Bauladu lies in the geographic center of Sardinia, where different historical regions meet to give rise to a kaleidoscope of environmental and cultural nuances. Its territory, nestled between mountains and plains, has always been a natural place of connection and passage: a characterizing vocation so deeply rooted as to be represented by the very toponym bau-ladu, from the Sardinian baduladu – in turn from the Latin vadum latum – indicating that wide ford on the Rio Cì spiri that serves as a communication gate and junction between the expanses of the Campidano and the basaltic plateaus of the Guilcer, between the coastal areas of Sinis, the inland hills of Barigadu and the Montiferru massif.
In Bauladu, Sardinia changes. It changes its environment, crossed by the line of climatic and floral-faunal change, characterized by vistas that highlight the contrast between volcanic areas covered by Mediterranean scrub, lush river valleys with their ancient springs and fertile agricultural areas. And the changing natural habitat is inevitably accompanied by an interweaving of cultures: the Bauladese variant of the Sardinian language is distinguished by the curious amalgamation of typical Logudorese lemmas and Campidano verb forms and desinences. Similarly, building construction technique sees the harmonious coexistence of basalt stone, absent in the South, multicolored trachytes but also of làdiri, the unfired earth and straw bricks. And if in addition to the centrality of Bauladu in the Sardinian territory, one considers that Sardinia, with its geographical position, is a strategic hinge between continents, one can easily understand why the dozens of archaeological sites make Bauladu one of the territories with the highest density of Nuragic settlements. Millennia later, the role of the Nuragic civilization in the cultural and economic connections of the ancient Mediterranean still appears evident. In more recent times Bauladu has experienced from a central position the life of the Giudicato d’Arborea, the fulcrum of the fruitful and original giudicale experience that unified the Island under the emblem of the deradicato tree and saw the birth of one of the first written legislative codes in History.
