The name seems to give a direction: Architano, «on the road to the Arci», the mountain where they quarried the obsidian that Sardinia once exported across the Mediterranean, and arrowheads of that stone still turn up in the fields. Of the seven nuraghi that stood here nothing survives: one of them, the Luxia, lay beneath the main church. In the Middle Ages there were two villages, Architano Magno and Architano Parvo, and the will of Ugone III, judge of Arborea, records a bequest to the church of Sant Nicolao de Architano Magno: two oxen and twenty sheep.
In the second half of the fourteenth century Architano Parvo vanished, as dozens of Sardinian villages did; in 1460 what was left of the population asked the viceroy of Cagliari to be recognised as a comune. The place was genuinely refounded shortly before 1660, when some sixty families driven out of Samassi and Furtei came to settle here. The saint entered the name only on the twenty-ninth of January 1864: until then it was simply Arcidano, and in Sardinian it still is, Arcidànu.
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📅 Every year, on 10 September
San Nicolò d'Arcidano celebrates Saint Nicholas of Bari on 10 September, amid a calendar of festivals that includes Saint Isidore and Saint Margaret.
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 San Nicolò d'Arcidano, but an easy day trip away.
