Santa Teresa Gallura

It is the northernmost comune of Sardinia: it stands on a promontory facing Corsica, eleven miles beyond the Strait of Bonifacio. In ancient times it was called Longosardo, or Longone, and it was already a port of some importance under the Romans because of the granite quarried round about and carried to Rome; for that very reason some have thought that ancient Tibula stood here. From the quarries of Capo Testa came the granite of the cathedral and the baptistery of Pisa and, so the story goes, that of the Pantheon as well. The village was probably founded by Pisan merchants in the twelfth century to encourage local trade; in the fourteenth the Aragonese built a new castle here, long fought over during the Sardinian-Catalan war. In 1442 the Genoese of Francesco Spinola stormed and sacked both castle and village, and the following year Alfonso the Fifth of Aragon ordered them demolished for good: the king had his own town razed to the ground.

On the outermost tongue of rock the tower of Longosardo still stands, raised in the sixteenth century by order of Philip the Second. When the island passed to the Savoy in 1720, the tower's commander, Francesco Maria Magnon, understood that a village was needed beside the fortress; and on 12 August 1808 a decree of Victor Emmanuel the First began the founding of Santa Teresa: the king himself drew the plan of the town and chose its name, in honour of his wife, queen Maria Teresa of Habsburg-Este. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many fishermen came here from the island of Ponza and stayed: to make themselves understood they learned Gallurese, but got it wrong, italianising words or bringing in their own, and out of that grew a variant which people here call teresino or lungunesu. It is a linguistic island inside an island: here a watermelon is not sindria but patecca, and money is not sòldi but dinà. In the other hamlets of the comune, a few kilometres away, it is not spoken.