Suino Sardo

Small dark pigs were kept out in the woods across the Barbagia around the Gennargentu and the Supramonte, in Ogliastra, and less so in the Sarrabus-Gerrei, the Monte Linas country and the Sulcis-Iglesiente, alongside the dairy animals. There was forest to keep them in: until the first half of the 1800s woodland covered 70 percent of that country, and the pigs went where the crops would not. Pigs have been on the island since at least the 6th millennium BC; the Nuragic period left bronzes of both domestic pigs and boar, medieval documents record the keeping of them, and several chapters of the code of Marianus IV of Arborea deal with it.