Isili

Isili has 2,842 inhabitants in the Sarcidano, on the edge of a plateau looking over the valley. The name is very old: the linguist Eduardo Blasco Ferrer read it as the joining of two paleo-Sardinian words of proto-Basque origin, is, meaning water or watercourse, and ili, meaning settlement; Isili would therefore be "the village by the water", and the river runs just below it. In 1821 the town became the capital of a province: about fifty thousand people spread over fifty-one comuni. Less than forty years later the province was abolished, and Isili went back to being a town.

Two things, though, it kept. From 1661 to 1866, at the community's own request, the Piarist fathers ran a school here that was free and open to all: two centuries of it. And then there are the rocks: the limestone gorges that open in the territory have made Isili one of the climbing centres of Sardinia, with more than three hundred bolted routes. In the gorge of Is Borrocus a dam built between the eighties and the nineties created a reservoir, and as the water rose an islet formed with an old church on it, San Sebastiano, since restored. The name of the gorge was mistranscribed as Is Barrocus, and that is what the lake is officially called.