Close encounters with a Komodo Dragon

Heading to the remote Indonesian island of Rinca to photograph a modern-day dinosaur was all Stefano Unterthiner’s idea. A zoologist as well as a photographer, he says, “I have always been fascinated by working with the Komodo dragon. [The Komodo] is full of mystery.” That mystery, coupled with the fact that the giant lizard is a threatened species, its habitat limited to a few islands in the Indonesian archipelago, “would be a perfect story for National Geographic,” Unterthiner says.

Attracted by the photographer’s red underwater camera case, an adult male dragon moves from the beach into the water on Komodo island.

For close to seven weeks, Unterthiner photographed these giant reptiles—males can grow up to 9.9 feet and weigh over 200 pounds—in the picturesque, sparsely inhabited wilderness of Komodo National Park. “When you see the dragon at close range in that landscape, with the little hills and the high grass, forest in the background, no humans,” he says, “you have the feeling of jumping back in time.

“Even if they look a bit ugly—a bit like a monster—at a certain point they seem pretty beautiful because they are completely unusual,” he says.

Although captivated by the sight of the dragon moving through its prehistoric environment, Unterthiner was nervous. He has been around his share of wild animals, but what he found disconcerting about the Komodo was not knowing what they were thinking.

An elderly lizard is photographed against the backdrop of a coming storm on Rinca island. 

“They don’t look at you, and then they look at you for a while and you don’t understand what they are doing,” Unterthiner says. They are reptiles after all, not unlike snakes. Slow-moving and “sleepy,” as Unterthiner describes them, the dragons can be unpredictably fast when triggered by sudden movements, vibrations, or the scent of blood—and they bite.

“They really shocked me when they were feeding. Whenever they smell blood they are incredibly fast and aggressive. I photographed two dragons eating a goat … they completely gutted [it] in less than three minutes. The bones, the horns—they ate everything.”

With Pà Matieus (not pictured) standing by to protect him, Unterthiner photographs a Komodo dragon in Loh Buaya on Rinca island. This photo was taken by Unterthiner’s wife, Stéphanie, who accompanied him on the shoot as his assistant. 

After a week or so of tagging along with researchers studying the animals, Unterthiner slowly began to feel more comfortable. His confidence bolstered by the company of a seasoned ranger named Pà Matieus, he dared to get closer and closer until at times he was working within one to three feet of them. Unless the shot was worth it though, with either beautiful light or engaging dragon behavior, he wouldn’t risk being so close but would shoot from a distance.

Near the end of the assignment, once he’d gotten his shots and was feeling relaxed, he took a risk without even realizing it. Photographing a dragon from a tree, he decided he wanted to get it from another angle. “When I jumped down [from the tree], my wife saw him lunge toward me, and in the exact moment I took a step back, he bit at the air where I just was. Then I just moved a few steps away and the dragon stopped. It’s rare they pursue the ‘prey.’ Usually they hunt by quick and short attacks, mostly playing with surprise.”

A male Komodo dragon is photographed above the village of Kampung Komodo, inside Komodo National Park. While encounters are inevitable, most end without injury. Unterthiner was struck by the mixture of fear and respect the villagers hold for these animals, who are the main draw for tourists coming to the island. “They are proud to show the Indonesian dragon,” Unterthiner says. 

After that, Unterthiner put his camera down for a few minutes, and then he started shooting again.

(Source: National Geographic)

How Amruta Patil’s Rakshasi shook my living room

What is it about a self-assured woman who doesn’t live by the world’s rules, who doesn’t look the stereotypical beauty, and who has it in her to look you in the eye, that scares the world? Why do the power-bearers feel so unsettled on encountering such a woman? asks, Rashmi Patel, a writer based in Melbourne, in the Ladies Finger. Read on: 

Five women of Indian origin sit in a dark warehouse-themed cafe in Melbourne, guzzling variants of coffee-laced drinks and reading letters that they have addressed to Sita, Ram’s wife, the goddess of virtue and sacrifice, who baffles many a modern Indian woman.

I am one of the five women. I have written my letter—an exercise in understanding the mythology of my belief, an excuse to meet other feminists of Indian origin, and a genuine attempt at understanding what our values really mean. After all, I am mother to a six-year-old daughter and I better get unconfused about my values before I pass on my confusion to her.

