Paulilatino

Paulilatino sits on the southern edge of the basalt plateau of Abbasanta, and its low houses are all built of black basalt. More than a hundred nuraghi are scattered across its territory, but what people come to see is the sacred well of Santa Cristina, of the ninth or eighth century before Christ: an elliptical enclosure, a stairway narrowing like a trapeze as it descends, and a circular chamber with an ogival vault, all in smoothed basalt ashlars, holding the water. Around it stand the huts of the village and the larger one where people gathered.

The name comes from the Roman settlement of Paulis Lactea, and part of the territory remained marshland until it was drained in the nineteenth century. In the Middle Ages the village belonged to the Judicate of Arborea, in the curatoria of Guilcier; once the judicate fell, its people stayed hostile to the Aragonese and rebelled when the De Ligia were to be imposed on them as feudal lords. After the marquisate of Oristano was confiscated from Leonardo Alagon, in 1478, Paulilatino asked and obtained to depend directly on the king's officials and no longer on a lord. The Aragonese-Gothic church of San Teodoro keeps an oddity on its front: the round window is still waiting for the rose that was never put in.