Samatzai

The coat of arms of this village of the Campidano, granted in 1999, counts its masters. Beside the sheaf that stands for wheat, the chief local crop, there are five Spanish-style shields, one for each of the five feudal families that passed the village from hand to hand: the De Ampurias, the De Puyalt, the Di Montbuy, the D'Heril and the Cervellon. It is not an allegory, it is a list. When the Cervellon died out, Samatzai became a royal fief, that is, it was administered no longer by feudal lords but directly by the officials of the crown, and so it remained until the redemption of 1839. Before that it had belonged to the giudicato of Cagliari, in the curatoria of Nuraminis; when the giudicato fell it passed to the Pisans and then to the Aragonese, who made it a barony. And it has not always had this name: in antiquity it was known as Santu Maccari.

The habit of changing address, for that matter, has lasted into our own day. The regional law of 2001 that created the new Sardinian provinces was to have aggregated Samatzai to the newborn province of Medio Campidano; then a later law, in 2003, established instead that it should stay in that of Cagliari, where it remained until the reform of 2016. Meanwhile the village keeps its own things: the former Montegranatico, that is the store where the seed corn was kept, has become a cultural centre; the old town hall houses the library and the doctors' surgeries; there is a museum called the Blacksmith's House; and the largest square, piazza Primo Maggio, measures a little over two thousand two hundred square metres, because somebody went and counted them. Underground there are the nuraghe Su Nuraxi at the place called Domu Is Abis and a necropolis of domus de janas in a spot named Sa Rocca Pertunta, the pierced rock.