Aggius

The name of Aggius is attested from 1341 in a row of forms that barely resemble one another — Alvargos, Abbarios, Albargos, Albergas, Albergues — and the form Agios appears for the first time in a table the king of Aragon had drawn up in 1358. Where it comes from is not clear: some trace it to the Greek aghios, that is sacrosanct, some to the Latin agnus, the lamb, and some to the word ajus, which means without right or law and which would point to the rebellious character of the first inhabitants. It is the last explanation that what followed bears out: in the sixteenth century Aggius was remembered as a centre of coin forgers, with their mint on Monte Fraili, in the chain that overlooks the village, and it was the refuge of the bandits of the whole district. In the spring of nations, in 1848, the village rose and was an autonomous republic for forty-eight hours; for all the rest of the nineteenth century it was torn by feuds between families, which ended up in the novels of Pietro Casu and Enrico Costa.

On the border with Tempio Pausania stands the nuraghe Izzana, the oldest in Gallura. Just outside the village lies a spread of granite boulders left by the quaternary glaciations and rounded by erosion: the faculty of Agriculture of the University of Sassari called it the Plain of the Great Stones, and later the tourist press gave it the name Valley of the Moon. In the village they weave carpets and tapestries on horizontal looms, large pieces, with geometric designs that repeat and colours that keep coming back — yellow, black, red, purple. There are five museums, among them one of banditry opened in 2010, and there is a choir that Gabriele D'Annunzio nicknamed the little cockerel of Gallura. The Gallurese spoken here has a peculiarity of its own: in place of the palatal c it puts a z, so that the sky, which in Gallurese is «li celi», at Aggius becomes «li zeli».