The ABBABULA Festival: Music, Words, and Roman Ruins in Sassari

There is something unusual about opening a music festival in a Roman archaeological park. Not because the gesture is unfamiliar — heritage venues across Europe host summer concerts in their amphitheatres and colonnaded courtyards — but because the decision to do so implies a particular relationship between the living event and the place it inhabits. When the twenty-eighth edition of the ABBABULA festival opened on 26 June 2026 in Porto Torres, with singer-songwriter Daniele Silvestri performing in the shadow of the Basilica of San Gavino near the site of the ancient colony of Turris Libisonis, that relationship was made explicit: music and place are not incidental to each other, and this festival has always known it.

A word that means something specific

The name ABBABULA is a contraction of the Sardinian expression abba a sa bula — “water up to the throat” — an image of survival under pressure, of holding on long enough to find air. It is an apt name for a festival born not from institutional patronage or civic infrastructure but from the ambitions of four women from Sassari who had been working in music distribution since 1988 and decided, in 1996, that the island deserved a serious festival dedicated to cantautori: Italian singer-songwriters working in the tradition of literary, melodically sophisticated popular music that counts Fabrizio De André, Francesco Guccini, and Ivano Fossati among its touchstones.

That cooperative — Le Ragazze Terribili, or “The Terrible Women,” a title worn without irony — has run every edition of ABBABULA since. Over three decades they have brought to northern Sardinia artists who rarely appeared on the island: Marianne Faithfull, Caetano Veloso, Vinicio Capossela, Fiorella Mannoia, Youssou N’Dour. The 2026 lineup — Daniele Silvestri, Sergio Cammariere, Nu Genea, Alberto Fortis, Eric Johnson — extends that record of bringing artists with real creative weight to a region that is not, on most festival promoters’ mental maps, a natural first stop.

The Roman substrate

Turris Libisonis was the first Roman colony on Sardinia, founded around 46 BC under Julius Caesar. By the second and third centuries AD it was the island’s most significant port after Caralis (modern Cagliari), connected to Ostia and the wider Mediterranean trade network, equipped with three sets of thermal baths, a sophisticated aqueduct system, and an urban plan that survives in fragments beneath the streets of Porto Torres today. Excavations from the 1940s onward have uncovered residential districts, the Domus di Orfeo, and the Terme di Pallottino — a mosaic-floored bathing complex that speaks to the colony’s prosperity during the Imperial period.

That Porto Torres carries this substrate — a Roman city beneath a modern port town — is something most visitors learn only when confronted with the archaeology directly. The original plan for the 2026 opening concert placed Silvestri in the archaeological park itself; a late venue change for technical reasons moved the concert to the Atrio Comita of the Basilica of San Gavino, the eleventh-century Romanesque church whose stones are partly drawn from the same Roman quarries that built Turris Libisonis. The venue shift changed the logistics, not the logic. The festival was still opening in a place where the layering of time is visible in the building materials around you.

What the cantautore brings to the ruins

Daniele Silvestri presented his “Canzoni a sdraio” project — literally, “songs in a deck chair,” a stripped-back format featuring just two collaborators: Davide Savarese on drums and percussion, and Marco Santoro on bassoon and trumpet. The choice of instruments matters. In a setting defined by stone and age, a brass instrument carries its own freight; the trumpet has been sounding in this part of Sardinia, in one form or another, since the Roman garrisons. Silvestri’s music — sharp, politically attentive, lyrically dense in the best cantautore tradition — sits at a different point on the formal spectrum from the minimalist contemplation that Arvo Pärt has made his life’s work, but both share the insistence that a song should require something of the listener: attention, patience, a willingness to sit still while language does its work.

The festival’s dedication to “musica e parole d’autore” — music and author’s words — is not incidental either. The cantautore tradition in Italy has always understood itself as literary: the song as a form of poetry that happens to have a melody, the performance as a reading that happens to have a rhythm. Bringing this tradition into proximity with the textual layering of an archaeological site — where the land itself is a kind of palimpsest, Roman mosaic beneath medieval stone beneath modern pavement — produces an alignment that feels less like programming and more like an argument about what the two activities share.

