Perdaxius

The name probably comes from the Latin petrarium, a stony place, perhaps suggested by the rocky mass of Monte s'Orcu at whose foot the village stands. In the caves of Su Moinu, in nuragic times, the dead were buried. But the village proper began in the Middle Ages, around a convent founded here by Benedictine monks: of that there remain the well, the monks' house and part of the stables. In the papers the place appears from 1260, under three different names — Petrargio, Perdacha, Pantagus — and it stays there until 1421, the year in which it turns up as abandoned, like all the other settlements of the Sulcis.

Repopulated around the seventeen hundreds, for a long time its numbers went up and down, and it found a stable shape only in 1958, when it became a comune of its own. What lies underneath is silver-bearing lead: the mines of Peppixedda and of San Simplicio, the second a small mine of argentiferous galena, worked this ground and are now closed. The village stands at ninety-eight metres, in the middle of the mining basin of the Sulcis, on flat ground ringed by hills, and the stream that crosses it ends up in the artificial lake of Monte Pranu.