Orani has 3,007 inhabitants in the Barbagia, at the foot of Monte Gonare, which has the sanctuary of Our Lady on its summit. For more than half a century a good part of the village lived on talc: the mines opened in 1917 and worked at full tilt until 1978. At carnival out come sos Bundhos, the local masks, and in the old washhouse of via Gonare there is the museum dedicated to the man who took Orani into the world.
That man is Costantino Nivola, son of a bricklayer, who had learned his father's trade before anything else. He worked as a graphic designer for Olivetti, but in 1938 he married Ruth Guggenheim, who was Jewish, and the racial laws forced him to leave Italy: Paris, then New York. There he shared a studio with Le Corbusier and invented a technique of his own, pouring concrete onto modelled sand, the sand casting he developed at his house in East Hampton. In 1958 he came back to Orani and put his concrete sculptures out in the open, along the streets of the village.
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📅 Every year, on 30 November; Saint Daniel from 12 to 14 October
Orani celebrates Saint Andrew, patron of the town, on 30 November, in the church dedicated to him. The town also holds the Nivola Museum, dedicated to the sculptor Costantino Nivola.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Orani, but an easy day trip away.
