Il Muto di Gallura

Sardinia, the Sardinians, and Sardinian land have been remarkably far-sighted in grasping a crucial difference: the possibility of a life complete in itself—without violence, without forcing, without actions that break coherence. In the recent past, there were attempts to dismantle this stance by imposing external models of growth and desire. Yet Sardinians resisted, struggled, and ultimately outgrew the very idea of modernity as a universal yardstick. Today, while the rest of the world strains to uncover the “secret” of longevity, many Sardinians smile—not because they possess a formula, but because they have safeguarded a posture that modernity has forgotten.

 

The life that inhabits their bodies and souls touches something beyond post-modernity, because modernity was never the point of comparison. Bruno Latour—the great sociologist and philosopher—clarified this in We Have Never Been Modern, exposing the illusion on which our worldview was built: a sharp separation between knowing subject and known object, between humanity and nature, between culture and environment.

 

Realizing that we have “never been modern” is not an ontological defeat, nor a resignation. On the contrary, it is a leap in awareness. It is recognizing that the environment is not an “other” to dominate—or merely to study—but part of us, as we are part of it. We are fused in a relationship of vital interdependence. And human beings draw the best from life only when they stop imagining otherness as separation and begin to feel it again as relation.

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From this perspective, longevity is not a performance; it is a reward—the biological and cultural reflection of a regained consciousness.

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On one of my journeys across the land I love most, I discovered Il Muto di Gallura. This place challenges modernity precisely because it does not accept it as a necessary horizon. It stands outside that paradigm. Set on the edges of Aggius (SS), it leaves you speechless for its complete lack of superstructure: everything appears in its immediate, uncompromising clarity, compelling a stance of wonder. Not folkloric wonder—because folklore freezes images—but living wonder, born from direct contact with ways of living that speak of an extraordinary life.

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It feels like a silent invitation to reconsider what modernity has taken from us without asking permission: reclaimed time.

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The guardian of this time is Gianfranco Serra, who inherited Il Muto di Gallura and turned it into a true cultural stronghold—one that does not “display” tradition like a shop window, but lets it breathe. Here culture is not narrated; it is practiced. It is stazzo life: necessary gestures, slow workmanship, material memory—objects that are not mere “things,” but traces of a way of being in the world.

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Among the most meaningful traces you can still follow is the ox cart—a true “world-clock” that, in a way, we should all learn to wear in order to live time differently. In Gallura, the ox cart was for centuries a tool for work and transport, but above all a schooling of time: a way of moving through space in which nothing can be forced. The oxen’s pace demands attention, measure, an ear for the ground. It is not “efficiency”; it is agreement with the landscape. It is a motion that does not cut through the world, but follows it—does not dominate it, but acknowledges it.

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One of Serra’s deepest projects grows from this very intuition: li camini di lu carrulu, the slow routes of the cart—embodied memory of Gallura, traced in the body long before they were drawn on paper. Slowness becomes a form of intelligence: knowledge of rhythm, a discipline of attention, a coherence between gesture and environment.

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The story that gathers around “Il Muto” is, unmistakably, a philosophy of slow living: a “truer” Sardinia, where everything moves by a clock slowed down against contemporary frenzy. The ox cart, then, is not folklore—because folklore crystallizes and impoverishes—but a practical manifesto against acceleration: an invitation to return to life’s biological and perceptual rhythm, where time becomes an ally again, not an enemy.