Travelogue -- In Sardinia

People were lining the streets of a town in the interior of Sardinia.

"Quid es la festa?" I asked a woman in her twenties seated on the curb in my best Hispano-Latinate pidgin.

She blinked up at me. "La festa è l'assunzione di Maria."

So we ordered drinks at a sidewalk cafe and waited with everyone else. Soon, there was singing and women in dresses and men in old-style suits processed by carrying crosses. Then tractors and oxen festooned with garlands. I watched a little girl of four or five amble around in her traditional costume dress and hop up in the scoop of a slow-moving earth mover turned float.

Afterward, driving back to Cagliari, the road narrowed into open country. On an anonymous dirt crossroad, we saw a group of people in costume dress. They were waiting to process, maybe to the tiny village's steeple I could see a mile distant through the hills and dry chapparal. I pulled over and hopped out and snapped two pictures with my old iPhone 5S. Then we drove on.