Berchidda

Berchidda has 2,897 inhabitants at the foot of the Limbara range, above the valley that climbs inland from Lake Coghinas. What the village is known for is music: since 1988 it has hosted Time in Jazz, one of the most important jazz festivals in Italy, founded and organised by the trumpeter Paolo Fresu, who was born and raised here and who learned to play in the village band, the "Bernardo Demuro", which has a history more than a century long. Above the houses the Limbara rises to Punta Sa Berritta, named after the berrita, the traditional Sardinian cap it resembles.

The town's coat of arms, on the other hand, carries the mark of another century. It was granted in 1933, with a Latin motto meaning "I shall preserve faith and lineage", an eaglet of the Limbara, the landscape of hills and the castle of Monte Acuto. Above all that there is a band of purple, and that purple is what remains of the capo del Littorio inserted at the time of the grant: the Fascist emblem was removed, and the band it occupied stayed where it was. As for the castle, it was the strategic point of the whole area: in 1237 the giudicessa Adelasia handed it over to pope Gregory IX, at her death it passed to the Doria and then to the giudicato of Arborea, and it changed hands between Arborea and Aragon until 1420.