Norbello

Basalt paving, dark stone facades and geranium-lined balconies give Norbello a look distinct from any whitewashed postcard. This village of the Guilcier, on the edge of the Abbasanta plateau, looks over the Chenale valley towards Lake Omodeo and carries one of the densest concentrations of prehistoric sites in central Sardinia on its land.

Why it matters

Norbello's cultural life encompasses its prehistoric landscape, churches, medieval heritage and contemporary traditions. Its territory holds around thirty nuraghi, four necropolises of domus de Janas, dolmens, eleven giants' tombs and six sacred wells, plus seventeen sites that yielded Punic and Roman cremation urns, an unusual funeral habit on this island. A medieval past survives in the abandoned plateau of Sella. The present adds horse breeding of the Anglo-Arab-Sardinian line, weaving and food traditions, and a comic-strip museum.

What to notice

The town's streets and squares are paved in local basalt, and house fronts are built of dark stone. The Romanesque church of Santa Maria della Mercede stands in a tree-ringed hollow at the village edge, its walls marked inside by ten crosses painted in red minium. The parish church of Santi Quirico e Giulitta probably began with a Romanesque layout later altered, and a parchment of 1265 attests the church of San Giovanni Battista. In the frazione of Domusnovas Canales, the church of San Giorgio anchors a small settlement, and the sanctuary of San Giuliano keeps an ancient well tied to the saint's legend.

The surrounding countryside includes the well-preserved nuragic complexes of Sirboniga and Suei, while the single towers of Ruiu and Perdu Cossu mark the skyline; sa Codina 'e s'Ispreddosu is an unfinished nuraghe reused as an Iron Age cult place. On the basalt plateau of Sella stand the ruins of the medieval church of Santa Vittoria and remains long called the castle of Sella, more plausibly a watchtower of the giudicato d'Arborea.

Context and history

The name moved through time: the village appears as Norgillo, then Nurghillu, then Norghiddo, from which Italian Norbello derives. The medieval settlement inherited the role of a curatoria of the giudicato d'Arborea, the autonomous state that governed this part of Sardinia, and the surrounding plateau preserves the villages of that era. Agropastoral work defined the economy, joined in modern times by the breeding of Anglo-Arab-Sardinian horses and by textile workshops that keep the village's looms known across the island.

Prehistory dominates the wider landscape. Neolithic people cut domus de Janas tombs into the rock, including the necropolis of Sunu Marras; Bronze Age builders raised the nuraghi and giants' tombs; sacred wells such as Ampridorzos served water ritual. Finds collected from local sites are kept in the village antiquarium, and the Midi museum, also in Norbello, holds a collection of nearly five thousand comics, an unexpectedly modern cultural asset.