Vestiges of a remote civilization: the nuraghi of Sardinia
One of the most characteristic aspects of the architectural, and also natural landscape of the island of Sardinia, is given by those very ancient, severe and imposing megalithic constructions, that is, made of large stones stacked one on top of the other without the use of mortar, which the natives call, in the voice of the original prehistoric and Mediterranean speech, nurakes, nuraghes, nuraxis, etc., depending on the various areas and dialects, and we, italianizing the word, more commonly call nuraghi.
The Greeks of the 6th century B.C. were already familiar with these monuments, and appreciated them especially for the constructive harmony of the interiors, covered with the false dome system that reminded them of the buildings erected by the Cretan Dédalo; they spoke of it in marvelous tales, crediting it with the construction, for nationalistic prestige, and creating over it the myth of the hero Norax (Norace, i.e., Nuraghe), who came from Spain to Sardinia with a numerous retinue of settlers.
The Romans preferred not to talk about it, and if I except perhaps a passage from the historian Livy, where, for the year 17 B.C., there is mention of castra, or castles, wrested by consular militia from the Ilienses, indigenous peoples, clad in goat or mouflon skins, warlike and semi-anarchic. The nuraghi reminded them of hard battles and even of some inglorious military pages silenced of course in official accounts.
Only in the last century, after long silence, a real paper battle was ignited around the destination of the nuraghi. And everyone wanted to have their say: archaeologists, philologists, historians, generals, lawyers, travelers; and they wrote about it in prose and verse; more than any other happy, among poets, in grasping its character, the unnamed and good literary canon, author of the Ritmo sardo or Canzone latina de lo sage Deletone (a character who never existed!), composed in the romantic enclosure of a provincial Sardinian town saturated with misunderstood patriotic love, myth and even limpid inspirational vernaccia, and passed off as a poetic essay from 1,500 years earlier to the dreamy and credulous intelligentsia of the enthusiastic local nineteenth century:
Istae moles non timebunt
consumantia tempora.
Altae, latae mire structae
fabricatae firmiter
Erunt istae, quamvis rudes
inter caetera mirifica.
The cantor believed the nuraghi were burial grounds, built by Phoenicians and Egyptians who landed in Sardinia from ancient times. Nuraghi, for Sardinia, are a bit like the Pyramids for Egypt and the Colosseum for Rome: evidence not only of a flourishing and historically factual civilization but also of a spiritual conception that imprinted the outward manifestations with a monumental and enduring character.
No other expression of island architecture from antiquity, and even from times closer to us, manifests the sense of power, majesty, sympathetic and monumental effort, and religiosity that appears in the Nuragic buildings.
And their astonishing number (there are more than 6,500 of them with total average density of 0.27 per square kilometer, with peaks of 0.90 in some areas); and their spread throughout the island, as well as an intense population, mark the most conspicuous and concrete result of the organization of human labor at all times of historical regional development, even if the labor was provided, almost certainly, by slaves or serfs, as was generally the practice in antiquity. Already the position of the nuraghi, as a rule located on high and dominant points, their frequent topographical and visual relationship, their proximity to places of water or the existence within them of wells reserved for emergency situations, their correspondence with territories of special strategic interest or of special productive economic value or distinguished from small settlements of huts to be protected and defended, indicate what was, predominantly and at least for a long time, the destination of these mighty constructions: namely, buildings of a fixed military nature, in which the chief and garrison lived; species of medieval castles that protected and dominated the adjacent village.
They were not tombs of princes and their families, as was mistakenly believed by taking as an argument the discovery of human remains there, but of strata of a later age than the Nuragic, that is, Carthaginian and Roman. Neither were they monumental temples, which today are known to be of different shapes and types, even for prehistoric island times, likewise burials (domus de janas or "fairy houses"; tumbas de sos gigantes or "tombs of the giants").
