Luogosanto

In a town of barely two thousand people there are twenty-two churches. The most important is the basilica of Nostra Signora di Luogosanto, raised in the thirteenth century in Romanesque forms: Pope Honorius III granted it the title of minor basilica, and later it received the privilege of the Holy Door, of which the parish archives speak from 1700. Until the seventies that door was walled up; then one of bronze was made, and since then it opens every seven years and stays open for a whole year, drawing thousands of pilgrims. Since 1982, every second of June, hundreds of people arrive here on foot and by night from Calangianus. A little to the south, on a granite rise from which the Strait of Bonifacio can be seen, the hermitage of San Trano guards the cave where the bones of two anchorite saints were found: inside it they have set an altar cut from a single block of stone.

And yet this place full of churches stood empty for two centuries. In the tenth century the Saracens sacked it and then plagues emptied it; the present centre is of the thirteenth century, and some attribute it to the Franciscans, to whom the name too would be owed. On the death of the last judge of Gallura, in 1296, the territory passed to Pisa and then to the Aragonese; but in the middle of the fifteenth century the town was wholly deserted, and only two hundred years later did some shepherds come back to build their stazzi here. They found themselves on the road between Tempio and Santa Teresa, that is on the route of illicit traffic with Corsica, and they knew banditry and smuggling. In the nineteenth century the town followed the fate of Tempio Pausania; then vines and livestock set it on its feet again, and in 1947 its communal autonomy was given back.