Santa Giusta

The town was born Phoenician: it was founded in the eighth century before Christ under the name of Othoca, though the nuraghi in its territory speak of people who came much earlier. Passing to the Romans along with the whole of Sardinia, it became a centre of Christianity, and tradition holds that right here, in the year 130, under the emperor Hadrian, the saints Giusta, Giustina and Enedina were martyred. After the fall of the Western empire Othoca was abandoned little by little, and in the Middle Ages the people moved beside the Romanesque church of Santa Giusta, which ended up giving the town its name. The village belonged to the giudicato of Arborea, in the curatoria of Campidano di Simaxis; when the giudicato fell, in 1410, it entered the marquisate of Oristano, and from 1478, after the defeat of the last marquis Leonardo Alagon, the Aragonese kingdom of Sardinia. Then it emptied again, because the sea was close and the barbary raids frequent.

From the eleventh century Santa Giusta was a bishop's seat, and its bishop helped to make a king: in 1164 the judge of Arborea Barisone the First sent bishop Ugo to Pavia, to Frederick Barbarossa, to obtain from the emperor his investiture as king of Sardinia. In 1226 an important synod of the Sardinian church was held here, called to apply the reforms decided by the Fourth Lateran Council. Pope Julius the Second suppressed the diocese with the bull Aequum reputamus of 1503 — the same year in which Ploaghe lost its own — and a second bull, of 1515, confirmed its union with the archdiocese of Oristano; in 1968 the see was re-established as a titular one. In 1637 the French were defeated here, who under the archbishop of Bordeaux had occupied Oristano. In 1767 Charles Emmanuel the Third annexed the town to the marquisate of Arcais, a fief of the Nurra, from whom it was redeemed in 1839 when feudalism was abolished. Of the old cathedral there remains the basilica of Santa Giusta, and in the countryside a Roman bridge still stands.