Nuoro Discovery Guide

Nuoro is the capital of the Barbagia, the mountain interior of Sardinia, and the interior is where the island is least like anywhere else in Italy. This is shepherd country: its own language, its own carnival masks, a Nobel laureate, and a landscape of granite and holm oak that has nothing to do with the coast.

The friction is that Nuoro itself is not a handsome town. It is a 1960s provincial capital with a small old quarter, and visitors expecting a hill village are disappointed.

Come for what it holds and what surrounds it: the best museum of Sardinian costume and masks on the island, Grazia Deledda's house, and half an hour away the villages of the Barbagia, the Supramonte and one of the deepest gorges in Europe. Almost nobody who flies into Olbia ever comes up here.

The Museo del Costume

Two hours, and everything else on the island makes more sense afterwards — the dress, the jewellery, the bread and above all the masks.

Mamoiada

The mask museum, and if you can arrange it, the carnival itself. The Mamuthones in a village street in January are not comparable to anything.

Monte Ortobene

Fifteen minutes up from the town, for holm oak forest, granite and a view over the whole Barbagia.

Orgosolo

The murals, which are political, unsentimental and still being added to.

The Supramonte

Walk in it with a guide: the Gorropu gorge, the Lanaittu valley, or Tiscali hidden inside its doline. Not a landscape to enter casually.

Eat in an agriturismo

A fixed shepherd's meal in the countryside, which arrives in about nine courses and is the best value in Sardinia.

Nuoro is the capital of a region that has spent two thousand years being described from outside, and it is conscious of it.

The Barbagia has been the object of Roman condescension, nineteenth-century travel writing, criminological theories, and a long run of Italian journalism about banditry. Deledda and Satta both wrote from inside it, and both are read here as correctives. There is a marked self-awareness about how the region is portrayed, and a corresponding warmth towards visitors who turn out to have read something.

The town itself is unpretentious and slightly austere. It is an administrative centre with schools, courts and a hospital, not a place with a visitor economy, and in February it is very quiet.

Sardinian identity is stronger here than anywhere else on the island, and it is expressed practically rather than performatively: in the language people actually speak, in the food, in who turns out for a village feast.

The real anxiety is demographic. The villages are emptying, the young leave, and everyone knows it.

The interior has the opposite problem to the Sardinian coast: not too many visitors but far too few, in a region losing its population.

Come out of season and stay inland. Autumn in the Barbagia is the region at its best and the money goes to villages that have very little else. A night in an agriturismo here is worth more locally than a week on the coast.

In the Supramonte, take a guide for anything beyond a marked path. This is karst with sinkholes and no phone signal, rescues are difficult and expensive, and the guides are local people whose work this is.

At Tiscali and the nuraghic sites, stay off the structures. They are unroofed, unstable and unstaffed.

Fire risk is high in summer in oak forest and maquis.

At carnival, remember the masks are a religious and communal rite, not a show. Watch, do not obstruct the procession, and ask before photographing people close up.

Buy pecorino, bread and wine from the producers; that is the entire economy here.

September and October are the best months here, and it is not close: warm, clear, and the season of Autunno in Barbagia, when the villages open their courtyards in turn across several weekends.

May and June are the other good window — green, flowering and excellent for walking before the heat.

The last Sunday in August is the Sagra del Redentore, Nuoro's own festival and one of the largest gatherings of traditional dress in Sardinia.

Carnival, in the weeks before Lent, is when the Mamuthones come out at Mamoiada and the other mask traditions appear across the interior. Cold, and the most extraordinary thing in the Sardinian year.

July and August are hot but far more bearable than the coast, and this is where Sardinians escape to.

Winter is cold, quiet and cheap, with snow on the mountains.

What a visitor actually pays in Nuoro

Nuoro is among the cheapest destinations in Sardinia and a fraction of what the coast costs in August, because essentially no tourism premium attaches to the interior. Agriturismi in the Barbagia are the distinctive option and often extremely good value: a long shepherd's meal with wine included, at a price that would buy a starter on the Costa Smeralda.