Sant'Andrea Frius

At Sant'Andrea Frius the shepherds' feast was paid for with a single day's milk. The day was called Sa muda: what was milked did not go to market but to the feast of Sant'Andrea in May, and that sale covered everything. The farmers, though, had another saint, Sant'Isidoro, and another feast. At a certain point the people decided to fund both together, and since then the two are held side by side: on the Friday afternoon the procession for the apostle, escorted by the knights of San Giorgio, and on the Sunday morning the one for Sant'Isidoro, with the traccas, the carts decked out for the occasion. Two trades that had divided the calendar between them ended by sharing the purse. The same horsemen return at carnival, when on the Sunday after the parade of floats a palio called the Dragon's Race is run.

The town stands where three roads converge, between the Gerrei, the Trexenta and the Campidano, and that position has served everyone who passed through: the first settlement was Punic, in Roman times it was an observation outpost, and in the fields the walls of a few country villas remain. At the site of Linna Pertunta many terracotta ex-votos have come to light reproducing parts of the human body and jewellery of various kinds: people asking for the healing of one precise piece of themselves. In the second half of the seventeenth century the Alagón, who held the fief and saw it emptying, transplanted here families of peasants taken from Nuraminis and Villagreca. In 1821 Vittorio Angius described the town down to the smallest detail. The church of Sant'Andrea, which was of the seventeenth century, was instead razed to the ground in the mid-fifties to make room for a modern one.