Sometimes, they may have been simple dwellings of wealthy shepherds and peasants, especially when the buildings are simple and of modest proportions. In any case they are, until proven otherwise, monuments of civic and secular life. In the vast majority, the nuraghi were erected before the historical colonizations of the island, carried out by the Phoenicians and Carthaginians around the late 8th century B.C. and arose for the purpose not so much of protecting Sardinia from Ligurian piracy, in a national political organization (which the Sardinians never managed to concretize) and in a kind of Mediterranean riparian understanding as was claimed, but for the defense of individual local staterelli (groups of tribes or civitates, as the Romans called them), governed by reucci, with a pastoral and agricultural economic basis depending on the area, in a way that recalls, somewhat distantly, the political-strategic organism of the medieval Giudicati, constantly fighting among themselves, for li predominance and territorial expansion.
From an internal and particularistic defensive system, this of the nuraghi passed, at the time of the colonial conquest, to a system of resistance to the new Semitic occupants, a resistance that was not immediate, as far as it seems, and accentuated especially during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., and in the lowland and hill areas; later still, in the mountains of Barbaria (present Barbâgie), not a few nuraghi may have constituted the last bulwark against the advance of the consular troops of Rome, moved to conquer the entire island territory. At all times it was, however, purely defensive organization, that is, negative: will remain a characteristic feature of Sardinian historical-political unfolding in every period.
The age of the nuraghi was therefore very long, and of not entirely uniform development. As far as the ancient and recent archaeological evidence shows, nuraghi were built in the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C., toward the beginning of the former, they expanded in the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. More than one was destroyed by the Carthaginians, towards the end of the 6th century B.C. (Su Nuraxi of Barûmini - Cagliari, Lugherras di Paulilàtino-Cagliari), in the occupation of their strategic hinterland; nuraghi lasted, even in original use, until perhaps Roman times (nuraghe Orrübiu di Orgoli-Nûoro, in Barbària). Their builders were indigenous peoples, whom the Greco-Roman writers call lolet or Ilienses; but it is a debated problem whether the primordial form of the nuraghe was imported from the Anatolian East, or from the Aegean, or from the Iberian Peninsula or Africa, or whether it was invented on the spot, where, moreover, it had wide, varied and admirable application and found a kind of terrain and people altogether propitious and congenial.
The name nuraghe, in which the root nur(a) means both "pile" and "cavity," i.e., "hollow pile," hollow construction, hollow tower, clarifies, in itself, the essential architectural form of the edifice: which is a truncated cone-shaped tower, with overlapping circles of large dry-stone, terminated by a terrace projecting over the wall line, with an inner chamber covered by egg-section vaulting obtained by the gradual protrusion, one on top of the other, of the rows of wall blocks, as in the famous "treasure" of Atreus, at Mycenae. A low doorway, generally exposed toward the sun and sheltered from the wind dominant mistral, through a narrow and long corridor introduces from the outside to the chamber which is often provided with niches and niches for storage and bedding; the corridor, sometimes surmounted by a botola in the ceiling, is frequently equipped, on the right of those entering, with a guard post, and on the left it is enriched with an opening leading to the staircase which leads to the upper floors or to the lookout terrace by winding up the core of the wall that is up to 4 or 5 meters thick.
This is the elementary form of the nuraghe. But an instructive variety of types is observed, from the simplest, with an isolated, single-story tower, to the most complex and formidable. Notable among the latter are the Losa nuraghe at Abbasanta-Cagliari and, especially, the Santu Antine at Torralba-Sassari, which, within a bulwark of triangular plan surmounted by a central tower raised three stories to its original height of 21 meters, contains a vast courtyard with a well and unfolds into seven chambers and a maze of overlapping corridors protected by loopholes intended for archers' shooting.
Known, for its picturesque location and beautiful and large structures, is also the Santa Barbara of Macomèr-Nuoro. But more than any other important and significant for various aspects, appears today the Su Nuraxi of Barumini-Cagliari, a singular monument for some new and absolutely exceptional characteristics, such as: a powerful wall beam of about three meters thick, which has covered, supporting and consolidating them without changing the architectural lines, the archaic structures of the primitive plant of the building largely unsafe; an external entrance, open in a section of the walls of beam, with lintels of perfect admirable squaring to chisel, raised a good seven meters above the ground and accessible only by means of wooden or rope escalators; a restored tower with beautiful squared blocks of yellowish marl that stand out against the polyhedral ones of the rough wall below. The grandiose building consists of a massive, squat quadrangular bastion fitted at the corners with four towers in originally provided loopholes that were blinded by the beveling along with the old ground-floor entrance, later replaced by the elevated entrance for greater safety in times of serious emergency.
