Ulassai

Ulassai is the highest village in Ogliastra, wedged between the great limestone heel to the north and Monte Tisiddu to the south; under the heel runs a cave a kilometre long, and down its flanks, when the rain is heavy, come the waterfalls. In 1981 the artist Maria Lai, who was born here, made a work on this territory together with the village: it was called «Legarsi alla montagna», to tie oneself to the mountain, and it was a communal work. Out of it came the open-air museum of Ulassai; and the museum of contemporary art that carries her name is in the old railway station — the station of a line that only got up here in 1893, because until the end of that century no road connected Ulassai to anything outside Ogliastra.

Around 1600 the men who ran the feast of Santa Barbara gave themselves a statute and founded the Opera Santa Barbara, which worked as a bank: it held money, grain, livestock and land, and lent them to the people of the village to be paid back over the years at a very low rate — five measures of wheat for sixty taken. Every loan was written in a register, and those registers still exist, kept by the committees that run the Opera two years at a time. The other face of the same life is harder: for three centuries the shepherds of Ulassai and those of Esterzili fought over the pastures of Pauli. The counts of Quirra gave the grazing back to the men of Ulassai, but the fighting went on until the end of the eighteen hundreds, and it cost hundreds of lives.