INSPIRATION

Today the mistral has finally come, the air is cooler and the sky is partially covered, exactly what I was waiting for! The short ride is pleasant. I forgot that on the way to Flussio I would have met Tinnura first. The two municipalities are adjacent.

The signs, end of one and beginning of the other, are in succession, literally a few meters away, just like I have already found in a few places, Baratili San Pietro and Riola Sardo, Ghilarza and Abbasanta, and then Muros and Cargeghe.

I arrive at the main square, in front of the Town Hall whose entrance is embellished with basalt statues. The walls of the square are full of murals, depicting Sardinian women in the act of weaving baskets, typical craft of this village, and other scenes of village life.

There’s also a beautiful fountain, a multi-coloured stone floor and a bar, where I enter and decide to spend a few hours to get some work on the blog.

After eating, I get back on my bike, since the day is not so hot and the sky a bit overcast. I arrive at the church of San Bartolomeo, of which the beautiful ancient stone apse remains, the rest renovated in a modern style.

From here I take the beautiful belvedere, bordered by huge basaltic boulders, which constituted an ancient megalithic wall of probable Nuragic age.

I ride it all by bike, enjoying the beautiful panorama of the same valley that I admired from Modolo and Magomadas.

And from here I can see them as well as all the other villages of Planargia, Tresnuraghes, Tinnura and Suni which I will see in the next few days.

I return to the streets of the village, passing houses built with dark basaltic stone, of which these plateaus are made up, resting on the white limestones that I observed further down in the Modolo valley.

I pass the Asphodel Museum, now closed, and I arrive at the parish church of Santa Maria della Neve, all pink, partly painted, partly adorned with pink trachyte most likely from the Bosa area.

Once back on the main street, I run into some expositions of asphodel baskets outside private houses. It is still early afternoon and there is no one on the street or on the doors to ask for more details on this art.

I am content to admire the details of the workmanship, rigorously by hand, the geometry of the designs, the color differences of the bands wrapped in a painstaking way.

I then venture into a side road that indicates the church of San Costantino and the park ‘Sa Roda’ but there is no kilometer distance indicated, it could be two or ten kilometers.

After a bit of road outside the village, in the middle of some uncultivated land and some vines, I decide to go back.

I pass next to a ‘wellness path’ in a small park, then I pass the railway line of the Macomer-Bosa Green Train, and I pass the Cantina Sociale della Planargia, producer of malvasia, the fine local wine. Flussio is also included in the ‘Bosa malvasia wine route’.

In a few hours I’ve seen everything there was to see. In silence. I feel satisfied.

 

SOUND FRAGMENTS

 

SARDINIAN SHORT STORIES

It is a pity not to have been here in Flussio in spring, when the asphodel plants begin to bloom and the harvest is made.

It is immediately after the harvest that the plants go through various stages of processing, often visible through the streets of the village.

Initially the plants are dried for the first time, wrapped in bundles that are placed on the external walls of the houses.

Once all the stems have been divided with a pointed knife, they are dried a second time in the sun through the streets of the village, and are withdrawn at night to not absorb moisture.

It is precisely at this stage that the whole place takes on a picturesque air.

Once dried, the stems are gathered in large bundles and stored in dry places. To be worked they need to be wet for 5 hours in special stone tanks and then wait about a day to be divided into 3 parts, external, intermediate and internal.

The first two are used to produce the motifs on the basket, wrapping them around the inside, forming a spiral until obtaining the basket, the so-called ‘corbula’.