Sardinia's mountain soul — the island's greatest literature, Grazia Deledda's Nobel Prize, Barbagia shepherd culture, and the longevity villages of the Blue Zone
Nuoro is the capital of the Nuorese — the mountainous, granite heartland of Sardinia — a city of 36,000 at 550m above sea level that produces more Sardinian cultural identity per square kilometre than anywhere else on the island. Grazia Deledda, born in Nuoro in 1871, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926 — the only woman to win in Italian language and one of very few writers to make an isolated mountain culture comprehensible and moving to the world. The Barbagia region around Nuoro — the most traditional shepherd culture surviving in the Mediterranean — is also one of the world's five '…
Nuoro was a minor market town throughout Sardinian history — significant enough to become a provincial capital under the Savoy kingdom (1821) but never a major city. Its importance is entirely cultural: the Barbagia (from the Roman name 'Barbaria' — 'barbarian territory,' because the Romans never fully controlled the interior mountain region) preserved archaic Sardinian dialects, customs, and material culture that disappeared everywhere else on the island. The Nobel Prize changed Nuoro's international status; the ethnographic museum (ISRE) founded in the 1970s systematically documented Barbag…