Mamoiada

Bent under the weight of the cowbells, their faces covered by a black wooden mask, the mamuthones advance slowly in two parallel lines, and at every step give a shoulder-blow to make the bells sound. The issohadores escort them with lighter steps, white mask and red bodice, and suddenly throw the soha, the lasso, catching young women as a wish for health and fertility, or a friend picked out of the crowd, releasing him at once. They used to catch the landowners, who to repay the honour would take the whole company home and offer wine and sweets. The masks come out for the first time on the seventeenth of January, at the feast of Saint Anthony of the fire.

In the garden of a house in the village, in 1997, Sa Perda Pintà came to light, the painted stone, also called the Boeli stele: a granite slab more than two and a half metres high, carved with concentric circles and cup marks, of the same family as slabs found in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany and Corsica. The Romans passed this way too, on the road between Olbia and Cagliari, and the memory of them lies in two names deformed by the local speech: the quarter called Su hastru, which comes from castrum, and the fountain Su hantaru vetzu — because in the Barbagia of Ollolai the hard c becomes a glottal stop, as Max Leopold Wagner noted. Five kilometres out of the village, on the Marghine plateau, the sanctuary of saints Cosmas and Damian is ringed by some fifty little houses for pilgrims.