Amruta Patil’s Hidimba in Rashmi Patel’s living room. Photo courtesy Rashmi Patel

But my mind is wandering, because Sita cannot hold my attention. She is too unknowable, her values are too other-worldly, and all our letters are filled with so much anger, grief and perplexity. Instead, I am thinking of Hidimba, who is sometimes also called Hidimbi, the demoness in Mahabharata who — how else do I put it — seems to have a great deal of attitude.

I am thinking of a particular Hidimba, the one that unflinchingly stares back from the walls of my living room. The one that has been created by Amruta Patil for her book Sauptik.

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You don’t need to know much about Hidimba. She is a forest-dweller, a rakshasi — a demoness — who despite her brother’s orders to lure Bheem in order to have him killed, falls in love with him and immediately reveals her intentions and her true feelings.

Take a moment to appreciate this fact, this flagrant violation of orders from an elder male member of her family and clan. Bheem is a prince, one of the five Pandavas, son of Kunti, and a vital hero in many stories of Mahabharata. It is an unlikely match— a woman of the wild and a prince destined for greatness. And yet, Hidimba is adamant. She bears Bheem’s child and chooses to stay back when the Pandavas leave for Hastinapur, knowing well enough that she and her child will have no place in the power-driven corridors of the famed city.

Hidimba Devi Temple, Manali. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

She may have a famous temple in Manali dedicated to her but for all practical purposes of middle-class Indian homes, she is a vile-looking character, a side-story that can only teach women what not to do, and a woman who is redeemed later in the story only by the presence of a son who fights on his father’s side in the great war of Mahabharata. She may be found in illustrations as a large, uncouth woman, dressed in tasteless, short clothes with long canines jutting out of her mouth.

But this particular Hidimba is different. The moment I lay my eyes on her on Patil’s blog I was smitten. And yet I was not ready for her when I unrolled the A1-sized print from the sturdy case.

I had a stinging feeling that she was going to cause a stir in my living room.

I was right.

I considered rolling it back until the elders left. I considered putting it up in my bedroom where it would not cross paths with traditional eyes. But then I remembered, this is exactly what my mother had done—rolled up bright watercolours filled with women and flowers and village fairs and kept them locked in the cupboard to make way for more sedate and acceptable art for walls. I was going to right this wrong. I was not going to hide this Hidimba.

“Didn’t you get any other painting?” asked an older relative as soon as I put it up on the wall.

I laughed, mostly to stifle my anger.

And then, one by one, friends, relatives and visitors, revealed in whispers, questions, and comments, how they could not get a grip on why the hell I had a dark-skinned rakshasi staring at them from my wall.

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Unlike other usual depictions of scenes from Hindu mythology, Amruta Patil’s illustration of Hidimba and Bheem is not illuminated by the sun, but is engulfed in a bewitching, deep ultramarine night. Every element, down to the snappy tendril, is lurching in a swirl of sexy darkness. Bheem’s stare is ghostly and untethered, but Hidimba makes unapologetic eye-contact with you. This is not just a painting, it is a call into the wilderness, and an invitation to loosen up the weave of life. It is a not-so-subtle jibe thrown at you in luscious colours that makes no bones about what you are missing, sitting there in the midst of civilization, staring at yet another neon screen, walking the tightrope of daily routine.

Hidimba, by Amruta Patil. Image courtesy her website

“Do you know what it is to be wild and in the wilderness?” Hidimba seems to ask, and then with her eyes, answers her own question with,  “I do.”

Maybe it is this confidence in her gaze that scares the women, frustrates the men, makes mothers uncomfortable, and incites a loved one to say: this painting should not be hung in the living room. You see, here is a woman who knows what you are supposed to not know. You are not supposed to know that you can tell a man to his face, “You are sexy”. You are not supposed to know that you can get away with loving a man of another class, making love to that man and getting impregnated by him, and finally choosing to let that man go. You are not supposed to revel in the wild, in surroundings and at times that rouse your senses, that unmoor you from your family and values, and leave you with offspring who must be brought up without a male guardian.

Take a look at her. No wan smile. No imperial tiara. No weapons or symbolic objects in hands. No, we are still not offered the mundanity of empty hands hung straight down from the shoulders. We are offered a view of her soft, vulnerable palms, smothered in red, shaped in a mudra that brings forefingers and thumbs together, the negative space between them vulva-shaped, taut and inviting. And yet, if there is anyone unhinged here, it is Bheem, not Hidimba. This Hidimba—brown, dark, and supremely confident—is the bane of my living room for most visitors.

