Girasole

The name of this village of the Ogliastra has nothing to do with the flower: it arrived there by wear, passing from document to document. In the fourteenth century it was written Gerosuli, in the sixteenth Gelisoi, then Girasol and at last, in Italian, Girasole; in dialect people go on saying Gelisuli. According to historians the place corresponds to the ancient Sulci Tirrenica, and the speech is Campidanese of the Ogliastra. It is one of those cases in which the official form of a name, by dint of being copied out, has ended up resembling a common word that has nothing to do with its origin — while the older version has stayed alive only in the mouths of those who live there.

Girasole lies eight metres above sea level, near the pond of Tortolì, and that explains the rest of its history: Phoenicians and Carthaginians developed an important port of call here, and the Romans went on using the area as a military base. The excavations of 1966 at the castle of Medusa brought to light Carthaginian buildings of the fourth and third centuries before Christ, similar to the Punic remains of Sant'Antioco. In the Middle Ages the village was in the curatoria of Ogliastra of the judicate of Calari, in 1288 it passed to the Pisans and from 1324 to the Aragonese Kingdom of Sardinia; then it changed masters a good many times — Carroz, Centelles, Borgia, Català, Osorio de la Cueva — and was redeemed on the first of April 1840. The parish church of the Madonna del Monserrato, in Catalan Gothic style of the fifteenth century, restored in 2014, gave back old frescoes on the altar.