San Sperate

The town bears the name of a man who never set foot in it: Speratus, a Christian beheaded on 17 July in the year 180 in the African city of Scilli, in present-day Tunisia, one of the twelve Scillitan martyrs. His bones came here because between 507 and 508 the Vandal king Thrasamund forced many African bishops into exile in Sardinia, and they brought the relics of their saints with them to save them from profanation: in the same crossing came the remains of Saint Augustine, which stayed at Cagliari, and those of Speratus, which came here. Between the seventh and the thirteenth century the ancient name of the place was replaced by his.

Two dates tell the rest. On 20 October 1892 the Riu Mannu burst its banks and sixty-nine people died: a scheme for the embankments had been presented twelve years earlier and had run aground in bureaucratic delays. And in 1968 Pinuccio Sciola began painting the walls of the houses white for the feast of Corpus Christi, and then sketching the first murals on them together with friends, fellow villagers and children. San Sperate became a museum village: artists came from the island and from abroad, and local painters emerged from it, such as Angelo Pilloni, who from 1969 frescoed the walls here and then went on to do the same in many other Sardinian towns.