This blog will make more sense if you read part 1 first, dealing with sacred wells and menhir sanctuaries in Sardinia here: https://magiclibrarybomarzo.wordpress.com/2022/07/31/sardinia-uncaptured/
The village of San Salvatore is a remnant of Lawrence’s undiscovered Sardinia.Like Santa Cristina, it is built around a sacred well, but unlike Santa Cristina, San Salvatore continues to have an intense spiritual life of its own and is not merely an archaeological park. It is open generally only by appointment.
In modern times, this village was intended for temporary habitation in periods of planting and harvesting, as it was situated out near the fields, which were far from the villagers’ permanent homes in the stony hills. Hardly anyone lives here today all year round, but the place comes to life in July, when people from the larger towns nearby settle down for the summer, sweeping out the dust and opening the shutters. The beginning of September is a time of celebration in the area of Cabras, culminating in important religious festivals, accompanied by feasts of seafood. Once upon a time you would have found on the menu dishes made with sea pens (the Pinna Nobilis), a favorite sea food along this coast since the times of the Phoenicians, although today they are a protected species.
The village consists of about forty small houses, like long narrow boxes , arranged in a square around the church of San Salvatore. The back walls of the houses form a continuous barricade, offering protection from intruders. As you walk through the narrow entrance barred to cars, you feel you are entering a self-contained citadel. These simple structures set in a barren landscape were often used as movie set for spaghetti westerns in the sixties, shot in the Sardinian outback.
Unpaved alleys of dirt and gravel run in between the houses, leading to the church in the heart, located in a clearing of beaten earth. This church was built in the times of Emperor Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century upon the framework of a much older pagan temple, this in turn erected on an even older sacred site. The crypt of San Salvatore is one of Europe’s unique testimonies to sacred architecture, for it contains a Nuragic well where across the aeons, pilgrims of many religions have gathered in search of bodily healing and spiritual rebirth.
I happen by on a Sunday, when Mass in the Sardinian language, not a dialect but a proper language in itself, is being held in the church. It is so packed you must squeeze your way to the entrance to glimpse inside, where a large crowd has lined up for communion. This festival still brings families and friends together for a joyous reaffirmation of their religious faith and a renewal of their cultural identity and sense of community. The men are all casually dressed in shorts and t-shirts, but there are many older women in traditional dress. The area of Cabras is one of the few places in Sardinia where you sometimes still see women in the archaic costume: a flowing, ankle-length gathered skirt, usually a dark floral print, worn not only for special occasions but for everyday use.
But black is not the required color for grandmothers here as it is in Southern Italy. Some women swish about in long skirts pale blue or daring pink. On their heads, they wear a wimple- like headdress draped neatly on the shoulders, or a quicker kerchief tied around the hair. The origins of this costume go way back in time, and by wearing it a woman shows her pride in her culture and her deep attachment to the past. DH Lawrence believed that the women’s veil-like headdress originated as a form of protection from the endemic malaria which plagued the area until modern times.
While mass is going on, I explore the village. Outside every house is a large square stone for sitting. The doors to the street are all wide open, so that you may peek inside. First you see a dark vestibule with a row of low chairs lined up against the wall, each with its embroidered woolen cushion. Here an entire family of eight may sit in privacy, chatting, taking the cool of the late afternoon while keeping an eye open on whatever is happening in the street. Behind this vestibule stretches a series of rooms, opening one into the other, all the way to the back wall of the house. Just beyond the vestibule, there may be an open courtyard where wood is piled or laundry hung or even goats or poultry kept. This afternoon, some older women sit with their sewing just inside the doorway, parsimoniously catching the last rays of light.
When the Mass is over and the last stragglers have left the church, a local guide accompanies me down into the crypt and begins my tour with a dramatic announcement: “Going down these steps meant entering the bowels of the earth, returning to the womb of the mother, to be purified in the waters of life, and then re-emerging into the light of day, reborn.” San Salvatore is still the destination of pilgrimages, and quite recently, the guide informs me, a blind person recovered his sight after washing his eyes here. The water of this well is also known to have healing qualities specifically beneficial to the lungs, and this may depend on the presence of natural antibiotic substances in the water. A chemical and geological analysis of this water has supposedly revealed that it possesses properties similar to those found in the waters of the Alps. Thus, the origins of the spring that feeds the well are quite remote in geological time and space, hearkening back to when Sardinia was connected to the mainland.
The well itself has been in use since prehistoric times, throughout the era of Nuragic Culture, Phoenician colonization, Roman occupation and into early Christian times, when it was sacred both to pagans and to Christians who used it as a baptismal fount. When the church of San Salvatore was finally built to enclose the well, Christian priests allowed pagan worshipers to continue using the well as a ritual site. No one religion could claim the well exclusively as its own and the recognition of its sacred power went beyond religious barriers. Legend claims that the church was built on decree of Emperor Constantine at the request of his mother, Saint Helena, discoverer of the Holy Cross. She remains strongly identified with this place as its protective spirit, blurring in with the figures of other goddesses who were worshiped here before her times, Demeter and Kore.
The inner walls of the crypt are decorated with crudely drawn pictures and graffiti, and with faded inscriptions in Greek, Latin, Phoenician, and Arabic believed to be magical formulas. The most common inscription is the combination of three letters which may be an abbreviation for the magical formula Rufu in Phoenician, Heal thyself. The most detailed drawings are the triad of Mars, Venus, and Eros, Roman fertility gods, and the figure of Hercules struggling with a lion. It was to these four gods, and particularly to Hercules, the savior, that this place was dedicated in late pagan times. Christianity carried over the pagan dedication, changing only the name: no longer Hercules the savior, but Christ the holy savior (San Salvatore) as deliverance from illness, symbolized by Hercules’ triumph over the lion, became salvation of the soul.
Winding back through these damp, dim rooms where the walls are streaked with moss and mold, you come to the sacred well, where a baitylos, or small menhir, stands upright in the well symbolizing the procreative act. Male and female meet and are reconciled in the innermost reaches of this temple dug deep in the earth. A number of coins glint around the base of the baitylos. The guide points them out to me ironically, “Yesterday a woman from Rome asked if it was a wishing well, making it clear to everyone what she would wish for!” This potent symbol of sex and fertility still stirs the modern imagination.
Coming back up “reborn” into the amber light of late afternoon, out of the dark womb and into life, I see that a bandstand is being built and a drink stall has been set up, right outside the church, as the village prepares for tonight’s festivities. A hundred people are milling around the dusty square while timid grandmothers peer out from dark doorways at the unfamiliar crowd.
The mass in Sardinian was the magnet that drew all these people here today to take communion and to commune with each other in the heart of the sanctuary. In this little corner of uncaptured Sardinia, the old ways of time still exert their fascination, bringing two worlds into contact: a timeless realm of inner “rebirth” whose archetypal forms still speak to us across the ages and a temporal one in which ties of friendship and family are renewed each year in a collective rite of food, music, and laughter, of mutual affection and social relatedness — just as it must have been three thousand years ago for the pilgrims gathering at the Nuragic well. A few words from the I Ching come to mind as I drive away from the village. The town may change, but the well cannot be changed.
The Magic Library of Bomarzo 
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