Patron saint festival In 253 days
Feast of Saint John the Baptist
📅 Every year, on 24 June
On 24 June Olzai, a municipality of 903 inhabitants in the province of Nuoro, celebrates its patron Saint John the Baptist.
Olzai stands in the middle of an amphitheatre of mountains, and has a river in the middle of itself. After the flood of the first years of the twentieth century the village channelled it into a wide bed paved with stone, and built two separate streets around it, one on each bank, joined by stone arch bridges: the torrent became the long square of the village.
With the Editto delle Chiudende the common land was fenced, and at Olzai almost all of it ended up with the local gentry. The parish priest Diego Mele, who came from Bitti and arrived here in 1836, then wrote the poem that made him famous, «In Olzai non campat pius mazzone», in Olzai the fox lives no more: metaphorical, deliberately obscure language with which he took the side of peasants and shepherds. He stayed until his death, in 1861.
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Olzai 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Olzai
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Olzai, but an easy day trip away.
Villa Pallavicino 📍 Salerano Canavese · 2.8 km The Second Empire villa gazing over the morainic amphitheatre of Ivrea from a hill above Salerano Canavese. Torre di Pramotton 📍 Donnas · 15 km A twelfth-century hexagonal tower at 540 metres, signalling to the Pont-Saint-Martin castle and the fort of Bard. castello di Castellamonte 📍 Castellamonte · 16 km Seven gates in the curtain wall and a fief split into 271 points of jurisdiction. Castello di Suzey 📍 Pont-Saint-Martin · 15 km A ruin above Ivéry: in 1351 the Vallaise held an Ivrea merchant prisoner here for ransom. Bard Fortress 📍 Bard · 19 km Rebuilt in the 19th century, this imposing Savoy fortress is a masterpiece of military engineering in the Aosta Valley. Pont Saint-Martin 📍 Pont-Saint-Martin · 16 km Two thousand years of traffic on a single span: the boldest flat arch left from Roman times.