The Nuraghe of the Bronze Age

It was only late afternoon when we found the Nuraghe, after a day of the lavish and empty Costa Smeralda (the bling bling coast). I was having a touch of heat stroke in the village of Arzachena, a sleepy but refreshingly normal place where the workers of the jet-setters live. Its box-like houses of stone and stucco baked under the sun, where the inhabitants spoke slowly enough that we could understand their Sardinian tongue. Groups of men lounged in the bands of shade.

Il Fungi, shelter from 3500BC

On top of Arzachena perches il Fungi, a gigantic granite rock shaped like a mushroom which is revered by its pious concrete setting. But under il Fungi sat some scruffy Sards with their dog and their beer. A capacious umbrella of densest granite, it provided shelter for Sardinians in 3500 BC. We climbed up against the punishing brightness of the sun and saw Gallura's fields all around. Then a thick-set woman at the tourist office showed us how to reach the other prehistoric ruins nearby.

Tomb of the Giants, 1800 BC

The Tomb of the Giants had a large empty parking lot and closed ticket office, but two Sardinian women, strolling through cow pastures and gathering plants, showed us where the Tombs were. Then they strolled over too, circling the megalith with hands held to their hearts. I would be strolling there, too, if I lived here.

The tombs date to 1800 BC, an early stone-covered passageway for burial, with added stellae from around 1200 BC. A small semi-circular doorway symbolically provides a threshold to that world of the dead that the Nuraghe were said to revere and fear. Bands are carved into the tall (4 meters) central stellae. The tomb sits by vineyards, in a grove of trees that provide deep cool. The feeling there was profound.

Nuraghe settlement, 1300 BC

A few hundred meters further was the center of the Nuraghic city that had covered 5 hectares of land in 1300 BC. A stone tower of heavy granite that had been painstakingly split, using wood and water to slowly break the giant rocks into flat surfaces, rose above lower stone cylinders. The stones were immense and misshapen, but fitted together skillfully enough to have withstood 3500 years of existence. Before the the chieftain's tower spread a complex of 2 smaller towers and workshops where the community baked, created pottery and stored food. Now trees grow inside the mossy stone circles, which include a kiva-like meeting hall where something like writing has been found. These peoples had commerce with the Egyptians and the people of Palestine, as well as the Mycenean Greeks. Pre-literate and pre-coinage, the Nuraghic people have left their settlements all over the island. Here, in Gallura, la Prighione as this one is called, as the network's center.

One of the rock's many faces

Further on we hiked, in the soft evening air, past stone farmhouses and inquisitive red cattle, an old sweet-eyed dog, through groves, past countless varieties of wildflower, up a rocky hill among huge rocks sculpted into arcs and twisted into faces by time. The sky was softening into pink hues and all of Gallura was spread beneath us, farmland and trees. Up the stony path, on precarious granite boulders, we climbed a Bronze age staircase like the boulder-stairs of the Prighione. Under a massive umbrella of a rock whose every facet seemed to be a Mt. Rushmore of prehistoric faces, hidden by the trees, was a temple, walls high, lintel intact, a doorway into a space of sacred purpose.

Temple, 1500BC

High up, above daily life, this temple has communed with the sky for these thousands of years.

The archeological museum at Sassari tells these tales of Sardinia beginning with 5000 BC, with jewelry and elegant pottery from the Nuraghic age and before. Then it details the incursions of Etruscans, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, and into the medieval days of the Aragonese and Genoese. All rooted in this lush land.