Gonnoscodina

The name states the place: Gonnos is the hill, Codina is stone, and Gonnoscodina is the rocky hill. It lies in the Marmilla, between the Giara of Gesturi, the Giara of Siddi and Monte Arci, the one with the obsidian deposits. The village was born in the Middle Ages inside the curatoria of Parte Montis, in the giudicato of Arborea; when the giudicato fell in 1420 it passed to the Marquisate of Oristano, and after the final defeat of the Arborean side, in 1478, to the Aragonese, who made it a fief of the Carroz family. Then the Centelles, then the Osorio de la Cueva, until in 1839 the village bought itself out as feudalism ended.

The parish church of San Sebastiano, of the nineteenth century, took the place of the old church of San Bartolomeo, of which two round arches remain, and it is one of the few in the diocese of Ales to be not merely blessed but consecrated; inside it keeps a relic of the Holy Cross. On the Rio Isca stands a bridge rebuilt in the eighteenth century on the base of a Roman one. On the night before the twentieth of January, the eve of Saint Sebastian, bonfires are lit in the village. Between 1927 and 1946 Gonnoscodina did not exist as a municipality: it was a hamlet of Gonnostramatza.