The geography of the 28th edition

ABBABULA 2026 spread across three communities: Porto Torres for the opening, Sassari for the body of the programme, and Sennori for further concerts through the month. This triangular geography is itself a statement. Sassari is northern Sardinia’s major city and university town, with a cultural life dense enough to anchor a serious arts festival. Porto Torres is its port — historically the gateway through which Sardinia received the Mediterranean world and sent its goods back. Sennori is a hilltop town of twelve thousand, minutes from Sassari, with views to the sea.

To move a festival between these three places over four weeks is to trace a human geography that has held its shape for two thousand years: the civic centre, the port, the agricultural heights above them both. The festival does not announce this; it simply moves through it, as people in northern Sardinia have always moved through it.

The 28th edition closes on 23 July with Nu Genea, the Neapolitan electronic duo whose project of recovering and recomposing Mediterranean popular music from the 1970s and 1980s — cumbia, tarantella, funk, North African modal traditions — is one of the more genuinely interesting acts in Italian music right now. That a festival rooted in the cantautore tradition ends with a group whose method is archival and reconstructive rather than autobiographical says something useful about how ABBABULA has developed: it remains committed to music with depth and intent, while allowing the category to expand as the music itself does.

Thirty years of “water up to the throat”

What Le Ragazze Terribili built over three decades is not easy to categorise. ABBABULA is not a prestige festival on the Glastonbury or Roskilde model, drawing enormous audiences and international broadcast attention. It is not a niche ethnomusicology event. It sits between, in the tradition of Italian summer festivals that take their cultural mandate seriously — that understand themselves as part of a region’s cultural life rather than as a commercial event that happens to take place in a region.

This is the kind of institution that does not announce itself loudly, but accumulates authority steadily. After twenty-eight years, ABBABULA has brought more serious live music to northern Sardinia than any other single organisation. It has done so by staying rooted — in Sassari, in its founding cooperative, in the conviction that the cantautore tradition is worth sustaining and that an island at the edge of the Mediterranean is as good a place as any to make that argument.

The Turris Libisonis archaeological park will be there next June, and the June after. Le Ragazze Terribili will likely bring another singer-songwriter to its vicinity, and another set of lyrics will be sung within earshot of the mosaics. It is a small thing, in the scale of European festival culture. But small, here, means specific — and specific, in a world of itinerant cultural events, is the harder thing to be.

FAQ

Q: What does “ABBABULA” mean? A: It is a contraction of the Sardinian expression abba a sa bula — “water up to the throat.” The name was chosen by the founding cooperative Le Ragazze Terribili to evoke the conditions of perseverance in which the festival was born: a commitment that held even when the circumstances were difficult.

Q: What is the festival’s musical focus? A: ABBABULA is dedicated to musica e parole d’autore — Italian cantautori and singer-songwriters in the literary tradition, alongside carefully chosen international artists. Over nearly three decades it has brought to northern Sardinia performers including Marianne Faithfull, Caetano Veloso, Vinicio Capossela, and Fiorella Mannoia, alongside Italian cantautori from Daniele Silvestri to Max Gazzè.

Q: Where does the festival take place? A: The 2026 edition — the twenty-eighth — runs across three communities in northern Sardinia: Porto Torres, Sassari, and Sennori. The opening concert took place in the Atrio Comita of the Basilica of San Gavino in Porto Torres, adjacent to the archaeological remains of the Roman colony of Turris Libisonis.

Q: Who organises ABBABULA? A: The festival is organised and produced by the cooperative Le Ragazze Terribili, founded in Sassari by Barbara Vargiu, Rossana Polo, Ida Vargiu, and Gabriella Sini. They have run every edition of the festival since 1996.