies, or in the light of the great flaming fires in the dark nights; there, from the rocky ridges, soft in the blue, before the immense desert landscape, rocked by the rosy evening breeze, we unknown Sardinian artists, fervent expressions fixed in the velvet and gold horizon, intoxicated with the perfume mountain roses, dream of the greatness of our forgotten homeland, but we are afraid of redescending to the plains in order not to be brought back down to earth, to the sad and desolate reality.

The first proof of the presence of man in this area dates back to prehistoric times.  The jaw-bone of a man and the remains of the bones of a deer, with marks of combustion and carved stones, were found in the “Grotta Corbeddu”  in Oliena (Corbeddu grotto) and were dated around 14000 to 12000 BC.

The following millenniums were probably characterized by the desolating after-effects of the glacial age of  Würm, thus in order to discover further, consistent traces of man’s presence on the island, you have to wait until the Neolithic age (6000 BC):

The real history of the population of this region, linked in some way to that nearest to us, begins in 1800 BC, Bronze Age and the date in which the Nuragic Age officially begins

The great Civilization raged in the whole of Sardinia from 1800 to 238 BC, when the Carthaginians began to invade the island in the 6th century BC.  The Nuragic people made use of the inaccessible mountainous areas of Sardinia as the final defensive, and often offensive, rampart.

After the third Punic war the Romans succeeded the Carthaginians in the control of the territory and it was them who gave the name Barbari (Barbarians) to the local people, as they nicknamed the Nordic people outside the empire. The politics of roman war was confronted by guerrilla warfare:  the Barbari came out in the open to strike once in a while, looting and pillaging, only to disappear  into the dark Barbagia.  Roman consuls and praetors alternated in trying to subdue this people but the victories obtained were never clear-cut.

A cruel stratagem put into practice by the Roman general Marco Pomponio gave the Romans the first clean victory over the people of the Barbagia:  the use of ferocious mastiffs trained to hunt man.  The unfortunate who finished in the hands of the Romans were executed or sent into exile, in an attempt to dominate the people that put the universal power of Rome in the shade.

Several decades of peace were lived but independence was mother to this people and discontent developed into revolt.  The Romans won the first battles yet the mountainSardinians created enough fear to prefer other methods to direct contact, such as sowing seeds of discord among the Barbarians or paying whoever was prepared to betray the unyielding upholders of independence.

A terrible civil war broke out and Rome gathered the fruits of it, breaking a community by now overwhelmed by internal conflict.  This was followed by a period of forced peace which, obviously, couldn’t be imposed upon those who had never wanted to accept obligations and thus followed new wars and the mountains were defended even with stones to keep the enemy away.

Among many strategies of conflict it was peace that proved best.  The war had put both sides to the test quite severely; the unshakeable tenacity of the Sardinians began to feel the effectsof an existence of conflict and privation in the mountains and the Romans knew to have weakened the enemy but not won.  In such a situation it was the good government of Azio Balbo that made the difference, leading to the Romans and the Sardinians signing a peace treaty that put end to centuries of conflict.

After the Romans followed the Vandals in the 5th century A.D. who put into practice a government of exploitation of the island, imposing elevated taxes on the inhabitants.  In their  80 years of domination however, the Germanic rulers limited their occupation to closing ranks along the coast, ignoring almost completely the hinterland.

Byzantine, Arab or Aragonese, conquerors and oppressors found no mercy for Sardinia and its people and the Barbagia had none for them.  The invaders no longer found an enemy army to confront but a hostile population, able to communicate with looks and to create a kind of community within the community.

The situation did not change with the birth of the Sardinian-Piemontese reign in the first decades of 1700s  Sardinia was treated as though it were a colony; the age-old forests were devastated in order to extract timber and coal, the mines reduced to nothing.

Not even after the unification with Italy was there any change and the bandits such as Corbeddu or Berrina, local versions of Robin Hood, kept alive the legends of the local population, manifesting the malaise that gripped this people.  Out of danger of the Second World War, Egidio Podda and domineered the island, terrorizing the rich landowners and obscuring once again the central power, incapable of holding in check their raids.

Living legends such as Graziano Mesina, the “escape king”, represented the rebel spirit of this people against the alleged injustices of the central power.  It is with him, in the end, that we see an end to the long ideological struggle against the system.

The Barbarian identity is, after all, as old as the history of man in Sardinia, daughter of a strenuous evolution.  Perfectly in step with the times, this society still conserves today its proud nature and natural hospitality, preserved in the living museum that is the Barbagia.