Su Bundhu. The wind.

A full and intense summer has passed, rich with encounters, voices, paths traveled, and silences gathered. Now, as autumn spreads its breath over the mountains of Barbagia and the sacred stones of Ogliastra, I return.
I return home.
I return to bow before Mother Earth, to that womb of rock and wind that welcomed and guided me through the long research from which my book on longevity was born. A book that is not just writing, but a journey, a listening, an immersion.

Today, in this transitional time, the earth becomes even more generous: it opens beneath my feet and delivers me into the invisible hands of the autumn wind. It is he who now accompanies me, pushes me forward, passes through me.

Su Bundhu — this is his name: a presence that crosses time, animates the seasons, walks alongside the shepherds, and waits with the women. But calling him simply “wind” is reductive. Su Bundhu is much more: he is the greatest non-human of the island, the animic spirit that blows through the wrinkles of the land, that enters bodies, rituals, stories, and gazes. He is the invisible messenger of the Dea Madre, her aerial accomplice, her mobile soul. He is what fertilizes, what agitates, what transforms. He is the deep breath of Sardinia.

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During my ethnographic work in the inland Blue Zones of Sardinia — between Barbagia and Ogliastra — I felt his presence many times, never trivial, never predictable. Su Bundhu arrives without warning, yet is always expected. He announces himself in the rustling leaves, sneaks between stones, shakes the tents, creaks the beams. He is everywhere, even in his silence. But it is during Carnival that he takes shape, becomes visible, symbolic, archetypal.

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Antonello Masini of Mamoiada describes one of his most powerful forms:

“It is an anthropo-bovine mask that covers the entire face of the wearer. It has an ovoid shape typical of the human face and is characterized by strongly accentuated features, such as a particularly prominent aquiline nose, voluminous mustaches that trace the upper lip and extend laterally in a pointed shape, a protuberance under the mouth defining a double chin; finally, the bovine horns raised on the forehead mark both the boundary and the symbiosis between human and animal.”

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This is not just a mask. It is a threshold. A passage between the visible and the invisible, between body and spirit, between the human world and animal forces. It is the ritual face of the wind — his epiphany. It is the symbol of an ancient alliance that still lives on in the gestures and beliefs of Sardinian communities.

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In Sardinian, the word bundhu doesn’t simply refer to atmospheric wind: it evokes a vital principle, a force that animates and moves through all forms of life. It is not a meteorological object, but a subject with will, mood, and voice. It is akin to the Greek ánemos (breath), from which the concept of anima — soul — is derived. Bundhu is what moves, what animates, what gives life. As Ernst Cassirer wrote: “All theoretical knowledge begins from a world already shaped by language” (1976, p. 54).

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And it is in language that Su Bundhu reveals its full cultural power. There are Sardinian expressions that refer directly to him:

• paret ki v’ata bundhos a giru — “it seems there are bundhos around,” to describe a powerful invisible presence in the air;

• hapat sa bundha de su mare — “may you have the abundance of the sea,” a powerful wish, a blessing in breath;

• su ruvu at bundhire kene ispina — “the bramble will bloom without thorns,” where bundhire doesn’t just mean “to grow,” but to be generated beyond the norm, by the grace of the wind.

 

And then there are words that reveal the animistic origin of language itself:

• vagabundhu — wandering soul

• moribundhu — dying soul

 

In both cases, what is described is not the body, but the state of the soul. Bundhu, in this sense, becomes a key to understanding existence: it is the spark that begins and the one that guides to the end.

All of this fits into a broader horizon: that of an animist cosmology that recognizes in nature a subjectivity, a diffuse intelligence, an immanent vitality. The Platonic concept of anima mundi — the soul of the world — finds here its most concrete and earthly form: Su Bundhu is the soul of Sardinia, its living breath.

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David Abram (The spell and sensous), in his dialogue between phenomenology and animism, would say it simply: nature speaks. And in Sardinia, the wind is her native tongue.

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Yet Su Bundhu is never alone. He is always in relationship. He is the wind that fertilizes the land of the Mother Goddess, that travels her body, lifts her soil, protects her essence. He is her light shadow, her invisible lover, her messenger. In the still-living pre-Christian cosmology of the Blue Zones, the Dea Madre is the lady of life cycles, the guardian of the cosmic rhythm. And the wind is what accompanies her. It is the force that enters sacred wells, echoes in the nuraghi, and slips through the hands of those who tend the land.

It is in this dance between earth and wind that life is generated. Not in an act of domination, but in an encounter, in a cosmic intimacy. Here, the human is never at the center but always within the world, entangled with it like a thread in a vast weave.

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To think of Su Bundhu as mere wind is to lose his depth. He is cosmological presence, cultural figure, living soul. He is the symbol of a Sardinia that has never broken its dialogue with the invisible, a Sardinia that still breathes with the rhythms of nature.

In the long-lived communities of the Blue Zones, Su Bundhu still blows. He cannot be tamed, he cannot be owned.
But he can be recognized. And perhaps it is precisely this capacity — to live in relationship with the invisible, to listen to the breath, to trust the wind — that is one of the deepest secrets of Sardinian longevity.

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A world that can still breathe with the wind is a world that still has a soul.