Ozieri

Ozieri gave its name to an entire prehistoric civilisation. In 1914 the archaeologist Antonio Taramelli dug the cave of San Michele, inside the town itself, and the pottery that came out of it, decorated with a care nobody expected, served to identify and define the Ozieri culture, later found all over the island. To the same people we owe the domus de janas, which in Sardinian means houses of the fairies: tombs cut into the rock in the shape of a house, because the dead were thought to go on living over there as they had here, with the walls painted in red ochre, the colour of blood and rebirth. In the territory of Ozieri alone there are 150 of them.

What came afterwards is measured in figures just as large: 123 nuraghes, villages, sacred wells and giants' tombs. From the foundations of a destroyed nuraghe came an ingot of pure copper weighing about twenty-eight kilos, of the type known as ox-hide, of Aegean-Cypriot workmanship: one of the very few intact in all Sardinia, proof that long sea routes passed this way. In 1921, at Baldosa, inside a terracotta jar, the Chilivani hoard was found, eighty-six axes, wedges and spearheads. Over the Rio Mannu the Roman bridge still stands that people here call Pont'ezzu.