Orotelli

The name of Orotelli is traced back to a Roman landowner, one Ortellius, and it already appears in the condaghe of Santa Maria di Bonarcado; a charter of 1139 records a bishop of Ortilli, Ugone, donating a church to the Camaldolese. This is no small detail, because the parish church of San Giovanni Battista, built around 1116, served for a few decades as the temporary cathedra of the bishop of Ottana. Of the Romanesque church there survives the fourteenth-century bell gable, covered with reliefs of figures and symbols that nobody has yet explained.

The village is one of the three of the Barbagia carnival, together with Mamoiada and Ottana: it begins in the middle of January with the fire of Sant'Antonio, and the masks of Orotelli are the thurpos, the blind ones. Around the built-up area, meanwhile, one can count the villages that are no longer there: Oddini, which left behind its country church of San Pietro, and then Arae, Forolo, Idili, Miale, Santu Chiricu, surviving only as place names. The territory of a municipality of two thousand people thus holds the remains of half a dozen medieval villages.