Urzulei

The territory of Urzulei lies largely in the Supramonte, among steep limestone walls, holm-oak woods and scrub. On the boundary with Orgosolo opens the gorge of Gorropu, which with its four hundred and ninety metres of depth and a kilometre and a half of length is among the largest canyons in Europe. Underground the village has as much again: between two hundred and fifty and three hundred caves, and among them the cave of Su Palu, part of a karst system seventy kilometres long that reaches as far as the Grotta del Bue Marino; inside it lives the cave salamander. At the place called Abiladesti there is a wild vine sixty centimetres in diameter, held to be the oldest specimen in the world, and at Sedda ar Bacas a yew a dozen metres high and about five hundred years old. Urzulei is part of the Sardinian blue zone, the area where life expectancy is markedly higher than the world average. About the name there is uncertainty: some trace it to a proto-Sardinian root that would mean ivy or climbing plant, but the source itself observes that this reading does not necessarily fit Orthullè, the Sardinian name of which Urzulei is the more recent Italianisation.

In the countryside around there are the ruins of several vanished villages, whose existence the place names record and the inhabitants' oral accounts keep alive. The best known is Mannorri, three kilometres to the south, abandoned at the end of the seventeen hundreds: its parish was San Basilio, and it had two more churches, Santu Tomeu out in the fields and Sant'Angelo in the old centre. Siddie appears on Piedmontese maps of the first half of the eighteenth century under the name Ussirie, near the fountain of Orgosecoro, and it had the churches of Sant'Elena and San Costantino: of the latter the central-plan ruins still stand. In the valley of Teletotes there was Olefani, abandoned in the Middle Ages, whose parish was dedicated to Sant'Aronau and of which the remains of the early medieval building survive. At Sedda Achiles there was Ludine, and of its parish church of San Giuseppe the ruins can still be seen. The lands of Eltili, which disappeared between 1504 and 1527, Urzulei divided with Baunei. In a place where people live longer than almost anywhere, five villages have died, and they are remembered one by one by the name of their church.