Luogosanto and other holy places in the Gallura

The name Luogosanto means holy place. (It also has a Genoese chateau, a mere ruin, set in glades of sculpted rock and trees against the brilliant sky, without a person in sight--only large cattle that resolutely showed us their brown haunches, and a tortoise with a magnificent sweeping shell.)

San Trano

There San Trano is set on a cliff amidst gigantic granite formations where two hermits lived, Tran and Nicolas. It is a square granite church built with the boulders as support and church altar. Outside an immense white marble dial sits in the earth. Droppings of rock climbing herds are everywhere. Within Luongosanto the Basilic also has the square granite exterior, while inside soar painted vaults, in the simple style of Sardinia. A baby doll in a casket lies wide-eyed in front of the altar, presumably for Sardinia's legendary processions. The ceiling paintings have a simple, grave dignity, like the old Tempio train station which has murals of peasant life in Sardinia.

San Pietro

In Tempio, the sprawling San Francesco is almost empty inside except for uninspiring plaster mannequins of holy people. But the San Pietro Cathedral in that important city dates from the 13th c. and now has enormous vaulted Baroque ceilings painted in olive greens. The altar is the Spanish wooden Baroque style, with the Virgin vaguely resembling Our Lady of Guadalupe. Opposite  and in the same building as San Pietro is the Oratoria Santa Croce, with plain, soaring Romanesque vaults of spare, beautiful brick. Cross the piazza and you come to the Oratorio San Rosario, a graceful lovely Baroque with the Stations of the Cross in glazed terracotta, pale blue and white.

Santa Croce

San Pantaleone, a bobo village near the bling-bling Costa Smeralda, also has a simple stone box for a church, but immediately upon entering you stumble into a gigantic plastic Christ being crucified, much larger than life, which leans against the left wall in the small space. Above him stained glass windows are of thorns and swords.

In Olbia, San Paolo is a recent reconstruction, filled with a strange contemporary art sensual and primitive, and almost vulgar, though much of the local art has a simple dignity. I wrote of the Romanesque San Simplicio of Olbia.

Necropolis 3500 BC

But the most moving of sacred places are the Neolithic burial sites. A Necropolis outside Arzachena has a circle of graves of knife-like slabs of rock, set in the earth to house the bodies, each with its stone box for treasures to accompany the deceased to the next world. It was used between 3500 and 2700 BC. Its tall Stellae represent the gods. It is strangely moving, and sits in the middle of nowhere, no officials, no tickets. You can circle it among arching grasses and bowing trees. The men that lay in this necropolis were shepherds and fighters, not unlike the Sards today.

Tomb of the Giants

The Tombs of the Giants, so-called because of the 4-metre high central stella, were common burial sites for the Nuragic people, of the later era (1800-1300 BC in many cases). Through the tiny arch in the central stella you now see the sky between slats of stone, but in those days it was the world of the dead. The peoples were said to fear the dead so much that they destroyed their weapons to keep them from rising up and taking vengeance on the living.

Santa Teresa Gallura

And finally the lovely Santa Teresa Gallura, a town at the northern tip of Sardinia, has taken flight with holiness as it flies out toward the sea, just facing Corsica, with  brilliant wildflowers. And St. Vittorio, the church in the central square is decorated inside with larger than life-size angels, that mount up to Christ high above, like a psychedelic dream on the edge of the turquoise sea.