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From its enchanting landscape to the
history of its stones, from tradition to something more
sporting, bizarre and eccentric. One tells between tears of
its defeats and victories, of the past of this people, these
Ligurian immigrants originally from Pegli who abandoned
their roots to move to Tabarka, a little Tunisian island, to
serve the Lomellini, rich Genovese patricians, and to work
every day collecting coral. Soon after, various events
caused their emigration – some of them stayed behind as
slaves submitting for all of their lives to orders of the
Bei tyrants while others were luckier when King Charles
Emanuel III, aided by some religious orders of the time,
succeeded after 1741 (the year in which the people of
Tabarka were traded as slaves) in negotiating a treaty and
saving many of the Tabarka slaves. Some of them left for
Spain, others ploughed new lands, others still were destined
to colonise the Island of Sant’Antioco. And as a result of
the
 occupation
of the north coast of the island, a small seafaring village
with Arab roots sprung up. Only afterwards, more precisely
in 1770, was the town of Calasetta, a seafaring and
agricultural centre, founded from an idea of the military
engineer Belly, who envisaged an urban structure in the form
of a chessboard where all the rigorously straight streets
intersect each other perpendicularly.
Irrefutable testimony of this deep tie is the dialect, a
very rich of words immigrant by the Liguria to the most
majestic Sardinia, mother of the natural beauties which
weave his landscape, rich of vegetation and little romantic
inlets, what the curiosity of the people who love to walk
along the coast of an enchanted place stimulates
These lines my kind and noble tourist
shade between the commas the secrets of the majestic journey...
now only you can open the casket
that keeps the ancient land from its Arab roots. |
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