Zeddiani

The Sardinian spoken at Zeddiani is the limba de mesania, the middle tongue: it holds together Logudorese and Campidanese elements, because the village sits on the seam between the island's two great dialect areas. The territory was already inhabited in the nuragic age, and in the Middle Ages it belonged to the giudicato of Arborea, in the curatoria of the Campidano of Oristano. When the giudicato fell, in 1410 it entered the marquisate of Oristano; in 1478, with the Arborese finally defeated, it passed to the Aragonese, among the fiefs of the Carroz family. In 1767 Charles Emmanuel III included it in the marquisate of Arcais, fief of the Flores Nurra, and there it stayed until the abolition of the fiefs, in 1839, when the village bought itself out and gave itself a mayor and a council.

The arms, granted in 2002, put three things together: a bunch of grapes on purple, seven ears of wheat bound with red on blue, and a marquis's crown on green, which is that of Arcais. What the village celebrates today, though, is neither the grapes nor the wheat: on the first Sunday of August comes the tomato festival. The comune covers a dozen square kilometres in the Campidano of Oristano, some ten kilometres north of the provincial capital, and borders Baratili San Pietro, Oristano, San Vero Milis, Siamaggiore and Tramatza.