[May 17, 2025]

A panoramic shot of the beautiful little bay of Nora, a seaside community outside of Cagliari, Sardinia. The ancient Romans used it to get away from the city. Basically it’s the Hamptons, or Lake City in Seattle or Homer in Alaska. (photo RobR)

There are towers on both headlands and all the islands, where military troops were stationed to protect the community from the pirates that regularly raided all the islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea back in the day, looking for loot in the form of people to sell in the slave markets of north Africa.

This is what’s left of the atrium of one of the houses. A reconstruction shows an impluvium or basin in the floor, built to collect rain coming in from the compluvium in the open-air roof above.

The atrium was the first room you saw when you entered, designed to put you in a properly awed (or envious) frame of mind. Those columns would do the job.

There are dozens of samples of mosaics assembled thousands of years ago. These are set into the floor of the public baths. The tinier the tessera, the longer it took to lay down the design and therefore the more elaborate and the more expensive. These took a very long time.

They even had their own theater.

The whole time we were in Nora the prólogos of Abduction of a Slave kept passing before my eyes. Nora, too, suffered its share of invasions and the looting of its population by pirates.

Chatter Eye of Isis Random Saturday Abduction of a Slave Eye of Isis Italy Nora Sardinia