In the dialect of this village of the Barbagia of Ollolai there are words of clearly Arabic origin, and the source patiently lists all the roads by which they may have arrived: the captured slaves and the pirates who took refuge in the mountains of the interior, the Pisan and Genoese dialects, Catalan and Spanish — languages themselves full of Arabic — the Sicilian and Neapolitan traders, and the Jewish communities come from Muslim Spain and settled in the ghettos of Cagliari, Sassari and Alghero. Among all those words, however, two are found only here and in no other point of Sardinia: dimma, used in the expression lu amus a dimma, and tabeccàre, which stands in faco comente mi tabèccat, that is I do as I please, and goes back to a root that also means to be well, to suit. Two words that live in a single village of a little over one thousand four hundred people.
At carnival, the chief mask is the maschera a gattu, the cat mask, which Grazia Deledda mentions in the novel Elias Portolu. The costume is worn with the two skirts inside out, and the rest is a whole life put on: a white cover over the head for birth, a black veil in front of the face for death, a red band round the head for marriage. At the end of the festivities they burn a puppet called Su Maimone, dressed in riding trousers stuffed with rags, gaiters and a wide shirt that hides a demijohn of wine, with which the glasses of those present are filled. Then there are the looms: here they weave large carpets on vertical looms, yellow, black, red and brown, with geometric designs or figures taken from the objects of the countryside, and one kind in particular, the burra, made to patterns handed down for centuries with naturally coloured wefts, is unique in the whole region — one can be seen at the ethnographic museum of Nuoro. The village stands at six hundred and thirty metres below Monte Gonare, and in the early Middle Ages these were the lands of Ospitone, the Barbaricine chief whom pope Gregory the Great addressed so that a population still tied to pagan beliefs might convert.
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📅 Every year, on 29 September
On 29 September Sarule celebrates Saint Michael the Archangel; the village also preserves the sanctuary of Nostra Signora di Gonare, on the mountain of the same name.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Sarule, but an easy day trip away.
