74 Bouloux
language is strange, and they are not Christians. Fazio ends his description
with a reference to the tomb of his ancestor Lupo degli Uberti in Oristano.17
This last detail indicates that part of the note referring to Sardinia in De in-
sulis (first version around 1385–1389) by the Italian notary Domenico Silvestri
comes out of a reading of Fazio degli Uberti.18 The De insulis was the first geo-
graphical treatise devoted exclusively to the islands.19 The section relating to
Sardinia is more developed than Fazio’s. It includes all the elements derived
from Solinus and completes them with new ones, therefore it gives the com-
mon name for the solifugus (“varsa”) and provides a recipe for a cure of its
bite. Following the geographical methodology of the humanists, it addresses
the ancient authors and points out their contradictions, thus it points out that
the dimensions of the island given by Orosius differ from those given by Pliny.
It acknowledges the mutatio nominum, which makes it difficult to correlate an-
cient place names with modern ones and raises difficult issues for the human-
ists. In order to be exhaustive, it turns to much more varied sources, including
recent ones (the Genealogie deorum gentilium libri of Bocaccio), especially for
everything that relates to the origins of the name of Sardinia. The details it
includes on the barbagia are more precise, which establish an image of a bar-
barian population living in high plains surrounded by forbidding mountains.
They possess all the attributes of a people living outside of the civilized world:
clad in animal skins, with their long hair and beards, they speak a language
incomprehensible to the other inhabitants of the island. Their diet consists
almost exclusively of milk and meat. Domenico Silvestri explains the origins
of these peoples as the descendants of Muslim populations that fled to the
mountains during the Pisan and Genoese wars at the beginning of the elev-
enth century, whose complete isolation would explain their savage state. The
name of the region they inhabited may have led Domenico to this explanation,
which seems to come down from an oral tradition. He concludes with an inter-
esting remark: the presence of these “barbarians” in Sardinia, so close to Italy,
lends some credence to the references by ancient authors to the existence of
monstrous peoples or to peoples with such different customs that their exis-
tence is otherwise difficult to believe. This extended passage initiates a double
commonplace concerning insularity: the island, a closed-off place, protects its
population from external influence—a phenomenon that can give rise to both
17 Fazio degli Uberti, Dittamondo, ed. Giuseppe Corsi (Bari, 1952), pp. 218–219.
18 Domenico Silvestri, De insulis et earum proprietatibus, ed. Carmela Pecoraro, Atti della
accademia di scienze, lettere e arti di Palermo, s. 4, vol. 14 (1953–1954), pp. 198–199. See also
N. Bouloux, Culture et savoirs géographiques.
19 Its sources are probably to be found in the chronicles.