The piglet of Bandits of Orgosolo and the Barbagian Code
When his love of ethnoanthropology drove Vittorio De Seta to Barbagia to shoot Bandits of Orgosolo (1961), he was stunned by the discovery of a civilisation that seemed the product of an extraordinary time machine. A leap backwards in time over not years but millennia. In an unchanged and unchangeable scenario, people move with cyclical rhythms that are always the same, governed by the Barbagian Code: an unwritten law, propagating rigid, at times savage, concepts. With no written trace of it ever found, this bonafide community law was compiled to govern the tribes that, for millennia, represented the basic economic units of the populations gathered in the mountains (the plains were mostly swampy marsh until the mid-1900s) who practiced pastoral traditions, almost always sheep farming. A law that gave the community the power of life and death over its members and that was applied by the people in the innermost areas of the Barbagia.
De Seta focuses his attention and the camera on Orgosolo, the village that is the symbol of this ancient code. Standing at the heart of the most important virgin forest in Europe (Supramonte), it is the birthplace of many famous bandits including, most recently, Graziano Mesina. Banditry in Sardinia is an ancient phenomenon, rooted in the moment when legal order threatened to replace natural law for the inhabitants. The Spanish (the Bourbons delegated the task of colonising what they believed, erroneously, to be the largest island in the Mediterranean to the Aragonese), who arrived at the end of the 1300s with the intention of building the outermost defensive bulwark for Spain against the Moors, brought their legal heritage with them. At the same time, Eleonora, Judge of Arborea, proclaimed the Carta de Logu, the first written constitution in history. The conflict with the Barbagian Code was inevitable, especially when taxation became particularly oppressive. The decisive push was provided in 1821 when Piedmont, which at the time composed the Kingdom of Sardinia with the island, decided (in accordance with Cavour’s liberal ideas) to proclaim the so-called Legge delle Chiudende (Enclosures Act) whereby anyone was permitted to fence off and claim land that had previously been shared commons, regulated by civic usage, for thousands of years.
With his careful and light focus, De Seta grasps even the tiniest detail of the incredible natural and human scenarios that appear before him with extraordinary efficacy. With skill and wisdom, he moves the characters, many of whom non-professionals who interpret themselves with dour expressions and dialogues that are mostly long silences and sketched gestures.
Cooking is also rigorously essential. Those who need to spend months away from their homes, in the midst of such verdant but arid nature, needed nutritious food that could keep for a long time and be cooked fast and without fuss. Food such as pane carasau, bread once cooked on the hot rocks in the fire (as Homer mentions in the Odyssey) which serves as a plate for slices of roasted sheeps cheese or, on holidays, boiled mutton with potatoes or the famous roast pig that De Seta describes so well in the film, a dish as simple as it is tasty.