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How a particular pigment materializes in the physical place of a painting is a complex story that starts with the artist’s many intentions (beauty? acceptance? experiment?) and ends when the pigment makes its mark. A new story starts when the pigment is perceived by a viewer who looks at it through the lens of their past experiences, biases, and expectations. So what do people’s reaction to this Hidimba say about the hue called brown, for brown is, and has always been, a troublesome shade for Indian women?

Haay Kaali chamdi—damn black skin—my friend and I have a habit of exclaiming every time we are faced with racial microaggressions.

“Please don’t say kaali,” says another friend, “say brown. We are not black, we are brown.”

But what is the word for brown in Hindi, or Urdu, or Gujarati, we wonder aloud. We belong to diverse regions of the subcontinent— Mangalore, Gujarat, Bangalore, Lahore, Bombay. Such a wide stretch and yet we scratch our heads to find a word for brown.

We were always called kaali when we were kids. We Google it. It throws up bhoora. “Brown = Bhoora“, it says confidently in extra-large font. But growing up, bhoora meant light brown and was usually used for light-brown eyes, not for the colour of skin. Then there is gehuaan, ghauaano, the colour of wheat, but what about all of us darker than wheat?

We were, for all practical purposes, black—easy targets for Fair and Lovely.

In ads, in films, in paintings, in everyday language, brown was, and still is for most parts, a forbidden entity. Even Krishna is called Shyam—black—and at best, painted blue.

What does it mean to have a colour banished from so many forms of expression despite its everyday presence and then to see it manifested as a complex mix of several hues on a painting that covers half a wall? It is disturbing to most, to say the least.

It may be okay to have brown skin but it is certainly disconcerting for many to have a large painting in a middle-class home that depicts brown skin in all its, mind you, brownness, not blackness or blueness or beige-ness.

Staring at the brownness of this Hidimba, I begin to ask more questions. Who were the rakshasas, or the demons? Who inspired these creations? Why is Hidimba usually depicted as an obese woman wearing a shapeless skirt? What does that say about people’s perception of ugliness, fatness, and uncouthness?

While I offer no answers, I am grateful to Patil for painting that brown, for depicting a rakshasi who demands respect and attention and for not shying away from putting Hidimba squarely in the center of the frame. If Hidimba is gutsy, Patil matches her with her own courage in acknowledging her not as a hastily formed caricature, but as a lovingly drawn woman, with shades of green, blue, and red wrapped inside and around her.

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Perhaps, ambiguous beauty and ambiguous virtue are not deemed fit enough to be showcased on a wall. To be honest, I am not in unconditional love with this Hidimba. There are times when I want to scratch through the dark shadows beneath her nose and lips. I want to reshape her heavy eyelids and center her irises. But unlike those who find her unacceptable, I find her striking.

“Too dark,” says an acquaintance.

“The colour of her skin, you mean?” I probe.

“No, the painting, overall,” he says defensively.

What is it about darkness that makes us so uncomfortable?

“It’s her hands,” says another, forming the same mudra with his hands, “See, hers are way too big for her body.”

“Look at her hands,” seconds another elder, nodding and mumbling at all the red.

She can’t accept that red, the colour of fertility, is not constrained in a straight line of sindoor or a perfect round bindi, but is smeared all over her palms. How shapeless, shameless and exposed!

“Okay, allow me to say what everyone wants to say but won’t. She is ugly,” says a neighbour. Does beauty lie in the eyes of the beholder, or can something or someone really be ugly? In any case, if a two-dimensional form can be treated with such contempt, what happens to people who are labelled “ugly” in real life? If I could be pressured to banish a painting from my wall, does the world play similar games to banish certain people from real life? What happens of them? Are they able to hold ground like Hidimba?

“Alright,” I say, “she may not necessarily be beautiful, but isn’t she striking?”

A few close friends who instantly fall in love with the painting make it a point to not mention Hidimba. Even the admirers are shy of admiring her.  What is it about a self-assured woman who doesn’t live by the world’s rules, who doesn’t look the stereotypical beauty, and who has it in her to look you in the eye, that scares the world? Why do the power-bearers feel so unsettled on encountering such a woman?

