In the Trexenta, the durum wheat plain, Guasila is recognised from far off by a dome. The parish church of Santa Maria Assunta was designed by the Cagliari architect Gaetano Cima and built between 1842 and 1852: octagonal, neoclassical, out of all proportion to the village. Beside it the seventeenth-century bell tower is still standing, thirty-five metres high, which had already flanked the earlier church; while the work went on the village made do with the little church of Santa Lucia. The municipal arms show that facade and an ear of wheat.
At dawn on the fourteenth of August a heifer is turned loose in the fields and chased on horseback by the young unmarried men of the village: the winner is whoever manages to take her by the horns, a corrus limpius. This is sa cassa de s'acchixedda, a rite in all likelihood pre-Christian; the animal used to be slaughtered and the meat given to the poor, today it is handed back to its owner. The day before, the women dress the statue of the Virgin for the Dormitio virginis, a rite of Byzantine origin that in Italy survives in only a hundred and thirty-eight other churches.
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📅 Every year, on 15 August, with the dressing of the sleeping Virgin on the 13th
Guasila celebrates the Assumption of Mary on 15 August. On the afternoon of Ferragosto, the Palio di Santa Maria is run, also known as the Palio dei comuni.
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Outside Guasila, but an easy day trip away.
