A TIME OF BANDITS
In the early 1920s, DH Lawrence set out on a short tour of Sardinia, coming to Italy’s second-largest island to discover somewhere “outside the circuit of civilisation”. On arriving, it seemed to the author that he was in some “strange and wonderful” land. The Sards he encountered seemed equally wild and inscrutable, rousing in him an “uneasy sense of blood-familiarity”. Sardinia engendered a primal response – perhaps unconsciously reflecting its turbulent past.
Lying in the centre of the western Mediterranean, Sardinia is as close to Africa as it is to Italy. Control of the island passed from Carthage to Rome in ancient times, then to Pisa and Spain during the Middle Ages, before falling into the possession of the dukes of Savoy (in what’s now south-east France and north-west Italy) in the early 18th century. Too inaccessible to become a staging post for Grand Tourists on their rounds of classical Europe, Sardinia received its first British adventurers in the mid-19th century, when the island was described in travelogues such as John Tyndale’s Island of Sardinia (1849). What Tyndale discovered was a richly forested, mountainous island of 9,000 square miles, with “a want of roads and transport” and a largely rural and illiterate population of some 600,000.
As Tyndale traversed the length of the island on horseback, he was struck by the Sard language – Latinate but heavily influenced by Greek, Spanish (bandits and outlaws); down in the valleys, malaria was rife. At every turn, poverty was a tinderbox to conflict. Villages were riven by vendettas. Highland shepherds and lowland farmers were in perpetual conflict. And while foreign investors were buying up large estates, speculating on the arrival of the railways, the dukes of Savoy were sending military attachments to deal with riots against laws demanding the enclosure and division of common lands.
