Bolotana

Bolotana has 2,846 inhabitants in central Sardinia, with a territory that runs down from the Marghine mountains to the Tirso valley. In Sardinian the village is called Golòthene, and the name contains an Indo-European root that recurs often in the island's place names and means "valley": it describes exactly the shape of the ground the village grew on. Its origins are probably Byzantine, and they are religious: the population gathered little by little around the sanctuary of San Bachisio, which had been built over a cave where a pagan cult was practised before.

Up in the mountains, at Badde Salighes, which means "valley of the willows", there is something that has nothing to do with any of this. In 1879 Benjamin Piercy, the Welsh engineer commissioned to design and direct the building of Sardinia's railway network, bought the land at auction and put up a villa with four corner turrets, and around it four hectares of English garden planted with the exotic species he brought back from his travels: Himalayan cedar, incense cedar, Spanish fir, and a box hedge trained into a tunnel that is among the longest in Italy. It was the centre of an estate of about three thousand seven hundred hectares, with a dairy at Padru Mannu whose cheeses reached Cagliari by train: the train Piercy himself had built. And there is a detail that corrects a much-repeated story: he never really lived here, staying only as long as his visits to the farm or his shooting parties required, and keeping his house at Macomer.