Nuxis

In the time of the giudicati the village was called Nughes, or Nugis, from the walnut trees; it belonged to the giudicato of Cagliari and, after 1258, passed to Ugolino della Gherardesca, then to Pisa and then to the Aragonese, who handed it round among various feudatories. And from about 1397 the records give it as empty: the village of Nuxis is recorded as depopulated, and depopulated it stays. It was repopulated only in the seventeen hundreds, and then it grew until it was one of the most important places of the Sulcis. A comune, however, it was not: it became one in 1957, separating from Santadi. So a settlement older than the giudicati has been an autonomous comune for less than seventy years.

What lies underneath is far older. The territory has been inhabited since the Neolithic — the necropolis of S'Acqua Cadda is of the Monte Claro culture — and to the Bronze Age belong several nuraghi and the sacred well of Tattinu. Near that same place stands the church of Sant'Elia di Tattinu, a small building of less than a hundred square metres, a couple of hundred metres from the village, and one of the few examples of Byzantine architecture in Sardinia. The rest of what lies under the ground has been dug out for thousands of years: the local account lists thirteen abandoned mines one by one — Bau Pressiu, Bacchera e Tattinu, Is Ollargius, Is Piras, Sa Marchesa, Serra Sirbonis and the others — and among the things that came out of them is a rare black marble, the marble of Nuxis, also called Tamara.