Nuoro historical timeline

The Barbagia's history is one of resisting whoever held the coast, and Nuoro is its modern capital rather than its ancient one.

Barbaria

The name is Roman and not a compliment: the highlands were the Barbaria, the part of the province Rome garrisoned rather than governed. Nuraghic culture persisted here longer than on the coasts, and the interior kept its language and its social forms through every subsequent conquest because no conqueror found it worth the cost of taking.

A late capital

Nuoro was a village of a few thousand into the nineteenth century, made a provincial capital in 1927. Almost everything about the modern town dates from after that.

The literary town

For a place that size it produced a remarkable amount of writing. Grazia Deledda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 for novels set in exactly this landscape. Salvatore Satta's The Day of Judgment, published after his death, is a portrait of Nuorese society that is now regarded as one of the great Italian novels of the century. The poet Sebastiano Satta and the sculptor Costantino Nivola came from here and from the village next door.

The kidnappings

From the 1960s into the 1990s the Barbagia had a serious organised abduction problem, with victims held in the Supramonte. It ended decades ago and the region is safe, but it shaped how the rest of Italy saw the interior and it is still the association many Italians reach for first.

Depopulation

The villages have been emptying steadily since the war, and that, not crime, is the region's real modern problem. Several Barbagia communes have lost more than half their population within living memory, and the schools closing one by one are the measure everyone here uses.