The best city hikes and walks in Monte Ortobene

Memorial plaque for the journalist Deffenu, who was politically engaged, represented socialist theses, fought for the equality of Sardinia and fell in the 1st World War at the age of only 27

Designed by the artist Constantino Nivola, the small bronze figures, which originally combine modern and traditional, are reminiscent of menhirs and the Nuragic statuettes in the rocks.

The church is locked and can only be viewed from the outside

Monument to the founder of Sardinia's industrialization. He had a dam built that generated electricity, which powered machines and installed the first street lighting.

A small, but finely crafted exhibition shows the life from the Stone Age through the Bronze Age, the Bronze Age with the Nuraghi to the Roman period. A special highlight is the reconstruction of the water sanctuary of Sa Sedda ' e sos Carros.

magnificent view to the Supramonte and to Oliena

Séuna is the first Nuoro, the farmers' neighborhood. Satta depicts it as a "cluster of small, single-story houses," dirt courtyards enclosed by dry-stone walls, and "cassi" (small boxes) at the doorstep: an order born from disorder. In the center, the little Church of the Grazie: simple, rustic, almost a house like any other, surmounted by a pediment with a bell. Here, Satta places a crucial part of his popular chorus: the peasant-priest, the vegetable garden, the almsgiving, the minimal rites of a very poor but cohesive community. Séuna, he says, could be a seaside village "if there were a sea": instead, there is a merciless white light that splits the shadows of the courtyards and accompanies the funerals that, as they pass, force the "lords of Tettamanzi" to rise and uncover their heads. Strolling today through the narrow streets that climb toward the Corso means recognizing the material grammar of the novel: courtyards, gates, irregular paving stones. Stop in front of the church facade and look at the low houses: you'll understand why Satta, in his "balance sheets," makes Séuna the origin of the village and at the same time its limit—proud, industrious, poor. It's the necessary counterpoint to the city of courts, classrooms, and cafés.

The house on the corner of Via Angioy and Via Sebastiano Satta is the author's biographical and fictional fulcrum. Now owned by the diocese, it houses a residential community: a purpose consistent with the charitable legacy left to the Satta-Galfré family. In the novel, the building becomes the setting for a domestic sociology: the notary's upper-floor study, the ground-floor living room, the constant ascents and descents of stairs too solemn for a provincial home. Ahead, the dark palace of engineer Mannu: Satta makes it the reverse shot of his own home, describing a "capital" project descended upon a village that had "made itself" over the centuries. Don't miss the rear courtyards: Satta evokes them as a "series of courtyards" that end in a small vegetable garden, with an oleander hated by Donna Vincenza—minimal details that become domestic symbols (poison, obstinacy, time). The street door ("portoncino") is contrasted by the large portal facing the countryside, a metaphor for the two faces of the house and its inhabitants: one public, controlled; the other open to the wind and the crops. Passing by today, one understands how Satta's architecture is above all an architecture of memory.