Gonnesa

The name most probably comes from a pre-Latin, palaeo-Sardinian root, goni, meaning hill: the place among the hills. In the Middle Ages the village was called Conesium or Conesi and was recorded as a domus, that is a centre of rural holdings; it also appears in the statute of Villa di Chiesa, in the chapter on the silver mines. Then it emptied: by the first decades of the fifteenth century it is recorded as abandoned, and the censuses show that this lasted until the end of the eighteenth, with the countryside kept alive only by the furriadròxus, little clusters of farmhouses where a few families of shepherds and farmers lived. In 1774 the Asquer, the new feudal holders, refounded the old village: they freed the occupied lands and houses and brought here, by an act signed before a notary, fifteen new families, giving each of them land, a house and the means to farm. The village was laid out at once on a geometric plan, with straight and aligned streets; at the census of 1821 there were 567 inhabitants.

What set it moving again was the underground, rich in zinc, copper, lead and silver. In the second half of the nineteenth century the reform of the mining sector brought Italian and foreign companies here, and by the early nineteen-hundreds the town had passed three thousand inhabitants. In May 1906 there were serious clashes between miners and the police, with dead and wounded: one of the town's squares still carries that date. In 1940 Gonnesa was merged into Carbonia and got its autonomy back in 1945. At Nuraxi Figus, born as a mining village, stands the mine of Monte Sinni, which was the last working coal mine in Italy: it stopped extracting in 2019. Of the industrial past there also remains the Normann village, born as the yard of the San Giovanni mine and turned into the housing of its managers, with the director's villa and the employees' club store. On the coast are the old tuna station of Porto Paglia, dated 1615, and the ruins of an Aragonese tower; inland, the nuragic village of Seruci.