Oct. 11, 2022

SARDINIA: S’OZZASTRU, THE ANCIENT…

Sardinia is one of the regions with the highest life expectancy in the world. It is not uncommon to find people who live to be 100 years old, and often even older.

This precious region is often referred to as a microcontinent due to the presence of a wide variety of ecosystems that have helped sustain the lives of all its inhabitants, both animal and plant.

The famous poet and singer Fabrizio De Andrè describes “Life in Sardinia [as] perhaps the best a man could hope for: twenty-four thousand kilometers of forests, countryside, and coastlines immersed in a miraculous sea should be exactly what I would advise the good Lord to grant us as Paradise”

A unique, remote island that for centuries lay “on the margins” of Mediterranean history and trade, yet was also the cradle of ancient civilizations—the most famous and mysterious of which is that of the “shepherd kings” who left us the “nuraghi.”

If we look even further back in history, however, we find an incredible living being that has managed to survive to the present day: nestled among the green hills of the historic subregion of Gallura, on a hilltop about 260 meters above sea level called Luras, stands Italy’s oldest tree, an olive tree (Olea Europaea) that is well over 4,000 years old.

S’Ozzastru, “the wild olive tree,” is ancient, majestic, lush, and as tall as a four-story building! It is called the grandfather of all trees… a very special grandfather who, over the course of four millennia, has witnessed the history of humankind unfold beneath its roots: As S’Ozzastru began to grow its roots, the ancient Egyptian pyramids had been built only a few centuries earlier, and the founding of Rome was still a long way off. The Phoenicians would land a millennium later, and the Nuragic civilization would encounter and come to know it a full two centuries after its birth…