Illorai

The biggest thing in Illorai is underground, and it was found by chance. In the nineteen-seventies, while they were building the fast road between Ottana and the road-keeper's house on the Tirso, the necropolis of Molia came to light: a complex of domus de janas of the San Michele culture, cut in the third millennium before Christ, of which nine tombs have so far been studied. One in particular, tomb VII, has sixteen rooms, and is held to be — together with the so-called tomb of the Chief at Sant'Andrea Priu, near Bonorva — the largest and most interesting underground construction in all Sardinia. The rest of prehistory is above ground: the nuraghi Luche and Su montrigu 'e Sa Corona, and the little bronzes found in the countryside, among them the ox kept in the archaeological and ethnographic museum of Sassari.

The village, one of the oldest of the Goceano, stands halfway up the slope above the Tirso, which here is spanned by a single-arched bridge of Pisan date: the people of the Goceano call it Pont'Ezzu, the old bridge. Of the Augustinian convent, closed when the village declined in the Spanish age, there remain in the parish church of San Gavino the statues of Saint Augustine and of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino and the silverware. In the countryside there is then the sanctuary of the Madonna della Neve, where one of the long feasts of Sardinia is kept: the faithful go to nuinare, that is, to make the novena, but here the novena does not last nine days, it lasts fifteen. Of the quarries of marble, sulphur and gypsum nothing is left; the two railway stations are kilometres from the village, and the line to Chilivani closed in 1969.