WHEN ISABELLA FRONGIA, 61, perhaps the most gifted weaver in Samugheo, the Sardinian town best known for its textiles, was a little girl, she would watch her mother, Susanna, work for hours at her loom. Located in the entry hall, the loom had been built of oak and chestnut by a local carpenter, and its squared edges had long ago gone smooth to the touch. Susanna, who is now 86, would sit before it, raising alternate strings attached to bamboo poles by pressing on the wooden pedals at her feet. She would send a bobbin of weft thread gliding across the horizontal surface of the remaining strings, strung taut in the loom’s belly, before yanking a heavy hinged wood batten with metal teeth toward herself, locking each new row into the others. This simple gesture — passing a weft thread through a base of stable warp threads — is the same for every piece of cloth ever woven. And on this loom, Susanna made everything the family needed, from bedcovers, blankets and towels to the wool textiles laid atop wood chests and the saddlebags slung over the backs of donkeys or men to transport things. Each piece was crafted according to designs and patterns stored in an unwritten repository of techniques and styles, many unique to the island, which over centuries had been passed through the hands of Sardinia’s women.

None of this accounts, however, for Isabella’s decision to make her life as a weaver, because at that time every woman in Samugheo wove what her family needed, and every daughter was expected to do the same. In fact, until the early ’80s, all girls were taught to weave. Samugheo is remote, in the island’s center, and separated from its closest neighbor, Allai, by steep hills. All islands are, by definition, isolated, but Sardinia, afloat on the Mediterranean like a puzzle piece gone missing from the coastline of southern France and northern Spain, was more so than most, and for longer. “As if here where the world left off” is how D.H. Lawrence described it in 1921, in his book “Sea and Sardinia.” Having fought a nonstop string of marauders lured by its strategic location — including Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Vandals, Byzantines and Arabs — and having endured long stretches of Roman and Spanish rule, Sardinians moved inland, forming small towns to protect themselves against conquerors and the harsh landscape. The people were poor but self-sufficient, and wary — for good reason — of outsiders.

Samugheo (population 3,018) is an unremarkable-looking town that sits snug against breathtaking cliffs and gorges, forests of cork oak and olive trees and fields fragrant in spring with asphodel and poppy. From a young age, girls began the laborious work of weaving the items for their own future dowry (corredo), which took the form of all the linens they planned to bring with them into marriage. When a girl married, the corredo would be paraded down the street, held aloft by relatives in a celebratory procession marking the girl’s move from her family’s home to her new one. The procession was of course an expression of culture and community, but it was also a ritualized form of showing off. According to Kyre Chenven, the co-founder of the Sardinia-based design company Pretziada, this competitiveness is partially responsible for the extraordinary level of skill and expertise found in the work here. “These woven items,” she says, “were a reflection not of outward beauty but of one’s refinement, skill and dedication.” One of the most special things the women would make — a finely woven linen bedcover with its design picked out in raised loops using a technique called pibiones (or “grapes,” which they resemble) — is unique to the island and has been practiced since antiquity. In addition to the technical prowess, the pattern language here is unusually rich. There are brightly colored “naïve” figures of people and animals familiar to European folk textiles, but also florals evocative of Persian textiles, abstract geometrics and heraldic symbols that feel distinctly Byzantine. And yet, for all their diversity and sophistication, Sardinian rugs and textiles are virtually unknown outside of Sardinia.