How Was Olbia Built

Olbia and its province are built of granite, and the two most interesting things here are six hundred years and one great social distance apart.

San Simplicio

The basilica was built between the eleventh and twelfth centuries in local granite, in the Pisan Romanesque manner but coarsened by the material: granite does not carve like limestone, so the detail is simplified, the arcading heavy and the surfaces left rough. The effect is austere and very solid, and it is the best medieval building in the north of the island. It stands slightly apart from the centre because it was outside the medieval town, next to a Roman necropolis.

Granite building

Traditional Gallurese building is dry-laid or roughly mortared granite blocks, small windows and heavy lintels, with the stazzi — isolated farmsteads scattered across the hills rather than gathered into villages — as the characteristic rural form.

The Costa Smeralda style

From 1962 the consortium's architects invented a vernacular that had never existed: whitewashed and ochre render over curved walls, juniper beams, hand-made tiles, rooflines broken to look accreted, and a rule that nothing should be visible from the sea. It is a designed fiction of an old fishing coast, executed with real skill, on a coast that had almost no buildings before.

What came before all of it

On the hills around the gulf stand the oldest structures here: the nuraghe at Cabu Abbas, a dry-stone tower inside a massive enclosing wall, and the tomba dei giganti at Su Monte 'e s'Abe, a collective burial fronted by a curved facade of upright slabs. Both are Bronze Age, both are built of the same granite, and both were standing for well over a thousand years before the Carthaginians founded the port.

Post-war Olbia

The town centre is plain reconstruction after the 1943 bombing, which is the honest reason Olbia is not pretty.