Sassari, Immigrants and Artifacts

Some of the oldest and strangest things in the land of the Sards, aside from the 3,000-year old ruins lying by the side of the road or in fields of sheep or cattle, are in the archeological museums at Sassari and Cagliari. Those visits bookended our trip, helping us make some sense of the time-space continuum. Arrowheads and little proto-Venuses, from thousands of years BC, beautiful jewelry, and the elegant pottery of the Nuraghe, then the burial treasures that often came from Etruria or Egypt, Pheonician symbols like the Eye of Horus which is pure Egyptian, Carthaginian masks (I made a mask like this, once) and facinating beadwork, Roman statuary and mosaics--it's a long, long story. As mentioned in an earlier blog (Train to Sassari), our first day out we took a train across the northern interior to what had been the first free commune of Sardinia (1294), and remained rebellious and politically significant through the centuries of occupation. Sassari is the second largest city with 129,000 inhabitants.

Rosello Fountain, Genoan

The vista from the train station is disheartening, construction mixed in with the 13th c. wall of thick stones that now back up umbre and gold houses. We bolstered ourselves with espressos at a cheerfully glum cafe like those all over Europe. The first stop, at a 17th c. Genoese fountain, is magical, not for sculptural beauty, but for its bright white presence down a grassy slope where children played and sketched. It is the site of a spring divinity, a water source that has been used since the 13th c.

Gothic Catalan Palazzo

St. Nicholas Cathedral

Then we entered the streets, rough granite, whorled columns, and stodgy monuments of the gothico-catalon style, all mixed in with a grimey somewhat out-of-time city--not so much dirty as mired in a desolate quality, growing like a jungle around the remaining architecture of a medieval and Renassance past. We climbed up the honking Corso and then down narrow streets where centuries-old stone vaults grace the interiors of store fronts, and out to the splendour of the Duomo, the centra Cathedral of every Italian city. A fantasy of Spanish baroque, massive and fussy at once, its facade centers around a sour-faced St. Nicholas. Inside the main hero seemed to be a war-like young man on a horse. The piazza had charm and grace, bright yellow facades with clean baroque decor. Sidestreets were neat, like Sicily's Sicracusa, while the Corso was like Sicily's Catania, dark gloomy stone. Over the spacious main square stands Victor Immanuel, united Sardinia's first ruler, square and pig-like, facing a huge neo-gothic bank that looks Venetian.

Model of a Nuraghe, Sassari Museum

There were streets that radiating from the square that felt like the Cote d'Azur, weather beaten warm facades with green or brown shutters. Only one architectural fantasy stood out, bubbling with victorian-looking sprites and bright-eyed nymphs.

As we rested on a piazza a Senegalese woman approached, tall and elegant and open-faced, with long corn-row braids and her wares. The Senegalese are everywhere in Italy, with their baskets of batteries and socks and charcoal lighters, or crafts from Africa, or in her case leather purses. In Venice they carry big plastic bags of designer-bag knock-offs, as they do in Florence. When she approached us I said to her, "Lui, il est né a Dakar." Telling people that Jacques was born in Senegal is always a good conversation starter.

Greek Erotic Vase, found in Sassari

"Dove?" she kept demanding. Where? Where was he born? What hospital? What street did he live on? She wanted to have his every memory of his birthplace, where he had lived only briefly while his father worked as an engineer installing railroads for France. The history between France and Africa has not been pretty, and Jacques had spent his career apparently trying to compensate for it, as a development economist for the poorest countries in Africa. We quizzed her---how did she come? Her husband had brought her, he had a job in a restaurant. He was bringing her sisters. He must have had papers, she was lucky. No matter how homesick she seemed to be.

Bronzetti, ~1000 BC

"These poor Africans," Jacques would say as more and more Senegalese appeared whenever our car stopped at a traffic light, or as we walked down the streets or sat in a café. "Everyone's screwing them." Sometimes they seemed stolid and dignified even peddling their trinkets, sometimes mischievous and smiling. "They're not shy, Senegalese," said Jacques. In Cagliari a big man dressed in an exotic combination of a Muslim-style culotte and straw hat seemed to be a leader of a group of Senegalese chatting on the street. We trailed two of them in Nuoro, wearing jogging suits, talking about soccer in a combination of Woloff and French. "Actually, soccer's their favorite thing," said Jacques. "They must feel at home here." Most places teenagers would lounge in groups in sunglasses and languid poses of discontent. Their deep black velvety skin stood out everywhere. "They're living 10 to a room, sending every centime home to their families," said Jacques. Looking directly at them often caused them to disappear in the crowd. And at about this time the Italian news, wherever we happened on a TV in a restaurant, was of Berlusconi and Sarkozy teaming up in an anti-immigration initiative, shipping back stowaways who had landed, like most, on Lampedusa. While, unbeknownst to us, our femme de menage back in Paris, Albertine, was mourning her nephew, suspected murdered in a retalitatory killing in the growing civil unrest of her homeland, the Ivory Coast. It turned out, luckily, that he was released alive after the desperate pleading of his sister.

Local versions of Bez, fertility god of Egypt

And so, even as I clucked and cooed each time I saw a farm animal or a stray cat or dog, Jacques retaliated by clucking in babytalk every time he saw a Senegalese.

But we had come to Sassari for the museum, where Sardinia's history resides. It welcomes you with a modest charm, scattered boulders and a rustic garden. The artifacts begin at about 3,000 BC, the labeling system meticulous but obscure. And thus far, it was all new to us.

Carthaginian mask, ~300 BC

Bez

That was our first encounter with the strange, defensive mounds of the Nuragic age (1500-800 BC) and the jewelry and weapons found in ancient burial mounds and in the later Phoenician and Carthaginian graves. The old fertility goddesses, looking a little Humpty-Dumpty-ish, or the powerful Tanit goddess, who began as nothing but a triangle with arms, and Sardinia's own Babai, a father of fertility. Then there were gods from around the known world, Bez, the misshapen fertility god with the erect phallus from Egypt, tiny statues that had been buried with ancient Sardinians, of deities and animals, and friezes found at tophets, the gravesites of infants. Following these the more skilled while rather unfeeling Roman sculptures--Venus, Demeter, Mercury--and some unbeautiful mosaics. It was exhausting and bewildering, and we went out into the emerging sun, and the marvelous train ride back to Olbia.