Siligo

In the countryside of Siligo, inside the archaeological park of Mesumundu, there is a church built at the end of the sixth century over the remains of a Roman bath building of the second: it is called Nostra Signora di Mesumundu, and it is the proof that the place was never abandoned — recent excavations have shown that around the disused baths a rural village went on living between the fifth and the seventh century. After 1065, following a donation by the giudice Barisone I, the Benedictine monks of Montecassino arrived, altered it and settled also in the little church of Saints Elijah and Enoch, on the top of monte Santu, the flat-topped mountain that can be seen from the whole Meilogu. On the tableland of nearby monte Sant'Antonio, instead, stands a nuragic sanctuary, and beside it the remains of a castle that the documents call Capula.

Today's village was born from the fusion of two neighbouring settlements, Cherchedu and Siloghe, and it absorbed what was left of the others around: Biddanoa, which appears in the Spanish censuses down to the seventeenth century, vanishes after the plague of 1652. How small it was the numbers say: in the first census, of 1485, thirty-eight families were counted at Siligo; in the seventeenth century they were little more than a hundred, and only in 1901 does the village reach one thousand five hundred inhabitants. From here, though, came three names that everybody in Sardinia knows: the improvising poet Gavino Contini, the singer Maria Carta and Gavino Ledda, who in 1975 told of his own childhood as a shepherd in Padre padrone.