Chiaramonti

When the giudicato of Torres fell in 1259, this territory of the Anglona passed to the Doria, who built a castle here: originally a square-plan tower with a curtain wall and, inside it, a building for the militia. In 1348 the Aragonese army led by Rambaldo di Corbera drove them out; two years later, however, the king of Aragon confirmed the village, together with the other centres of the Anglona, to the same Doria. In 1357 it was taken by Brancaleone Doria, the husband of Eleonora d'Arborea, and Chiaramonti thus became part of the giudicato of Arborea; it passed definitively to the Aragonese in 1448, after the defeat of Nicolò Doria. Of the castle, today, only the outline of the tower remains: all the rest, in the Aragonese period, was turned into a church. The municipal coat of arms, granted in 1973, holds on to it all the same — a red castle with battlements, over two silver swords crossed with their points upward.

What strikes one most, though, is the count. In the municipal territory more than a hundred nuraghi have been censused, and those are only the censused ones; then there are the nuragic fortress of punta 'e S'Arroccu, which is a megalithic wall belonging to the Monte Claro culture, another wall of the same kind at Punta Corrales, the necropolis of Su Murrone and the domus de janas of Peruchi. The village, in short, stands on top of a landscape built thousands of years before it. In the eighteenth century it was incorporated into the principality of Anglona, granted to the Pimentel and then passed to the Tellez-Giron, from whom it was redeemed with the abolition of the fiefs. The traditional craft is weaving, but here the looms are horizontal, and the carpets are recognised by the variety of their colours and their geometric themes; the language is northern Logudorese Sardinian.