Tempio Pausania

Tempio is a town of grey granite: the historic centre, largely eighteenth century, is built of squared blocks and looks more like the towns of southern Corsica than like the rest of Sardinia. It stands at 556 metres, at the foot of Monte Limbara, in the heart of the Gallura, and is the seat of a bishop and of a court for the whole region; research on cork, the historic raw material of this land, is also based here. The name appears for the first time in 1173, as Templo, in a deed between the Primatial See of Pisa and the bishop of Civita.

The second name, instead, is a claim: Pausania was added at the end of the nineteenth century to evoke Phausania, the first bishopric of the Gallura, and to this day there is no historical or archaeological evidence linking the two places. The same holds for the house that popular tradition assigns to Nino Visconti, the judge of Gallura whom Dante names in the Comedy: the building, near piazza Gallura, does incorporate pieces of medieval architecture, but no document says it was his. Tempio has in short given itself two illustrious pasts and one certain, which is the stone it is made of.