TrueSpace
Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, has been tickling my imagination for decades. In the mid-1990s, software for ray tracing, a kind of 3D animation, was released under the name Cagliari TrueSpace. Shortly after, when I uncovered that the name of the company, Cagliari, was not a coincidental and random collection of letters, but the capital of a former kingdom, I realized I had to, one day, visit Cagliari.
Today was that day.
The city is small, with only around 150000 inhabitants, down from just under 200000 at the beginning of the 70s, but has had a very long history.
Before Italy, before Savoy, before the Ostrogoths, before the Romans, even before the Punic Carthaginians, the island was home to Neolithic settlers who left fortifications that have made it to being recognized as a World Heritage Site today.
Cagliari is also home to Italy’s longest religious procession, a 4-day, 70km walk celebrating St. Ephysius, who was supposedly martyred, beheaded, around 303AD. Literally nothing is known about the man, but the festival around his commemoration is the most important religious event of the city.
I missed it by just a few days.
Now, in the middle of May, the city feels calm, perhaps sedate. The inner city has some tourists, but is not overrun by them. Many of the streets are quiet.
Granted, the sights are also not overly spectacular, but also on par with plenty of more out of the way destinations on the mainland. And the city does have that redeeming feature of every good city: there is a good amounts of cats.
Where Sardinia becomes fascinating is in its deep history. Before it was Italian, the island was part of a slew of kingdoms, and also was the seat of a kingdom itself, the aptly named kingdom of Sardinia, which became the political core of the house of Savoy, which led the unification of Italy.
But, before that, there was Roman, Carthaginian, and Punic rule. And history goes deeper, with Sardinia being home to an indigenous people, the Nuragic civilization, which had its heyday, roughly, between 1800 and 600 bc, before Phoenicians started to mess things up.
What they left behind are the aptly named nuraghi, stone mortar-less towers and tightly packed settlements that may have been villages. No language or writing remains, and their religion is uncertain, but seems to have had a focus on water and bulls, or oxen.
They worked bronze, traded across the Mediterranean, and perhaps had soldiers in Egyptian armies, evidenced by certain Egyptian descriptions of armour, depictions that were also found in Sardinia.
A somewhat more certain connection with the eastern Mediterranean is with the mysterious Sea Peoples who terrorized the East around 1100BC. The Egyptians called some of them Sherden, or Shardana, and the way they were represented resembles the bronze statuettes of warriors from Sardinia, though the connection itself is only marginally more than speculative.
Their style of bronze art, to me, resembles Celtic and Scythian imagery. However, no direct connections exist, there, even if all three started to emerge around the same time, though all perhaps just derive from a shared Indo-European background.
The nuragic language is lost. There’s speciation that it was Indo-European, but it could also have predated that, connecting to, for example, Basque.
A few place names still hint at a pre-Roman history, but little can be derived from this.
I found that some of the place names, including the site of the most important nuragic remains, at Su Nuraxi, reminded me of names you also encounter in Malta, which could hint at a Semitic connection. However, that name is simply a Sardinian meaning of “The Nuraghe”, where Sardinian is a Romance language. A pity, doubly so, because, with the mentioned water worship, and ‘su’ meaning ‘water’ in many Turkic languages, there could have been a so much more tantalising cross-Mediterranean, even cross-Eurasian connection.
That said, it seems that their huts were constructed in Etruscan style. But that could also be coincidence; conical hits can just be that, conical huts.
Yet, apparently, according to a guide in the archeological museum, the Etruscan elite called themselves by a name hinting at an nuraghic connection, though I could not find an independent source on that.
Bet there are also actual juicy connections; the term sardonic, as in smile, relates to the island.
In ancient Greek, sardonios gelos meant “bitter” or “scornful laughter.” Classical writers associated it with a poisonous Sardinian plant, causing facial muscle contractions resembling a grin, before death. This “deadly grin” became associated with cruel, mocking, or cynical laughter.
The plant itself, though, is not known.
And the fish, sardines, are believed to be so called because they were abundant around the island, the Greeks originally naming the fish for the island.
I avoided the roadside plants, for eating, just in case. But did enjoy a few nice fishes. What I sadly couldn’t find, was Casu martzu.
I have to return to TrueSpace.