How Was Nuoro Built

Nuoro is a young town in an old landscape, and the interesting building is mostly outside it.

The old quarter

What survives of pre-twentieth-century Nuoro is San Pietro, a small district of low houses in undressed granite with external stairs, tight lanes and almost no ornament. It is the vernacular of the whole interior: thick walls, small openings, and the same grey stone the hill is made of.

The modern town

From 1927 Nuoro was built up as a provincial capital, and most of it is plain twentieth-century construction — wide streets, apartment blocks, public buildings. It is not pretty and there is no point pretending otherwise; the town's quality is in what it contains.

Barbagia villages

The villages around are older and denser: granite houses packed on slopes, courtyards behind, and in Orgosolo walls covered since the 1960s in political murals that have become the village's identity.

In the mountains

The Supramonte holds the oldest building here: dry-stone shepherds' huts, the pinnettos with conical juniper-framed roofs, and Bronze Age sites including Tiscali, a nuraghic village built inside a collapsed limestone doline, invisible until you are standing in it.

The nuraghi

The interior is dense with nuraghi, the dry-stone towers built across Sardinia between roughly 1800 and 1100 BC and found nowhere else on earth. They are corbelled cones of massive unmortared basalt and granite, often with a spiral stair in the wall thickness, and there are thousands of them on the island. Around Nuoro they stand in ordinary fields, unfenced and unremarked.

Nivola

At Orani, a museum to Costantino Nivola, whose sand-cast reliefs took this landscape to New York.