Oct 11, 2022

SARDINIA: S'OZZASTRU, THE ANCIENT...

Sardinia is one of the lands with the highest longevity rates in the world. It is not uncommon to find people reaching 100 years of age, often exceeding it.

This precious region is called a micro-continent because of the presence of a wide variety of ecosystems that have helped to preserve the lives of all its inhabitants, animal and plant.

The famous poet and singer Fabrizio De Andrè defines. "Life in Sardinia [as] perhaps the best that a man can hope for: twenty-four thousand kilometers of forests, of countryside, of coasts immersed in a miraculous sea should coincide with what I would advise the good God to give us as Paradise."

A unique, distant island, for centuries and centuries "on the fringe" of Mediterranean history and trade, but also the cradle of ancient civilizations, the most famous and mysterious being that of the "shepherd kings" who left us the "nuraghi."

Looking even further back in history, however, we find an incredible living thing that has managed to make it to the present day: among the green slopes of the historic subregion of Gallura, on a rise about 260 meters above sea level named Luras, is the oldest tree in Italy, an olive tree(Olea Europaea) that is well over 4,000 years old.

S'Ozzastru "the olive tree" is ancient, majestic, lush and as tall as a 4-story building! It is called the granddaddy of all trees...a very special granddaddy that over the course of 4 millennia has seen the history of human beings flow under its roots: While S'Ozzastru was beginning to grow its roots, the ancient Egyptian pyramids had been built a few centuries before and the founding of Rome was still a long way off. The Phoenicians would land after a millennium, and the Nuragic civilization would meet and know him well two centuries after his birth...