Mamuthones e Issohadores di Mamoiada

In the heart of Barbagia, in Mamoiada — a town of just over two thousand inhabitants in the province of Nuoro — one of the most studied and least understood ritual processions in the whole of Italy takes place every year on 17 January. On that date, the feast of Sant'Antonio Abate, the streets of the town fill with two figures who move together yet follow opposite logics: the Mamuthones and the Issohadores.

The Mamuthones advance in single file, bent under the weight of a stack of cowbells tied to their backs — the sound they produce, dull and rhythmic, spreads with each step in an almost mechanical cadence. Their faces are covered by dark wooden masks, carved with fixed, expressionless features; their bodies are wrapped in black sheepskin. The Issohadores walk alongside them with a different, looser gait: they wear a red waistcoat, white shirt and trousers, a Sardinian berritta (traditional cap), and carry a bandolier of bronze bells across their chest. In their hands they hold a rope — the soha — with which they cast a lasso towards the crowd, mimicking a capture. The two figures form a system: one weighed down and advancing, the other circling and controlling.

The origin of this procession remains a matter of debate among scholars. Marcello Madau, an archaeologist at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Sassari (Sassari Academy of Fine Arts), has noted that there are no written sources able to confirm the presence of the Mamuthones in remote eras, while acknowledging that cultural transmission in Sardinia has historically been oral. Some researchers place the appearance of these masks within the documented folklore of the 19th century; others see them as part of a continuity of agro-pastoral rites of prehistoric origin, tied to the seasonal cycle and the propitiatory rebirth of nature. Neither position has found definitive confirmation.

The Museo delle Maschere Mediterranee (Museum of Mediterranean Masks), located in the centre of Mamoiada, holds the original costumes and offers a broader comparative context: the town's masks are set alongside similar figures found in other cultures of the Mediterranean basin, from Greece to the Iberian Peninsula, suggesting a network of ritual practices spanning eras and geographies whose threads cannot be traced with certainty. The museum has become a reference point for studies on traditional European carnival.

What remains, beyond the hypotheses, is the procession itself: the physical weight of the cowbells — which in a complete costume can exceed thirty kilograms — the slowness imposed by that load, the sound that precedes and follows each figure. Mamoiada is not a place to pass through: those who arrive on 17 January, or during carnival, find themselves inside a ritual that the local community preserves with a continuity that needs no outside explanation to exist.