Here they speak Ligurian in the middle of Sardinia, and the reason is a journey two centuries long. In the sixteenth century some families from Pegli followed the Lomellini as far as the islet of Tabarka, off the Tunisian coast, to fish for coral. When the coral ran out and the raʾīs of North Africa began making them free or enslaved according to who was in charge in Tunis or Algiers, in 1738 they asked king Charles Emmanuel III for a quiet place to trade from: the king granted them the island of the sparrowhawks, then deserted. The Phoenicians had called it Inosim, which means the same thing. The town, designed by the Piedmontese engineer Augusto de la Vallée, took the king's name, and while it was being made ready the refugees spent two weeks in the buildings of the tuna works at Portoscuso.
In 1798 Barbary pirates made a savage raid and carried off more than nine hundred townspeople, held as slaves in Tunis for five years. During that time one of them, Nicola Moretto, found on the beach at Nabeul a wooden statue that everyone took for a Madonna, and which was probably a ship's figurehead washed ashore. That find held the prisoners together; when king Charles Emmanuel IV freed them by paying a heavy ransom, the statue was brought to Carloforte too, and to receive it the church of the Madonna dello Schiavo, Our Lady of the Slave, was built.
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📅 Every year, on 4 November; 29 June brings a procession to the sea, and the Madonna dello Schiavo is the most heartfelt feast
Carloforte celebrates Saint Charles Borromeo on 4 November. To this day, 29 June is a solemn feast, with a procession to the sea and fireworks; the feast of the Madonna dello Schiavo is, however, the one most deeply felt by the Carolina community.
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