Campidano ( sc, Campidànu) is a plain located in South-Western

Sardinia Sardinia ( ; it, Sardegna, label=Italian, Corsican and Tabarchino ; sc, Sardigna , sdc, Sardhigna; french: Sardaigne; sdn, Saldigna; ca, Sardenya, label=Algherese and Catalan) is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after ...

(

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...

), covering approximately 100 kilometres between

Cagliari Cagliari (, also , , ; sc, Casteddu ; lat, Caralis) is an Italian municipality and the capital of the island of Sardinia, an autonomous region of Italy. Cagliari's Sardinian name ''Casteddu'' means ''castle''. It has about 155,000 inhabitant ...

and

Oristano Oristano (; sc, Aristanis ) is an Italian city and ''comune'', and capital of the Province of Oristano in the central-western part of the island of Sardinia. It is located on the northern part of the Campidano plain. It was established as the pr ...

Geography

Geologically, it is a

graben In geology, a graben () is a depressed block of the crust of a planet or moon, bordered by parallel normal faults. Etymology ''Graben'' is a loan word from German, meaning 'ditch' or 'trench'. The word was first used in the geologic contex ...

, a tectonic structure formed in the mid-

Pliocene The Pliocene ( ; also Pleiocene) is the epoch in the geologic time scale that extends from 5.333 million to 2.58Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological Epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fina ...

(4 to 2 million years ago). Later it was subject to large sedimentary deposition phenomena, creating an overall thickness of 600 m of sediments. The plain is crossed by the

Tirso River Tirso is Spanish and Portuguese for Thyrsus, and usually refers to the saint of that name (Saint Thyrsus) (San Tirso, Santo Tirso). It can also refer to: People * Tirso Cruz III (born 1952), Filipino actor * Tirso de Molina (1579-1648), Spanish pl ...

, the longest in Sardinia.

History

Agriculture has been successful in Campidano since the

Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several parts ...

, continuing on through the Punic and the Romans, who cultivated here grains and grape. Dams of the large Sardinian rivers nourish the

artichoke The globe artichoke (''Cynara cardunculus'' var. ''scolymus'' ),Rottenberg, A., and D. Zohary, 1996: "The wild ancestry of the cultivated artichoke." Genet. Res. Crop Evol. 43, 53–58. also known by the names French artichoke and green articho ...

and

wheat Wheat is a grass widely cultivated for its seed, a cereal grain that is a worldwide staple food. The many species of wheat together make up the genus ''Triticum'' ; the most widely grown is common wheat (''T. aestivum''). The archaeologi ...

cultures, also typical products of this zone.

Paddy field A paddy field is a flooded field (agriculture), field of arable land used for growing Aquatic plant, semiaquatic crops, most notably rice and taro. It originates from the Neolithic rice-farming cultures of the Yangtze River basin in sout ...

s are present near Oristano. The Sardinians from this area, and by extension all the people inhabiting the lowlands of Southern Sardinia, are called Campidanese ( sc, Campidanesus, it, Campidanesi).

References

Geographical, historical and cultural regions of Italy Plains of Italy Landforms of Sardinia Province of South Sardinia Province of Cagliari Province of Oristano {{Sardinia-geo-stub

Geography

History

See also

References