Loceri

The first time this village appears in writing it is already destroyed. A Pisan document of 1316 names it thus: «The wood called Luccieri, which was once a village called Luccieri, now destroyed. Which wood lies between the village of Bari and the domus Gueni and contains some chestnut trees.» That is: where there was a village there is now a wood, and in the wood there are chestnut trees. The destruction probably goes back to the struggles between the Commune of Pisa and the Visconti of Gallura, in the second half of the twelve hundreds, the same in which the castle of the Rosa in Ogliastra fell. About the name the hypotheses are many: some connect it with Locri of Magna Graecia and a flight of Greeks, some derive it from Villa Luceri or from Locus Aeris, the place of copper, and some simply from that vanished Luccieri. Massimo Pittau traces Villa Luceri to the Luceres, one of the Etruscan tribes of Rome's beginnings. The parish church has moved too: the old one, dedicated to Saint Thomas, was destroyed by a flood of the river, and in the seventeen hundreds it was rebuilt a hundred metres or so further off, in neoclassical style — but dedicated to Saint Peter the Apostle. The cemetery stayed attached to it until 1905.

In 1363 king Peter IV of Aragon incorporated Loceri, with other villages of the Ogliastra, into the county of Quirra, given in fief to Berengario Carroz; the village was redeemed from its last feudatories in 1839. How many people lived there is known thanks to the hearth lists of the parliaments: in 1654 there were sixty-two hearths, that is about two hundred and fifty people, and in 1840 the inhabitants were eight hundred and forty, in two hundred and fifty-six families. Casalis's dictionary, which reports those numbers, adds the rest as well: twenty-five births, fourteen deaths and four marriages a year on average, and a life which, for those who get past the dangers of the earliest age, usually reaches sixty. And it notes something nobody would put in a guidebook: the cemetery lay behind the church, down in the valley, and «the exhalations of the shallow burials offend the sense of not a few». People lived on wheat, barley, pulses and flax, with very productive vineyards — eighteen varieties of grape were counted — and twenty thousand fruit trees.