The patron saint of Carbonia is Saint Pontian, celebrated on the Thursday after the second Sunday of May in the church dedicated to him, located on the central Piazza Roma: inaugurated together with the town in 1938 and consecrated on 18 November the following year, it was built in Neo-Romanesque style to a design by architects Cesare Valle and Ignazio Guidi, the same men who oversaw the town's founding urban plan; inside it holds wooden panels by Eugenio Tavolara depicting the Stations of the Cross.
Carbonia was in fact founded in the 1930s at the will of the Fascist regime, which decided to establish a new mining town to serve the coal mines started in those years in the Sulcis area to meet the energy needs of an autarkic Italy: the name itself, a futurist-sounding coinage, literally means «land or place of coal». The town was built right by the Serbarìu mine, absorbing the 19th-century village of the same name as its south-eastern district. On 9 June 1935 Benito Mussolini, visiting Bacu Abis, announced the establishment of the Sulcis coal basin; after the fall of fascism, the Sulcis mines remained for years the only ones able to guarantee adequate production levels in Italy, after Istria and its deposits had passed to Yugoslavia.
