Corsa degli Scalzi, Cabras: The Dust That Protects

Photo of the Month, August 2026.

Column curated by Dario Sequi.

Some races are measured in kilometres.

This one is measured in centuries.

For the August 2026 Photo of the Month I chose the Corsa degli Scalzi, the Race of the Barefoot: seven kilometres of white road between Cabras and San Salvatore di Sinis, hundreds of men dressed in white, bare feet, the statue of the Saint carried on their shoulders.

I curate the Photo of the Month column for Family Notes.

One image each month.

Never by chance.

This one is not about a festival. It is about belonging.

Why do men run barefoot between Cabras and the Sinis?

The race takes place on the first weekend of September. This year the first Saturday falls on the 5th.

At dawn the Saint leaves Cabras. On Sunday he returns.

Around nine hundred curridoris, in fourteen groups, cover seven kilometres of dirt road without stopping. White robe, a cord at the waist, bare feet on the ground.

At the origin there is an episode from 1619: a Moorish raid on the Sinis coast. The story goes that the inhabitants, running to carry the statue to safety, raised so much dust that the invaders believed they were facing an army.

That dust, then, was a defence.

Today it is memory.

What does a community do with its own fear?

Most communities do one thing with fear. They forget it.

Here the opposite happened.

The fear was not removed. It was turned into a gesture, and the gesture has been repeated for four centuries. Every year, at the same hour, on the same road.

This is not nostalgia. It is maintenance.

Communities that last do not preserve their memories. They practise them.

You do not run to arrive. You run in order not to forget.

What lies beneath the village waiting for them?

The arrival point is a village of low houses, the cumbessias, inhabited only during the days of the feast.

At its centre, the church.

Beneath the church, a hypogeum cut into the rock: corridors, rooms, a well. On the walls, inscriptions in Latin, Greek and Arabic. Charcoal drawings of Mars and Venus, of Hercules and the Nemean lion. Boats carved between the fourth and the sixteenth century.

The water of that well was sacred long before a church was built above it.

The men run toward a place of worship.

Beneath that place of worship lies an older one.

This is not a contradiction. It is stratification. Real traditions do not erase what they find. They settle upon it.

Why did I photograph the dust and not the faces?

I was born on this island, and for forty years I have followed faces, shadows, waiting.

There are still moments that stop my breath. This is one of them.

Because you do not photograph only what you see. You photograph what vibrates in the air: the sound of the steps, the white of the robes, the concentrated silence of the eyes.

I could have chosen a face. There are extraordinary faces in that race.

I chose the dust.

Because the dust is the only visible part of what happened in 1619. It is the same dust that confused the eye of the enemy. It is the dust of fathers, of grandfathers, of sons.

And because the light, that morning, seemed to choose them. It passed through them slowly, as if it meant to accompany them into the years ahead.

The question that stays

These are the photographs that remain.

Not because they record an event. Because they hold a soul.

When the dust settles, and the race is over, something is still suspended in the air.

Each of us carries something on our shoulders, every day.

The question is not how much it weighs.

It is who we are carrying it for.

Dario Sequi

The Author
Dario Sequi curates the "Photo of the Month" column for Family's Notes. A photographer and narrator of places, each month he selects a single image and accompanies it with a personal reading shaped by observation, memory and attention to place. Family's Notes is the editorial journal of FA Travel, a MICE and luxury travel house based in Cagliari and Olbia, Sardinia.