Gesturi

Gesturi lies at the foot of the Giara, in the upper Marmilla, and it is known for two things: the plateau above it and the friar who was born in it. The blessed friar Nicola da Gesturi came into the world in 1882 in a modest house in the middle of the village, and that house is now a museum. The place is strongly religious: six churches, nearly all in good repair, among them Santa Barbara, which goes back to 1437, and two of the sixteen hundreds that are the seats of the two confraternities — Santa Maria Egiziaca for is cunfrarius nieddus, the black brothers, and San Sebastiano, beside the cemetery, for is cunfrarius biancus, the white ones. The old centre is made of very narrow streets, of arches and old doorways, and of houses with vaulted verandas: it is the architecture of an agro-pastoral culture that has come through whole. In the Middle Ages Gesturi belonged to the curadorìa of Marmilla, in the giudicato of Arborea; then it passed to the Kingdom of Sardinia and from one baronial family to another, until in 1839 it was redeemed with the abolition of the feudal system.

What was once an imposing volcano is today the Giara: a tableland reaching almost six hundred metres, which overhangs Gesturi and the neighbouring villages of Genoni, Tuili and Setzu, who share its nearly four thousand hectares — and almost half of it belongs to Gesturi. On top there are vast stretches of cork oak, along the escarpment woods of oak and poplar. Up there too stands Bruncu Madugui, a protonuraghe: its chamber, unlike the later tholos nuraghi, has no ogival pseudo-dome, and it was built in a high position to protect the plateau. How many nuraghi there are on the Giara is a question that has been answered three times, and each time the number was bigger: the first chorographic map of the plateau, drawn in 1840 by the Piedmontese general Alberto Ferrero, found nineteen; in 1924 the first list of national monumental buildings counted twenty-eight nuragic and archaeological sites in Gesturi's territory alone; and today, after further surveys, some thirty are reckoned.