Ulassai and Maria Lai: The Road Home

Photo of the Month, July 2026.

Column curated by Dario Sequi.

In Ulassai, time walks slowly.

Not because it has been left behind. Because it knows the road.

For this July 2026 Photo of the Month I chose an encounter, even before a photograph: a woman, a road walked for decades, a village in Ogliastra gathered beneath its mountain. It is the image of a portrait that was never taken. Perhaps, for that very reason, a truer one.

I have long curated the Photo of the Month column for Family Notes.

One image each month.

Never by chance.

What remains in a village that is emptying?

Every time I cross Ogliastra for a photographic story, I feel something difficult to explain.

Here, depopulation is not an abstract concept. It is a concrete presence: closed houses, young people gone, villages too small to always offer work, stability, possible ambitions.

And yet, within this apparent absence, something very strong remains.

Above all, the elderly remain. Women and men who worked an entire life to give their children and grandchildren the chance to go further. To study. To build a future elsewhere.

Often it was they themselves who urged them to leave.

With one precise hope: that one day they might return.

Not out of necessity. By choice.

Are those who stay really left behind?

We tend to imagine those who stay as steeped in melancholy. Or resignation.

In Sardinia, and in Ogliastra in particular, I have often perceived the opposite: an inner youth, a stubborn gratitude, the simple and profound awareness of the fortune of still being there.

At home.

Staying is not being left behind. It is another direction.

What does longevity have to do with belonging?

Perhaps this too is one of the secrets of the longevity of these lands.

Ogliastra is among the Blue Zones of the world: it was here that demographers Gianni Pes and Michel Poulain identified the first blue zone of centenarians. The usual explanations are well known: the food, the air, the walking, the community.

But something holds them together: the bond with one’s own place. The possibility of continuing to belong.

Ulassai has even turned this bond into art. On 8 September 1981, Maria Lai tied the houses of the village to its mountain with twenty-seven kilometres of sky-blue ribbon. She called it Legarsi alla montagna – Binding oneself to the mountain.

It was not a metaphor.

It was a village recognising itself.

Who was the woman on the road?

This woman came toward me while I was observing the village and the landscape around it.

She walked smiling. As if she already knew that, once she reached me, I would ask her something.

And so it happened.

All I managed to tell her, with some embarrassment, was that I would have liked to take her portrait. Because she was beautiful.

She replied that she had walked that road for decades. And that she had never seen me there, waiting for her.

I had arrived too late.

Then she continued toward the village. I followed her with my eyes, with the light regret of never having had the occasion to wait for her before.

The question that stays

I did not take the portrait.

This image remained: a dark figure walking down toward the houses, the mountain holding the village still, an evening light in no hurry.

Perhaps this is the photograph. Not the face, but the step. Not the instant, but the decades that prepared it.

How many roads do we walk every day, certain that we know them?

And who, on those roads, have we not yet taken the time to wait for?

Dario Sequi

L’autore
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, Sardinia.