The workshops announce Assemini before the road signs: pottery has been worked here since before the Romans, with finds going back to the Ozieri culture, and in the Middle Ages it was regulated by guilds called gremi, which required by statute that the traditional shapes never be changed. It was made in the courtyards of the Campidano houses, called strexaius, with wells to extract clay, settling tanks, the potter's wheel and wood-fired kilns of raw brick: the same houses, built of làdiri, sun-dried clay brick, resemble the haciendas of Spanish Latin America so closely that the comparison is almost automatic. The town's name remains something of a puzzle: the most followed theory traces it to a note on the map of Sardinia drawn in 1589 by the Flemish cartographer Mercator, who marked here an Arx Muni, a fortified village, later corrupted into Arsemini and finally Assemini.
The territory, which stretches across the Cixerri plain and includes a detached administrative island in the wild woods of Gutturu Mannu, inside the Sulcis park, is home to Sardinian deer and golden eagles and holds traces of a possible Roman settlement linked to the Punic port of Nora. In the Middle Ages Assemini sent its own representatives to the first Sardinian parliament called by the Aragonese in 1355, and later passed to the Carroz, the Centelles and finally the Osorio, from whom it bought its freedom in 1839. In the little church of San Cristoforo, until the nineteenth century, teeth were pulled there: it was the town's barber-surgeon's shop.
No events match these filters.
📅 Every year, on 29 June
Assemini celebrates Saint Peter the Apostle on 29 June, in the parish church dedicated to him, whose original building dates from the first half of the 11th century and was later rebuilt in Catalan Gothic style.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Assemini, but an easy day trip away.
