Arborea

Arborea has 4,048 inhabitants in the Campidano of Oristano and is a town born twice under the wrong name: inaugurated on 29 October 1928 as Villaggio Mussolini, then Mussolinia di Sardegna, it took its present name only in 1944, from the medieval Giudicato of Arborea. The town is the urban centre of the reclamation of the plain of Terralba, begun in the Giolitti years and completed under fascism; malaria, however, was defeated only after the war, with the campaign financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.

The coat of arms says it all: a bell tower above a marsh, between two ears of wheat, and the motto De limo fertilis resurgo, «I rise fertile from the mud». The settlers came from the Veneto and from Friuli, brought by the Società Bonifiche Sarde, and their languages are still spoken here beside Italian and Campidanese: in September their descendants hold the polenta festival. In front of the municipal museum, since 2009, a triangular plaque recalls the children of Bullenhuser Damm, murdered in 1945.