Aritzo

At Aritzo they used to trade snow. It was gathered in winter in the neviere, containers made for the purpose, and in summer the men they called the Niargios used it to make a lemon sorbet, in Sardinian sa carapigna, which the village still celebrates with a festival. It is the kind of trade you can carry on at eight hundred metres, at the foot of the Gennargentu, in the Barbagia di Belvì: cold as merchandise. The village's name, on the other hand, is said to come from the chestnut burrs, a plant abundant in these mountains, and some compare it with the Basque areitz or haritz, which means oak or chestnut — it remaining to be understood whether in that pre-Indo-European language it is a native word or a loan. The chestnuts, at any rate, have stayed: the chestnut and hazelnut festival, born in 1972, is held on the last weekend of October and in two days counts almost fifty thousand visitors, in a village of a little over a thousand people.

The place was Punic — in the Gidilau district deposits with Punic coins and a tomb with bronze objects have come to light, now in the archaeological museum of Cagliari — then belonged to the giudicato of Arborea, and from 1420 to the Aragonese, who put it into the lordship of the Barbagia di Belvì; it was redeemed from its last feudatories in 1840. Along the main street stand the things that tell the rest. The former Spanish prisons of the sixteen hundreds, which here they call Sa Bovida, were so secure that in 1793 some French officers were locked up in them. Casa Devilla keeps its seventeenth-century core intact, and in its inner courtyard the poet Bachisio Sulis was killed. The Arangino castle, on the other hand, is not old at all: it was built in neo-Gothic style in 1917 by cavalier Vincenzo Arangino. And then there are the old houses, built of schist and set off by wooden balconies, and an ethnographic museum with thousands of objects of the farming, forest and shepherding tradition.