Seui

Towards the middle of the sixteen hundreds, in the old centre of Seui, the Spanish built a prison to administer justice over the whole Barbagia di Seulo: that building held inmates until 1975. A little outside the village is the other place where the people of Seui were shut in, the anthracite mine of Fundu 'e Corongiu. The coal seam was identified by Alberto La Marmora in 1827; the mine worked for the best part of a century and closed in the middle of the nineteen hundreds. On the first Sunday of August the village walks up to the country church of San Sebastiano and Santa Barbara, and there masses are said for the miners who worked in it and for those who lost their lives in it. Seui stands at eight hundred and twenty metres above the sea, sixth village in Sardinia for altitude, and on its arms it carries a golden mouflon on a blue field.

A good part of the territory is taken up by the forest of Montarbu, nearly three thousand hectares of holm oak, downy oak, cork oak and chestnut, with hop hornbeam, holly and yew, and inside it live the golden eagle, the Sardinian deer, the fallow deer and the mouflon. In January, on the fifteenth, the seventeenth and the twenty-first, on the eve of the feasts of Sant'Efisio, Sant'Antonio abate and San Sebastiano, in every neighbourhood at nightfall is fogoronis are lit, the bonfires, and the families gather round the fire; the first of November is Su Prugadoriu, the purgatory, and the children used to go from house to house asking for walnuts, hazelnuts and chestnuts for the souls of the dead. In the Middle Ages Seui belonged to the giudicato of Cagliari; conquered by the Aragonese in 1324, it passed through several feudal families, in 1604 it ended up in the duchy of Mandas and came out of it with the redemption of 1839. In our own day it has changed master again, an administrative one: it was in the province of Nuoro, then in that of Ogliastra, and the reform of 2016 assigned it to Sud Sardegna; in the spring of 2017 the people of Seui voted in a consultative referendum to go back to Nuoro.