Badesi

At Badesi the surnames are few, and there is a reason. The town came into being around 1700, when a handful of family groups already related to one another settled here; from those descend the families of today, and that is probably what explains the insistent recurrence of just five surnames — Stangoni, Carbini, Oggiano, Sanna and Fara. The name, on the other hand, is an everyday gesture turned into a place name: it comes from the Logudorese badu, ford, because the people here used to cross the river Coghinas on foot, a river the local speech calls Riu di Cuzina. The town slopes gently down a hill, and from above the eye takes in the plain, the gulf of Asinara and, on clear days, Corsica.

The town also chose which side to belong to, and chose something that later vanished. In 2001 a regional law set up the new Sardinian provinces and assigned Badesi to that of Sassari; the citizens disagreed, and on the twentieth of October 2002 they went to vote in a referendum to join instead the new province of Olbia-Tempio. The transfer was carried out by a law of 2003. Then the reform of 2016 abolished precisely that province: the choice had been made, but the thing chosen is no longer there. Meanwhile the work has stayed the same, the vines on the river's alluvial plain, the Vermentino di Gallura, and the juniper-covered dunes that separate the vineyards from the very long beaches of fine sand.