Rural phenomenon, codes of honour and geography of an archaic resistance.
This chapter documents a historical phenomenon of inland Sardinia. It aims neither to romanticise banditry nor to associate it with a population as a whole. No claim concerning living persons or links between the Porcu name and criminal activities is published without serious documentary basis. Current bearers of the name are not, as research stands, linked to the groups discussed.
Any concerned person may exercise their right of rectification or removal.
Sardinian banditry developed in a precise area: the mountainous interior of the island, and especially Barbagia, a region whose name comes from Roman antiquity (Barbaria, land of the « barbarians » not Romanised).
There, the massifs of the Gennargentu and the Supramonte, the isolated valleys and the high pastoral plateaus sustained a closed pastoral economy, where central power, Piedmontese then Italian, long exercised only nominal authority.
The mythical villages of this phenomenon, Orgosolo, Oliena, Nuoro, Orune, are all located in this hinterland. Popular iconography, particularly the murales of Orgosolo, still bears witness today to this ambivalent memory.
At the heart of Sardinian banditry lies a set of unwritten customary rules, analysed in particular by anthropologist Antonio Pigliaru in his work La vendetta barbaricina come ordinamento giuridico (1959): a true parallel legal order, with its obligations of revenge, its hierarchies of honour, its procedures of reconciliation (paghesa).
This code long coexisted with the law of the Italian State, not as mere criminality but as an alternative legal culture, which explains the difficulty of the authorities in halting the phenomenon by repression alone.
Obligation to respond to offence, in codified proportions.
Protective community silence in the face of outside investigation.
Formal reconciliation procedure ending the cycle of vengeance.
Sardinian banditry produced characters at once hunted by justice and mythologised by popular culture, sign of a complex relationship between the State and the inland communities.
« Grazianeddu », emblematic bandit of Orgosolo in the 1960s-70s, famous for his multiple escapes. His trajectory embodies the ambiguity of Sardinian banditry: a popular figure in certain circles, while accumulating judicial convictions. His name is inseparable from the media period of the kidnappings.
Nicknamed « the tiger of Ogliastra », a major figure of 1920s banditry, linked to a family vendetta turned collective tragedy. He represents the classic, archaic form of the pastoral bandit prior to the kidnapping turn.
Unlike Cosa Nostra (Sicily), the 'Ndrangheta (Calabria) or the Camorra (Campania), Sardinian banditry does not constitute a hierarchical mafia organisation with affiliation rites, unified command structure and economic territorial control.
It is a reticular criminal phenomenon, based on autonomous cells (often family- or village-based), shared customary codes, and a common modus operandi, without centralised governance.
This distinction matters because it changes the nature of judicial and sociological analyses: an armed custom is not fought as an organised criminal enterprise.
This is also why judicial investigations into the Anonima Sarda have always identified individuals and small groups, never an « organisation » in the Sicilian sense.
« From the mountain to the headlines: 1960. »
Chapter V, The Anonima Sarda →