Lula

The mines of Lula are old: the Romans worked the Argentaria, the Guzurra and Sos Enathos, and the last of them closed only about ten years ago. One of the first miners' strikes in Sardinia happened here, on 16 April 1899, against the company that held them. And in 2020 Sos Enathos, empty and deep and still, was put forward to house the Einstein Telescope, the instrument built to listen to gravitational waves: the same holes dug in search of silver would serve to hear the universe.

The carnival mask of Lula is called su Battileddu, and it is the victim. It wears sheepskins, its face is dirty with soot and blood, its head is covered by a black woman's kerchief and above that a headdress of horns, among which a goat's stomach is set; on its belly, hidden by the cowbells, it carries an ox stomach full of blood and water, which is pierced now and then to wet the ground. Behind it come other men dressed as widows in mourning, their faces painted black, advancing to the funeral lament and carrying rag dolls for the onlookers to kiss. The mask was given up in the first half of the twentieth century, perhaps because of the poverty and the mourning of the war, and was taken up again in 2001. Outside the village stands the country sanctuary of San Francesco, a destination for pilgrims from all over the island, which Grazia Deledda mentioned more than once. And there is a harder fact: for more than ten years, between the nineteen eighties and nineties, this comune had no mayor, for fear of the reprisals that anyone accepting the post might suffer.