Nuorese Cultural District
Aritzo
Description
Aritzo is located inland, in a valley blanketed with forests, at an altitude of 800 metres and in the heart of the atmospheric Gennargentu massif.
The little town is a renowned tourist destination thanks to its numerous springs, the most popular being is Alinos and funtana de sant'Antoni.
In the village, amidst the houses with stone facades and wooden or cast-iron balconies looking out onto the flagstoned streets, you find the parish church of San Michele Arcangelo, which traces back to the year 1000. A renovation in 1914 gave the church an elegant, grand air, while keeping the Gothic-Aragonese sections (fourteenth to fifteenth century) intact. There are numerous works of art inside the church, including paintings, statues, an eighteenth-century organ and a polychrome marble altar.
Near the church, you find the seventeenth-century Spanish jail, which was used as a maximum-security prison until the middle of the twentieth century and is where even some of Napoleon’s French officers were detained.
Today, the Spanish jail hosts a fascinating exhibit on witchcraft, instruments of torture and the Inquisition in Sardinia, which was called Bruxas.
Aritzo also has an ethnographic museum, the Museo Etnografico della Montagna Sarda, with a collection of traditional clothing, Carnival masks, artisan tools and kitchen implements that reconstructs the agricultural and pastoral culture of Barbagia.
The town is especially famous as the ‘chestnut capital’ and holds a chestnut festival at the end of October, during Autumn in Barbagia.
The historic centre is also home to the fascinating Casa Devilla, a seventeenth-century building not far from the Castello Arangino, which was built in 1917 with exposed stones in the medieval style.