It was not raining anymore, and we found ourselves in a small uneven square, filled by few parked and running cars and covered by rich-colored, large, political murales. I didn't like them much to be political, but that was the only reason for most of them to be, the reason for Orgosolo to be that political symbol that it had been, emancipated from being just the most famous den of brigands in Sardinia.

Because many of the murales were also not political, I was always looking for them, and happy to spot the picasso-like figures of women, the shepherds with the sheep, the old ladies painted while sewing or waiting sat in front of the houses were they lived, more simple or warmer images of life that could actually be filled by any sort of thoughts you might have in mind walking in front of them.

And as I waited for Libi and Cedda to get an ice cream, a salesgirl inside of a clothing store looked at me, from trough the window, and we smiled at each other. Her eyebrows lifted half annoyed, half cheerful so as to say, "I know you like it, and I am glad you do, but it's no big deal. I'd rather live somewhere else". And so my eyes answered "we all feel that way, so I think I can understand".

Then I turned to look at the square once again. I tried to look at it as it was the zillionest time I was doing it. And true, it was no big deal. The old houses were much more beautiful than the new ones, but everything was marked by an ancient, irremediable poverty. And the political murales, about the Vietnam war, the Gulf war, the fights of the workers, the leaders of the old communist party, the folk singers, the last century thinkers, were just there repeating their message forever and I, for the zillionest time, could not avoid it. It was like the whole weight of the world had collected in this town, for all the indifferent towns to keep on with their lives.

As a salesman later kindly explained to us, everything had started back in the sixties with an advertising graffiti of a clothing store. "You come as a shepherd, you go as a gentleman".
Still the paintings, redrawn over and over when needed, really looked alive. Even with their slogans, or their rhetorical visions, were alive. More than in any museum. Just because folks, unknown to me, were there, asserting them, often repeating the words of famous dead.

Like in that murales that quoted Lev Tolstoj: "All the plans to attenuate the misery of the masses with the charity of the riches are hypocrisy and imposture".
So true, and somehow more poignant drawn on a wall than written on the pages of any book.