So how do you dismantle patriarchy? If one of the answers is: one image at a time, I offer you this Hidimba by Amruta Patil. I offer you her sensuality and wild streak that is not necessarily pleasant at the first encounter. Come, meet her gaze, admire her brown, replicate her calm, for in a world dominated by male power, your compass is more than just a external device. It is also an internal, steady heartbeat that revels in who you are, what you want, and where you aspire to be.

Prize launched for thrillers that avoid sexual violence against women

The Staunch book prize has been founded to honour books where ‘no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered

From Before I Go to Sleep to The Girl on the Train, the trope of the woman in danger from a man has powered novel after novel to the top of the book charts. But claiming that violence against women in fiction has reached “a ridiculous high”, a new prize is being launched for the best thriller “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered”.

Founded by the author and screenwriter Bridget Lawless, the Staunch book prize will open to entries next month, with the winner to be announced on 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Lawless, who is funding the £2,000 prize pot herself, will be joined on the judging panel by the actor and writer Doon Mackichan, who wrote and presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary about the increase of violence against women on television, Body Count Rising.

“It’s way past time for something more original,” Lawless writes on the prize’s website. “As violence against women in fiction reaches a ridiculous high, the Staunch book prize invites thriller writers to keep us on the edge of our seats without resorting to the same old cliches – particularly female characters who are sexually assaulted (however ‘necessary to the plot’), or done away with (however ingeniously).”

Lawless said she was moved to launch the prize after seeing the number of films featuring rape as a plot device at last year’s Baftas. She is entitled to vote in the awards, but this year abstained, writing in the Guardian that it was not clear if the films in the running were free from the accusations of sexual abuse that have swept Hollywood in the wake of claims made against the film producer Harvey Weinstein.

“I thought, I can do one small thing. I thought I’d start with books. They are a source for so much material, and if I can have a tiny bit of influence there, it will help,” she said. “There are so many books in which women are raped or murdered for an investigator or hero to show off his skills … This is about writers coming up with stories that don’t need to rely on sexual violence … Is there no other story?”

 To impose a blanket ban on any writing that deals with this seems to me to be self-defeating
Val McDermid, crime author

The Staunch book prize will disqualify any work that does not meet its criteria of no woman in the story being “beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered”. It is open to stories across the thriller genre – crime, psychological, comedy and mysteries – and to traditionally published, self-published and not-yet-published works.

“I’m certainly not alone in getting increasingly fed up and disgusted with fictional depictions of violence happening to women in books, films and television. It echoes, exaggerates, fetishises and normalises what happens to women in the real world. But I know there are writers creating thrilling and complex work without going there,” she writes on the prize’s website.

The crime novelist Andrew Taylor said: “It has to be good in principle that someone’s drawing attention to crime fiction, on page and screen, that uses women-as-victims-of-violence as … a sort of literary monosodium glutamate: ie, as a gratuitous and fundamentally nasty flavour enhancer lacking moral or artistic purpose.

“That said, it’s hard to see how anyone could cope with the practicalities of administering such a prize, or even define its terms of reference without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

Fellow crime novelist Val McDermid agreed. “My take on writing about violence against women is that it’s my anger at that very thing that fires much of my work. As long as men commit appalling acts of misogyny and violence against women, I will write about it so that it does not go unnoticed.”

McDermid said that it was “entirely possible to write about this without being exploitative or gratuitous”, although many authors do not. “I agree that there is a lot of fiction – not just crime novels and thrillers – that seems almost to glory in a kind of pornography of violence, and I deplore that as a woman and as a writer,” she said. “But that’s not generally the sort of book that wins awards. To impose a blanket ban on any writing that deals with this seems to me to be self-defeating.”

McDermid said that she, along with “many other crime writers, particularly women”, had created “strong female characters with agency who provide a powerful counter-image to the ‘woman as victim’ trope”.

“Women writers get asked all the time, ‘How does it feel as a woman to write about women as victims of violence?’ Male writers are never asked this question. Go figure,” she said. “Although men are as likely to be murder victims as women, the nature of the crimes is different. Men die in fights; drink, drugs and gangs are usually at the heart of it. Woman die because they are women, often at the hands of the men in their lives … There’s very often a sexual element to the murder of women, which begs all sorts of questions about power and misogyny and psychological oppression. Frankly, random knife crime doesn’t make for very interesting fiction. More sinister crimes that involve relationships between the victim and the perpetrator inevitably make for a more involving read.”

