Ortueri

Ortueri lies in the Barbagia of Mandrolisai, among cork oaks and holm oaks, and looks like the most enclosed place in the world: and yet almost everything found in its ground comes from somewhere else. The obsidian scattered at several points of the territory — blades, bladelets, scrapers — exists in Sardinia only in the deposits of Monte Arci, some fifty kilometres to the southwest, so somebody went to fetch it or received it. And in the nuragic age they reached much further: from this territory come two fragments of ox-hide ingots, the ones shaped like an ox skin, and analysis says the copper they are made of comes from Cyprus. Together with a flat copper axe, they suggest a votive area or a place where metals were worked. The inland village, in short, was inside the trade of the Mediterranean.

What is local, on the other hand, is the stone, and you can see it in the way the nuraghi are built. Where the ground is granite the walls are irregular, made of roughly dressed polygonal blocks; where the pink trachyte comes to the surface, on the border with Samugheo, the stones are carefully shaped, T-shaped or wedge-shaped, and laid in regular courses, as at the nuraghi of Nuracche. And wherever an erratic boulder or a spur of rock happened to be, the builders took it into the structure: it saved the carrying, and the building stayed anchored to its base. The territory also keeps menhirs, among them a cylindrical one with no figures, of local granite, a little over three metres tall; and at Mui Muscas, where in the nineteen fifties a reforestation site turned up a dozen large, finely worked stone knives from half a metre down, there is now the municipal park of the Sardinian donkey.