Ardauli

At Ardauli the year is counted by saints. In January there is Sant'Antonio de su fogu, with the bonfire and sweets offered to everyone; the afternoon before, the children go round with little bags and knock on doors asking for su panizzeddu, a sweet of dried fruit. In May the procession comes out with horsemen and ox carts decked out, sas tracas, and at the end there is the auction of the cherries and the wheat offered to the saint. In August everyone moves to the novena of San Quirico and Santa Giulitta, a few kilometres from the village: people sleep in the muristenes, the little houses around the church, and there are two nights that have a name — sa notte e sa chena, on the nineteenth, when families eat together, and the night of the twenty-fourth, sa notte de s'izzadorzu, when people stay awake to watch over the saints who go back to the village the next day. In June there was also San Giovanni: a fire was lit in every quarter and you became compares by jumping it together, hand in hand. That tradition has been lost.

The history of the village is that of the Barigadu: the domus de janas and the nuraghi, then the Giudicato of Arborea, and after 1420 the Aragonese. For a long time Ardauli was a royal fief, that is, administered by the king's officials and not by a family of feudal lords; only in 1774 did it end up in the marquisate of Neoneli, granted to Pietro Ripoll, and it came out of it with the redemption of 1839. There is then a date the village does not let fall: on 8 June 1976 Antioco Deiana, from Ardauli, a carabiniere of the escort of the magistrate Francesco Coco, was killed together with him and with the other carabiniere Giovanni Saponara in an attack at Genoa. Every year, on the anniversary, the mayors of the three villages the victims came from — Ardauli, Terralba and Salandra — meet here.