Nuoro Culture

The Barbagia is the cultural core of Sardinia, and Nuoro is where it is collected and explained.

The masks

At Mamoiada, fifteen minutes away, the carnival is led by the Mamuthones: men in black sheepskins and dark wooden masks carrying up to thirty kilos of cowbells on their backs, moving in a slow rhythmic procession, escorted by the Issohadores in red. Nobody knows what it originally meant. It is not a revival and it is not for visitors, though visitors come.

The language

Sardinian is spoken more widely here than anywhere else on the island, and the Nuorese variety is regarded as the most conservative form of the language — the closest surviving speech to Latin, by a number of measures.

Shepherding

Sheep, pecorino and a pastoral economy still underpin the interior. It also underpins the food: pane carasau, the thin dry sheet bread made to keep for months away from home, roast suckling pig, and Cannonau, the heavy red of the Barbagia.

Deledda

Her novels are set among these villages and were written by someone who left them. Reading one before coming is the single best preparation for the Barbagia.

Bread as craft

Sardinian bread is a serious craft and the museum treats it as one. Beyond carasau there are breads made only for weddings, for Easter, for a saint's day, worked into elaborate pierced and plaited forms by women in the village and never sold. Some of the pieces on display took days to make and were meant to be eaten within hours.

Living a long time

This part of Sardinia was the original blue zone, identified because an unusual number of men were reaching a hundred. The research is real; the popular version, which credits everything from Cannonau to goat's milk, runs well ahead of what was actually shown.