Lunamatrona

The name of this village of the Marmilla lends itself to two readings, and both are divine. Some derive it from Juno, with the attribute matrona; and some prefer to start from luna, the moon, which would stand for the night divinity, the Roman Diana. In that case Lunamatrona would mean, literally, Queen Moon. The village sits at a hundred and eighty metres in the inner plain of the Marmilla, between the river Mannu and the hills of the Trexenta, and the area was already inhabited in nuragic times: in the territory there are the giants' tomb called Su Cuaddu de Nixias and the nuraghi Pitzu cùmmu and Trobas. Of the Roman presence, instead, some tombs with their grave goods speak.

The rest is a chain of masters. In the Middle Ages the village belonged to the giudicato of Arborea, in the curatoria of Marmilla; when the giudicato fell it passed to the marquisate of Oristano, and when the anti-Aragonese revolt of Leonardo Alagon, the last marquis, failed at the battle of Macomer in 1478, the whole area came under the Aragonese. From there it entered the incontrada of Parte Montis, within the county of Quirra, fief of the Carroz; in 1603 the county became a marquisate and passed to the Centelles; in 1798, under Savoy, to the Osorio de la Cueva, who held it until the redemption of 1839. Today the village is known for smaller and better things: the museum of the territory at Sa Corona Arrubia and, on the first Sunday of September, a fair devoted to three things at once — the melon grown dry, that is without irrigation, the malvasia and the sheep in a coat. And in the nineteen-eighties, until 1990, a village of not even two thousand people had its own radio station with a real following: Radio Lunamatrona.