Lawless acknowledged that not all thrillers depicting crimes against women are gratuitous or exploitative. “Of course, there are [good thrillers tackling this topic] but they are not for this prize,” she said. “How we see women depicted and treated in fiction does spread out to the wider world and how women are treated there. That battle is far from won, but there is definitely a climate change. People are fed up with it. Here’s my alternative.”

(Source: The Guardian)

The Ghost of Zora Neale Hurston

“Zora!” Alice Walker howled in the cemetery. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to stand out here all day, with these snakes watching me and these ants having a field day.” It was August 1973. Zora Neale Hurston, who was then thirteen years dead, was a mudslinging protofeminist novelist-folklorist-playwright-ethnographer, not to be crossed, and she had climbed to minor literary stardom in the thirties with her accounts of the Southern African American experience, specifically black Southern womanhood. She was, in the words of her friend Langston Hughes, “the most amusing” among New York’s “Niggerati.” She hailed herself as their queen. But Hurston was complicated. “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves,” she once wrote. “It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.” She declined to recall a single memory of racial prejudice in her autobiography. Her sycophantic attitude toward her white patrons, Red-baiting, and eventual criticism of Brown v. Board of Education had rotted her name. “She was quite capable of saying, writing, or doing things different from what one might have wished,” Walker admitted. But she forgave Hurston. As Hurston herself declared, “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?”

And so: nearly a decade before Walker published The Color Purple, a sister masterpiece to Their Eyes Were Watching God, the contributing editor at Ms. magazine stood in weeds up to her waist in Florida while sand and bugs poured into her shoes, looking for Hurston. Walker had flown from Jackson, Mississippi, to Orlando and driven to nearby Eatonville, the prideful all-black town where Hurston was raised, but not, as Walker learned from an octogenarian former classmate—Mathilda Moseley, teller of “woman-is-smarter-than-man” tales in Hurston’s Mules and Men—where she was put under.

Walker’s quest took her to Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic Coast, to the dead end of Seventeenth Street, to the Garden of Heavenly Rest.


“In fact, I’m going to call you just one or two more times,” Walker swore. Hurston was somewhere in the crummy segregated burial ground; trouble was, her grave was unmarked. “Zo-ra!” Walker roared. And, as if Hurston had shoved her, Walker stumbled into a sunken rectangle in the heart of the yard: presumably Zora.

At the local monument maker, Walker clocked a queenly headstone called Ebony Mist. It reminded her of Hurston when she was learning witchcraft at temples in Louisiana, and though Walker dearly wanted it, the issue of lucre obliged her to settle for a modest one—“pale and ordinary, not at all like Zora”—which she had cut with A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH.

I studied cultural anthropology at Orlando’s liberal-arts college, where Hurston was a bona fide heroine. She herself had done her anthropology studies at Columbia University, where she along with Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were protégées of Franz Boas, the giant who institutionalized the vital participant-observation method. Papa Boas sent Hurston to Harlem with phrenology calipers to measure the skulls of pedestrians and give lie to the notion of Negro inferiority. She never finished her Ph.D., and turned instead to literature. When she came back down to Florida to do fieldwork, she essentially went AWOL on Boas, though she still shipped him oranges.

One summer, in what was mainly a ruse to dwell with a boyfriend in his parents’ beach house, I fulfilled my chemistry requirement at the local community college. We drove by Hurston countless times—we stopped to coo over manatees in waters minutes from her resting place. But until I, too, tried to look her up in Eatonville, I’d had no clue Hurston was so close by.

When I visited last October, the cemetery’s grass was buzzed down, but the Garden of Heavenly Rest remained dumpy. I offered Hurston a pair of ripe grapefruits. People often leave her balls of citrus, which figured into her fiction. People often leave purple things, too, in recognition, I think, of the Walker connection. The plot was flush with cash, dominos, a rhinestone statement necklace, a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of sparkly red nail polish, and two bottles of Guinness.

Whether this corpse in this sandy earth belonged to Hurston is still uncertain. What’s more, the gravestone is wrong: it reads “1901–1960.” Zora had fibbed on her age and was born a full decade earlier, in 1891. She returned to Fort Pierce at the end of her life, in 1957. Her options had evaporated and she had scraped by, twice divorced, as a chambermaid, office clerk, substitute teacher, a journalist on a murder trial, and, if one of Walker’s sources had it right, a horoscope columnist. She was at work on an uncontracted biography of Herod the Great—a project fourteen years in the pipe—when she had a stroke and passed away in a county welfare home on January 28.

