Decimomannu

The name is a Roman road sign: Decimo stands for the tenth mile from Cagliari, and mannu, in Sardinian, means big, to tell it apart from the other Decimos round about. The town grew inside a bend of the Flumini Mannu, on the road that led from Caralis to the Sulcis, and its reason for existing has always been that: letting people through. Of the Roman bridge over the river the ruins remain, and from the width of the watercourse it can be worked out that it must originally have had thirteen arches. In 1879, digging to build the railway station, a necropolis came to light with Punic bronze coins.

On 29 February 1324, not far from here, Pisans and Aragonese faced each other in the only pitched battle of the war for Sardinia: it is the battle of Lucocisterna, the Pisans lost it, and from that defeat the Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica was effectively born. In the village cemetery, on the other hand, stands a stone sarcophagus that does not belong here: it is that of Violante Carroz, daughter of a viceroy of Sardinia, and it used to be in the church of San Francesco di Stampace in Cagliari. It was brought to Decimo by the Cao-Pinna family, who had bought the ruins of that church and the ground around it.