Pau

Pau has earned a nickname no other village can use: the village of obsidian. It lies on the western side of Monte Arci, and throughout its territory that black, glassy volcanic stone crops out which for millennia was the island's most precious raw material. Here there are not only the deposits: there are the workshops where obsidian was broken out and worked, and there is Sa Scaba Crobina, the raven path, a black expanse that Alberto La Marmora had already noted in the nineteenth century.

The municipal museum of obsidian keeps faithful reproductions of the ancient tools, while in the village workshops that same stone is now cut and set in gold to make jewellery. Of ancient settlement there also remain the traces of a village at Su Pizzu de sa Campana, near the little church of Santa Prisca. As for its masters, Pau followed the fate of the whole Marmilla: the judicate of Arborea, the marquisate of Oristano, then the Aragonese, with the Carroz holding it until the family died out in 1511 and, after them, the Centelles, the Català and the Osorio.