Buddusò

Buddusò has 3,979 inhabitants at seven hundred metres, on the plateau that bears its name. At the foot of Punta Pianedda, on the border with the land of Bitti, the Tirso is born: the longest river in Sardinia, which the Romans called Tyrsus and which had here its Caput Tyrsi, a station on the road from Karalis to Ulbia. The name of the village may mean exactly stone: it is set beside the Aegean gyllós, block of stone, the same root as the Albanian gur.

And on stone Buddusò lives: the granite quarried here has ended up in buildings and skyscrapers all over the world, though the trade is in decline and the quarries have left wounds in the landscape. The village appears in the documents in the fourteenth century as Gulluso; it passed to the Doria at the fall of the Giudicato of Torres in 1259 and remained a fief until the redemption of 1839. One thing here is recent: the fog. Until the nineteen-eighties it was rare, then came the dams of Sos Canales and Monte Lerno, and with them the banks of vapour.