Lodè

In the Middle Ages Lodè stood on the western border of the giudicato of Gallura, and the way it was measured says everything about that border: the sources record a hundred men able to handle weapons. Not houses, not flocks, not souls: men who could be armed. On the fall of the giudicato, around 1296, the territory passed to the Pisans, and in 1323 to the Aragonese. In 1431 Alfonso the Magnanimous, king of Aragon, sold it to Nicolò Carroz, and Lodè was incorporated into the barony of Posada, whose fortunes it followed; in the seventeenth century it ended up in the county of Montalvo, fief of the Masones, then with the Nin Zatrillas, from whom the town bought itself free in 1839 when the feudal system was abolished. A place that for five centuries was bought, sold and counted.

The territory is large and steep: from the valley floor to the summit of Montalbo there are more than a thousand metres of difference, and the rains are so irregular that wet years alternate with dry spells five or six months long. To the east Montalbo makes a natural boundary, covered in scrub, holm oak and strawberry trees; part of the territory lies within the regional nature park of Tepilora, Sant'Anna and Rio Posada, and in the forest of Usinavà an area is called Sa Ghiniperaglia for its junipers, with old stands of holm oak. In the town some houses of the old vicinato survive, protected not for their beauty but for their type: they matter because they are built the way things were built here. Between the two censuses either side of the millennium the town lost about a tenth of its inhabitants.