Elmas

The name comes from the Catalan el mas, the farmstead, and beneath that name lies a Roman mansio: a kind of organised village serving the patrician families who had taken up residence round about. In the Middle Ages the settlement that counted was instead Semelia, whose church of Santa Caterina is named in a bull of pope Gregory VII of July 1079; but by 1528, when Charles V gave this territory to Isabella Sanjust, Semelia had emptied and the village still alive was the Villa del Mas, the one whose name survived. Not far off, in 1324, the battle of Lucocisterna was fought, which handed the south of the island to the crown of Aragon: it happened more or less where the airport runway now lies.

Elmas became an autonomous municipality in 1839, was suppressed in 1937 and reduced to a district of Cagliari, and took its independence back only in 1989: fifty-two years as a quarter of somebody else's city. In between falls the worst day of its history. On 26 October 1946 the Rio Matzeu burst its banks and the flood struck Elmas and Sestu: twenty-one people died, dozens of houses were destroyed and about nine hundred people were left without a roof, six hundred of them here. Today the municipality holds the airport of Cagliari-Elmas, the main gateway of Sardinia, and looks out over the pond of Santa Gilla.