Hold and reserve a nine night shepherd village trip in inland Sardinia for spring or autumn

A language the Romans never finished

A shepherd village trip in inland Sardinia takes you into the one part of the island that was never really governed from outside. Rome held the coast and called the interior Barbaria, which is where the name Barbagia comes from. Carthage before them and Aragon after them arrived at much the same arrangement.

What survived is a language. Sardinian is not a dialect of Italian; it is a separate Romance language, and the Nuorese variety spoken here is usually described as the most conservative one still in daily use. It keeps hard consonants that Latin had and Italian dropped. Domo for house, chelu for sky, abba for water.

You will hear it in the street and not in your direction. Older people speak it among themselves and switch to Italian for a stranger without appearing to think about it. Nobody performs it for visitors, and this trip does not pretend otherwise. What you get is the sound of it at a distance, which is the honest version.

Orgosolo has about two hundred murals

The first ones went up in 1969, painted by an anarchist collective from the mainland, and the village carried on without them. There are now somewhere around two hundred, on the walls of the main street and the lanes running off it. They are not decoration. Subjects run from the Sardinian shepherd revolts to Vietnam, from Palestine to the closing of a local factory, and a fair number are being argued with by later paintings on the same wall.

Two hours will cover the street. Take the second hour slowly, because the ones worth standing in front of are up the side lanes and are the least maintained.

That is the honest part of it. Some are twenty years old, sun bleached and flaking off the render, and nobody repairs them on any schedule. A few have been painted over by people who disagreed with them. Arrive expecting an outdoor gallery and you will be disappointed. What is actually there is a long running public argument that happens to be in paint.

Granite, and what wind does to it

Most of western Barbagia sits on granite, and the granite is old, coarse and full of feldspar crystals you can pick out with a thumbnail. Where it has been exposed long enough, wind and salt have hollowed it from the inside out. Geologists call the result tafoni: round cavities, sometimes a hand across, sometimes deep enough to shelter in, opening into each other like a honeycomb.

Around Ollolai and Gavoi they stand as tors along the ridgelines, rounded and stacked, with orange and grey lichen over most of the surface. People have used the sheltered ones for four thousand years. Some hold bronze age material. Some hold a shepherd's stack of firewood from last winter.

The trip walks two ridge days on this ground. Underfoot it is grit and low scrub, with no path in places and no shade at any point in the day. Poles help on the descents, because dry granite grit on a slab behaves like ball bearings.

Nine days in a place that shuts at one

The interior is emptying. Villages that held three thousand people in 1960 hold eight hundred now, and the median age in some of them is over fifty. Ollolai made the news for selling houses at a euro on condition the buyer restored them. Several places have one shop, that shop closes at one in the afternoon and reopens at five, and on Sunday nothing opens at all.

Distance is the other thing. Nuoro to Orgosolo is eighteen kilometers and takes half an hour, because there is no straight road anywhere in Barbagia. Sixty kilometers is a two hour drive. The itinerary is built around that and still spends a fair share of the week in a minibus.

Weather is not reliable either. April on the Gennargentu can hold snow above 1,500 meters, and October brings the first real rain of the year in short heavy bursts. Two of the nine days are likely to be indoor days, and there is not a great deal indoors to do.

Where $1,960 else goes

This departure sits on the $1,960 rung, and it is not alone there. The office keeps every trip at that figure on one page so the number can be seen doing different work in different parts of the world. It does not rank them and will not tell you which is the better buy, because that is not a judgement a figure supports.

• The whole of the $1,960 rung
• All eight figures side by side
• Every departure in one table