Seneghe

The name of Seneghe has been genuinely argued over. The archaeologist Giovanni Spano derived it from the Phoenician scin, tooth, for the jagged crest of the mountain above the town, and even brought in Mount Sinai as a comparison. The local parish priest would have none of it: Monsignor Giovanni Antonio Deriu, who held the parish from 1885 to 1927, wrote a monograph by hand to prove the opposite. The root sen, he observed, is also in Senis, Senorbì, Sennori, and there is nothing jagged about those; whereas in the speech here s'ena, or bena, means a vein or strip of fertile land — and the proof is in the field names people still use: S'ena 'e Bobboi, Benalonga, S'ena 'e su pirastru. The name of the town would therefore be the good land up high. The spelling settled as Seneghe only from the middle of the nineteenth century: before that it was written Senege, Sehenes, Senecae, and for the Spaniards Senegui.

With a name and with people the town appears on the twenty-fourth of January 1388, in the peace treaty between Eleonora d'Arborea and King John of Aragon: among the signatories eight representatives of Seneghe are named, and the first is the maggiore Troisco Manca. Before that there had been everything else, and in quantity. In the territory there are at least a hundred protonuraghi, nuraghi and multi-towered complexes, and the source warns that the figure is rounded down; a stretch of paved Phoenician road climbed from Cornus towards the mountains, and at Sa Funtana Fraigada the thermal spring the Romans used still flows. In 1692 a plague killed more than five hundred inhabitants: when it ended, the town chose Saint Sebastian as co-patron out of gratitude, but did not change the dedication of the church, which has remained to the Immaculate Conception.