Irgoli

Irgoli has fifty-one archaeological sites within its territory, and in Roman times it was Fanum Carisi, a stop on the road that joined Portu Tibulis to Caralis, recorded in the Antonine Itinerary. The oldest church in the village, Santu Miali, was built in the thirteenth century on the ruins of a giants' tomb, and until the nineteen-thirties the burial ground lay in the garden beside it. Of the ten churches in the comune, seven stand in the village and three out in the country, and nearly all of them are sixteenth- and seventeenth-century work; the parish church of San Nicola di Bari, the largest, dates from 1634.

Today the village is read mostly off its walls: Irgoli is known across Sardinia for its murals, which paint scenes of country life and glimpses of a forgotten past onto houses and courtyards. For the feast of Sant'Antioco, on the first weekend of August, the statue is carried through the streets on the Sunday on an ox-drawn cart dressed with flowers and ribbons, and on the Friday evening there is a poetry contest. Between 1927 and 1946 Irgoli did not exist as a comune of its own: together with Galtellì, Loculi and Onifai it formed a single administration called Irgoli di Galtellì.