Antonio Gramsci was born here on 22 January 1891, and spent his very first years at Ales before leaving. For decades, though, visitors were shown the wrong house: in 1947 Palmiro Togliatti, then secretary of the Communist party, unveiled a plaque on a building in corso Cattedrale — which during the twenty years of fascism had been the local party headquarters, the casa del Fascio — and the mistake was handed down; research in the last decade has established that Gramsci was in fact born in another building, used as a nursery and run by nuns. Not far off is the square that carries his name: a triangular space that the sculptor Giò Pomodoro designed as a monument, a plane of stone with figures recalling episodes of his life and words cut in Sardinian — the earth, the water, the fire, the stone, the sun, the moon, the wheel. Pietro Ingrao inaugurated it in 1977, forty years after Gramsci's death.
Ales is the seat of a diocese, and one of the smallest episcopal seats in Italy. In the Middle Ages it belonged to the giudicato of Arborea and was the head of its curatoria after Usellus; when the giudicato fell it went to the marquisate of Oristano, and after the defeat of the Arboreans to the Aragonese, who put up the castle of Barumele — abandoned in the fifteen hundreds, and today a few ruins. From 1603 it was part of the marquisate of Quirra, and it bought itself free in 1839 with the end of feudalism. At the foot of Monte Arci, the village keeps three museums, and one of them, in the hamlet of Zeppara, is a museum of the traditional Sardinian toy.
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📅 Every year, on 29 June
On 29 June Ales, a municipality of 1,515 inhabitants in the province of Oristano, celebrates its patrons Saints Peter and Paul, to whom the cathedral is dedicated.
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 Ales, but an easy day trip away.
