Nurallao

The name of Nurallao sounds in Sardinian as Nuradda, and its oldest certain record is in the peace treaty of 1388 between Eleonora d'Arborea and Giovanni I of Aragon, where the village appears as Nuradau and, among the representatives of the villages that joined the treaty, there signs a certain Gunnario Porcu, majore ville de Nuradau, the headman of the village, with other notables of the place. Earlier still, in a notarial act of 1206 by which Guglielmo di Massa, giudice of Cagliari, and Ugo di Basso, giudice of Arborea, fixed the boundaries between their two giudicati, a Nuredei is read in the list of villages. Scholars break the name into nur-, a hollow heap, and a root that in proto-Sardinian — and, they say, in proto-Basque — meant grazing land, land for keeping animals. Under this ground there is a great deal: at Aiodda a megalithic tomb, among the largest in the Mediterranean, brought to light by excavation on private land, which yielded menhirs and ornaments; at Nieddiu, beside the nuraghe, a nuragic sacred well reinforced with lime in Punic-Roman times; and in the early sixties, at sa conca de sa figu, two small bronzes — a Sardus Pater and a goddess — with a notable quantity of tin and lead and a round building that held them, enough for archaeologists to speak of a foundry. So much wealth has had its price: the tomb robbers and the clandestine diggers have worked this territory hard.

Nurallao stood very close to Valentia, the Roman post that watched the inland road between Caralis, today Cagliari, and Olbia; between here and Isili, at the site called Bidda Becia, the old village, there remain houses, streets and wells of a Roman-age settlement. Of the first Aragonese feudatory nothing is known, not even the name: the record shows that on the sixth of February 1423 the fief returned to the royal patrimony because its lord, one Pedro Dejnar, had died without succession. It passed then to the Castelvi and afterwards to the Aymerich, marquises of Laconi, who held it until 1838, when the village became a free comune with an elected mayor and council. In our own time it has been handed about between provinces: a regional law was to have assigned it to the new Medio Campidano, another of 2003 sent it instead to Cagliari, and there it stayed until the reform of 2016. The territory is crossed by the Isili-Sorgono railway, and since 1997 only tourists ride those tracks: the Trenino Verde stops at the station of Nurallao and at the Cignoni halt.