The Corso Garibaldi is the main pedestrian street of Nuoro's old quarter, a broad avenue of stone-paved elegance lined with palazzi, small bars, and the occasional well-stocked deli. It runs through the heart of the historic centre and connects the main piazzas. In the evening, particularly in summer, it becomes the main venue for the passeggiata.
The street is quiet by the standards of larger Italian cities, which gives it a slightly melancholy quality that suits Nuoro well. The novelist Grazia Deledda, who was born a few blocks away and set much of her fiction in the town and its hinterland, wrote about the same street — the women veiled in black, the men in festive costume for the great August feast of the Redeemer, the sense of a community turned in on itself. Much has changed but something of that character remains.
The Redeemer festival (Festa del Redentore), held on the last Sunday of August, brings costumed representatives from Barbagia villages to Nuoro for a procession of traditional dress that is one of the great folklore spectacles of Sardinia. If you are in the region in late August, it is worth timing a visit to coincide.