Domusnovas

The name is Latin and means «new houses»: it comes from the foundations of the giudicale age, which were called precisely villenove and domusnovas. Dante, in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, to show how much the speech of the Sardinians resembled Latin, wrote that they say domus nova and dominus meus: perhaps he had this very place in mind. And there is a second link with Dante, this time a person. In 1257 the district of the Cixerri was granted to Ugolino della Gherardesca, count of Donoratico; since Villa di Chiesa, today's Iglesias, did not yet exist, the count settled here, in a town then ringed with walls, built himself a stronghold and gave Domusnovas its own statute to make the mining grow. In 1288 the Pisans captured him and let him die in prison.

The mines then decided everything else. Already in Roman times the town stood on the road between Cagliari and Sulci and received from the district of Metalla the silver-bearing lead to be worked in its own foundries, along the rio San Giovanni. In the nineteenth century extraction became almost the only activity, farming and herding having been given up, and so it went on until the crisis of the nineteen-fifties: behind the caves of San Giovanni, the Oridda valley is still full of abandoned workings. Those caves, which give the town its nickname of the town of caves, once had their entrance closed by two Neolithic cyclopean walls, demolished in the nineteenth century.