San Vero Milis

The name is a mistranslation. The village was San Teodoro — San Teoru in Sardinian — after a church that probably stood beneath the present Santa Sofia; in the Middle Ages the form Sancte Eru appears, already legible in the Condaghe of Santa Maria di Bonarcado, and later the Piedmontese rendered it by ear as «San Vero», the true saint, with no regard for what the name meant in Sardinian. «Milis» was added in the age of the giudicati to say which Campidano it lay in, and to tell it from the other San Vero, which became San Vero Congius.

At the edge of the village stands S'Urachi, a complex nuraghe whose central keep was ringed by about ten towers set with perfect symmetry: demolitions and a road cut along the perimeter leave seven of them visible, two lie below the level of the roadway, and a tenth is probably still buried. This plain was the granary first of Carthage and then of Rome, and at Capo Mannu there was a harbour, the Koracodes Portus, tied to salt and fishing. Today flamingos stop in the ponds, the vineyards give vernaccia — whose scent of almonds once came from a mould that formed a film on the wine when the barrel was not full — and at Su Pallosu lives one of the oldest cat colonies in Italy, documented since the end of the nineteen-forties.