Summer in Sardinia

Just when I thought I had started to become accustomed to the natural beauty resplendent in Sardinia, it took my breath again once more. The weekend started in Barbagia, home to the "bandits" of Sardinia, a people who have resisted any sort of rule over the centuries, whether it be Roman or the central Italian or Sardinian governments. Bandits is too narrow and cruel of a definition, though: they have been shepherds, partisans, siblings, parents, and children. Their own stories are told through the murals of Orgosolo, shouted in sprawls of bright paint across façades and whispered in fading words tucked against doorframes and around corners. A multitude of causes is represented, railing against everything from the attempt to install a military base in Barbagia in the 1960s to the assault on the Twin Towers to the imprisonment of Julian Assange to the suppression of Palestine and many more stories of oppression both local and global. Anti-facist mural in Orgosolo. One of the i...

History is trim on the United States: an overlay on the surrounding landscape that shows itself in a turn onto an unexpectedly cobble-stoned street, a stray Native American arrowhead found during an excavation, a stone wall happened across in the middle of a hike. Even where it can be seen, most of it is recent, only four hundred years, with the cliff dwellings of the Southwest and the mounds of the central U.S. the only striking signs of anything older. In Sardinia, history is the foundation upon which the island has been built. Four hundred years ago, the ruins of Tharros had already changed hands several times, been abandoned, and covered by a blanket of soil and brush. This has been evident throughout my time here, but nowhere more so than this weekend. Our first stop out of Cagliari was at a nuraghe, a massive circular stone structure built using mortarless stone construction during the Bronze Age that has weathered the tests of time to remain as a monument to their capabiliti...