Onanì lies in the inland hills of the Nuoro area, between Bitti, Lodè and Lula, and its territory is almost all woodland and open pasture. Within those boundaries stands Mamone, the agricultural penal colony: two thousand three hundred hectares that for decades were a part of the village, with dozens of guards and their families living there until the mid-Eighties. When the colony emptied, the village emptied too: in 1961 there were nearly fifteen hundred inhabitants, today there are 430.
In the Middle Ages the settlement belonged to the Giudicato of Gallura, in the curatoria of the Barbagia di Bitti; when the giudicato fell it passed briefly to Arborea, then to the marquisate of Oristano and in 1478 to the Aragonese, who had already made it a fief in 1431. It ended up in the marquisate of Orani and was redeemed only in 1839, when the feudal system was abolished. The Romanesque church of San Pietro, from the twelfth century, and the Gothic church of Santa Maria still stand, along with the nuraghi, the domus de janas and the giants' tombs scattered across the countryside.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Onanì
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