Wonderful in strength and boldness of structure is, in the interior, the tall and capable courtyard, equipped with a well, and which serves as a skylight and ventilation element and provides access to the cells of the corner towers and keep, cells stacked in two stories at the corners, and in three stories-- connected by flights of stairs with elevated openings over the chambers--in the tallest middle tower (18 m) terminated by a terrace projecting on huge corbels in the same way that the ramparts of the bastion, with unusual appearance and with hitherto unique example. More often than not, these major nuragic complexes, which were enlarged and perfected in later periods recognizable in the same structures and in the archaeological objects found inside and outside the building (of stone, terracotta, bronze, etc., of practical use, simple and sturdy in general), are surrounded and fortified by an outer wall that develops in rectilinear bastions and with towers at the corners, sometimes with dead angles and with loopholes for greater defensive efficiency: Instructive, in the genre, is the grandiose enclosure of the nuraghe Orrúbiu of Orròli-Nuoro, equipped with seven towers, which occupies, as a whole, an area of about 2.000 sq. m. of land with its concentric ramparts, intended for the service of sculling and for the maneuvering of war machines. These are architectural forms and means of defense that anticipate the medieval castles with which certain nuraghi, if they did not differ in construction technique, could almost be mistaken for their general appearance.
Between simple and complex nuraghi there are also nuraghi of intermediate types: with a single tower preceded by a courtyard (nuraghe Aras di Gesturi-Cagliari): with two detached towers (nuraghe Carcinadi Orròli- Nuoro); with two towers with an intermediate courtyard (nuraghe Santa Barbara di Villanovatruschedu-Cagliari). There are also cases of juxtaposed nuragic schemes (Lugherras nuraghe of Paulilatino-Cagliari). Finally, there are nuraghi other than the normal circular-towered ones, of elliptical and quadrangular plan, whose variation is usually explained by the influence of external architectural motifs of historical peoples or as an effect of accentuated environmental isolation; but which, perhaps, can also be connected with the persistence of rectilinear formulas, prior to the development of the Nuragic civilization, i.e. of the Neo-Neolithic age, as would seem to indicate the quadrilateral scheme of a monumental and very singular megalithic tumulus, either religious or funerary in nature, which is now being excavated in the locality of Monti d'Accoddi in the territory of the municipality of Sassari.
A recent theory by the German archaeologist Kaschnitz von Weinberg offers a curious psychoanalytic interpretation of the round, hollow- almost cave-like appearance of the interior spaces of nuraghi, as of the compartments of related forms on the islands of Crete and Malta. A basic principle would have been the religious concept, widespread in the psychology of primitive Mediterranean peoples, of realizing in the circular, concave construction the symbol of the womb of the earth goddess and mother, the foundation of every natural generation and the spiritual expression of an agricultural-based civilization. Another theory, from the persistence of the round and hollow shape of the nuraghe in the huts of modern Sardinian mountain and hill shepherds and farmers, would like to derive that the shape itself concretizes a quality of indigenous race and environment.
One is struck, moreover, by the whimsical and open character of nuragic architectures as a whole; by their not allowing themselves to be concluded in precise formulas; by their holding up almost by a miracle of nature and instinct, without a consciousness and science rational of construction. Basically, it is the same fresh, intemperate and barbaric improvisation that gave birth to the Nuragic sculptures, the now famous bronzes, which represent the nuraghi themselves, but more importantly the various categories and grades of the warrior, seafaring, trade and industry active society that built them and was their vigilant, proud and generous guardian for a very long space of time before and during the bitter conquests.
The echoes, remote and millenary, of those ages and people have not yet entirely died out in contemporary Sardinia, especially where the soul of the people, lagging behind by centuries, is struggling to catch up with the instances and progress of the modern world. And a small segregated world, the old face of a sorrowful and yet noble Sardinia; it is the liveliest folklore, which will not delay, as in happier and already advanced patches of land, to participate, by virtue of men and goodness of innovative institutions, in the history that turns, with happy fortune.
