Segariu

The name of Segariu, attested in documents of 1180, comes from the Campidanese s'ega 'e riu, the marshy valley of the river, because the village stands on the left bank of the valley formed by the Lanessi torrent; according to another reading it would come instead from segau de s'arriu, that is cut in two by the river, since the rio Pau runs through the village. In both cases the name speaks of water, and water here counts for more than it seems. The country church of Sant'Antonio, late Romanesque, stands a short way from the Lanessi: inside the nave, near the entrance door, a trapdoor opens on a stair going down to a hypogeum, and in the hypogeum there is a nuragic sacred well. In front of the church there was also a loggia held up by four columns, which the flooding of the Lanessi carried away in November of 2008. Not far off is the nuragic complex of Sant'Antonio, quadrilobate in plan, with a central tower and four outer towers, and around it the traces of a wide late-Punic settlement.

The history of the village is a history of emptying and return. The first population figures are of 1320: Segariu then counted almost eighty hearths, that is three hundred and twelve inhabitants. Then, in the course of the fourteen hundreds, the village gradually lost its people until it stood uninhabited; and when it had people again, in 1583 the hearths were once more eighty, for three hundred and forty-eight inhabitants — practically the same number of households as two and a half centuries before. In the Middle Ages the village had had a certain importance and was protected by a castle, the Rocca su Casteddu, of which some ruins remain; in 1414 the Aragonese incorporated it into the barony of Furtei, granted to Michele Sanjust, from whose descendants it was redeemed in 1839. And in the twentieth century the merging came back by administrative means: in 1927 Segariu and Furtei were joined into a single comune with Furtei as its seat, and Segariu was reconstituted in 1945.