In Sardinia by Jeff Biggers

Author:Jeff Biggers [Biggers, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2023-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

22 ​ ​ | ​ ​IN SOS LOGOS DE ANGIOY

A ballad directed against the tyranny of the feudal barons (the worst features of feudal tenure were not abolished until 1835), contains stanzas which are magnificent even in translation.

—Charles Dickens, Household Words, 1856

The procession rode into the piazza with an air of triumph, the militia marching in front in ràgas, wearing their berritas, black jackets and vests, their flared white trousers under their black skirts, waving their hands to a ripple of red- and black-clad figures in the crowd, who cheered from the windows, balconies, and packed confines of the streets. The Sassarese revolutionary Gioacchino Mundula carried a flag alongside the armed peasants. Dressed in a white scarf, her traditional dress marking her village patterns, a young mother held her son and pointed at the figure on the white horse, a red cloak across his shoulders, as if he had triumphantly entered the city gates in victory. As clerics and nobles looked on warily from the sides, the marchers sang the words of a poem in the northern Sardinian language that had been circulating clandestinely all year: Procurade ’e moderare, Barones, sa tirannìa. Endeavor to moderate, oh barons, your tyranny.

“In Sassari,” historian Francesco Sulis wrote in 1857, “the cry was that of ‘down with the nobles, down with the priests, long live Angioy, long live the republic.’ The representative of liberty and the Republic, Giommaria Angioy, sparkling the affection of the soul from his eyes, proceeded through the crowd at a slow pace and bareheaded, with a smile on his lip.”

This was the image of the painting in the grand Sala Sciuti in the Palazzo della Provincia in Sassari, where council meetings were once held. Titled L’ingresso di Giommaria Angioy a Sassari, typically translated with a little more excitement as Giovanni Maria Angioy’s Triumphal Entry into the northern city in 1796, the fresco returned to view in 2022 after a ten-year hiatus of restoration.

Somehow, symbolically, that delayed restoration captured a lot of Sardinian political history.

As I wandered the captivating streets of Sassari and its carnival of sights, I stumbled onto an itinerary of people and places in the history of the island. Walking in the towns of Sardinia was always a delight, and often an informative one. If you wanted to understand the layers of any city, one sought it at the source—its fountains, the piazzas, the streets, or the paths into the countryside, where decaying plaques or street names, even graffiti, gave a glimpse into a moment of history that mattered enough to mark its presence in our daily lives. Across a lovely white wall in Nuoro, for example, black spray paint zigzagged with a powerful message: Sardigna Libera! Free Sardinia!

Sardinia may boast more villages with murals than any place I have ever visited. A walk through towns like Oliena, Fonni, San Sperate, and Orgosolo, as we will see later, was like finding portals into another era, as street scenes and cubist visions played out on the walls. In

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