Nuoro (also pronounced outside Sardinia; Nùgoro in Sardinian, the name in Sardinian language is co-official) is an Italian town of 35 964 inhabitants, the capital of the homonymous province of central-eastern Sardinia since 1927.
The city extends over a granite plateau at about 554 m a.s.l. (the houses extend between 450 and 650 m a.s.l.), at the foot of Mount Ortobene 955 meters high and between the hills of Ugolio, Biscollai, Cucullio, Sant'Onofrio. To the west the city ends with the Corte plateau. Nuoro is the seventh highest provincial capital in Italy, after Enna, Potenza, L'Aquila, Campobasso, Aosta and Caltanissetta.
Nuoro enjoys, like almost all
the municipalities of Sardinia, a temperate Mediterranean climate
dominated by a recurring mistral, with moderately hot summers and
cool winters, only rarely freezing.
However, the relatively
high altitude and the particular geographical position of the city
favor sudden drops in temperature during the cold waves from the
north, especially north / east. Nuoro also periodically undergoes
the hot sirocco, which comes from the Dorgali valley and often
generates very intense rains. The average annual temperature varies
between 13 and 15 ° C, depending on the vintage (Average 2004:
+13.09 ° C / Average 2005: +13.07 ° C / Average 2006: +14.30 ° C)
and districts, the city having a fair geographical extension
combined with a considerable difference in height of 275 m between
the highest and lowest point.
During the winter there are
many frosts (57 in 2004) while in summer the days with temperatures
above 35 ° C are quite rare; (not even one in 2004), also thanks to
the fact that the sea breeze often manages to reach the city,
mitigating the temperature by a few degrees.
In the decade
1996-2006 the lowest temperature recorded in Nuoro was -10.5 ° C on
January 31, 1999, on the occasion of a cold wave from N / E, with 40
cm of snow accumulated in about 15 hours. From 2001 on, however,
38.1 ° C has not been exceeded (the data refer to a specific area of
the city, that of the Quadrivio).
The name derives from the medieval Nuor, deriving from the older
Nugor; it was argued by Spano (1872) that this in turn came from an
unspecified "oriental voice" meaning "house" or "light" or "fire",
the latter understood as "domestic hearth", given the rooting of the
fiscal use of the term.
The root has "pre-Latin,
proto-Sardinian, unclear" origin.
According to Areddu, the
root * nug- (which we find in Nug-ulvi) means "foot of" (see Greek
onux, Slavic nogà), then nug-or probably had the significance of:
"at the foot of or, which seems Indo-European oros (cf. Greek oros
“mountain”) Nulvi is also found at the foot of a mountain.
Linguists such as Massimo Pittau and Benvenuto Aronne Terracini
argue that the ending in -r represents an ancient plural form.
The incorrect pronunciation of the name of this city is
frequent. Coming from three syllables (Nù-go-ro), the correct
pronunciation maintains the initial accent on "u", Nùoro, and not
Nuòro. The pronunciation with tonic "o", very frequent among
continental Italians, is explained by the rarity in the Italian
language of a sequence -ùo- compared to the much more common
diphthong -uò-.