After my visit, I itched to read Hurston again. Her first published story was a ghost story, and when I spotted it collected among Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women, 1872–1926—branded “feminist, turn-of-the-century American supernatural literature”—#MeToo was stirring and the timing seemed right. But I accidentally shipped the book to my parents’ address in Florida, then had the parcel rerouted to New York City. Once I had it in hand, I put off cracking it open.

Earlier this month, I packed Restless Spirits when I left for Paris during the cyclone bomb. Lo: the plane flew without luggage; my bag did not surface for weeks. As a result, I began leafing the 1996 anthology of twenty-two ghost stories by Hurston, Kate Chopin, Hildegarde Hawthorne, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, and others on the first anniversary of the Women’s March, which, in Paris, was pissed on by bitter weather and not well-advertised. Near the Eiffel Tower, a crowd of approximately a hundred people carried banners such as ENCORE FÉMINISTES and exhorted American expats to vote absentee in the midterms.

Reading this literature has been no comfort—your spine won’t shiver but your hands will wring. It ran in popular magazines such as Harper’s, Vogue, and The Atlantic over a fifty-year period during which, as the book’s editor remarks, the industrial revolution bent ideologies about the nature and role of being female to more brutal degrees. The short stories are organized into themes: matrimony, motherhood, sexuality, madness, widowhood, and spinsterhood. In them, fearful, enraged, desirous, pained, and restless American women have been made so by a culture we can still recognize today. The editor notes in her introduction that the supernatural was a safe way for the authors to confront their dissatisfaction via allegory. When they wrote about their world, she asks, is it any wonder that the ghosts they conjured, and those who saw, heard, and were able to listen to them were chiefly women?

In fact, “Spunk” (1925), Hurston’s Eatonville-set story about possession, supplies the anthology’s rare male ghost. In it, a gutless hubby manages to comes back to kill his wife Lena’s lover, who had killed him first. Only Lena survives the love triangle. It is pure woman-on-top Hurston, as she lived and breathed: the force who tripped Alice Walker in the cemetery when she dared to shout, “Are you out there?”

(Source: The Paris Review)

Italian town Ollolai sells $1 homes to lure new residents

Ever dreamed of owning a home in a pretty Italian village? The news you've been waiting for has finally arrived.

You can now buy one for just over a dollar.

Ollolai, a destination in the mountain region of Barbagia on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, is selling hundreds of abandoned homes for just €1 ($1.2).

It's not the first Italian town to try the gimmick, but it seems to be the first to live up to the promise. It's also got the beauty and history needed to draw people in.

The real estate bonanza comes with a catch, though. The 200 stone-built dwellings up for grabs are in poor condition and buyers must commit to a refurbishment within three years -- which will likely cost about $25,000.

Behind the sell-off is a plan to rejuvenate a community at risk of becoming a ghost town. In the past half century, Ollolai's population has shrunk from 2,250 to 1,300, with only a handful of babies born each year.

"We boast prehistoric origins," says Efisio Arbau, Ollolai's mayor. "My crusade is to rescue our unique traditions from falling into oblivion.

"Pride in our past is our strength. We've always been tough people and won't allow our town to die."

Formerly Barbagia's capital, Ollolai remains the most untouched and authentic patch of Sardinia.

Once buzzing, its maze of alleys and mural-covered piazzas are now silent, as younger residents have been lured away to bigger cities.

Abandoned by the families who once occupied them, many stone dwellings have been lying in ruin, covered in cobwebs, for decades.

Some traditional ways of life survive. Local shepherds continue to make the exquisite premium sheep cheese, Casu Fiore Sardo, that the area is known for, while artisans still weave fine baskets.

Arbau likens the town's struggles to its olden day battles, from an era when surrounding caves were used by separatists and bandits to stow their kidnap victims.

"We once had a fiery king, Dux Ospitone, who united all heathen tribes in a league," he adds. "Our pagan ancestors never succumbed to the ancient Roman conquerors, who dubbed us 'barbarians.'

"These hills are Italy's 'Highlands' and we are sons of 'Bravehearts.'"

(Source: CNN)