Serramanna

Serramanna means the great ridge, and in the Middle Ages it was not one village: it was many scattered hamlets, Bangiuludu, the three Saboddus, Santa Maria di Monserrato, which one after another emptied and flowed into a single centre. Then, in 1455, something happened that is worth telling in full. Aldonça de Besora, lady of the fief, granted the place liberties and franchises: an act of exceptional weight, because for the first time the country people here were called people and inhabitants, not vassals. Comparable concessions, in the rest of Italy and in France, were made by lords only three centuries later.

What is remarkable is that the town remembered. When in 1997 Serramanna at last received a coat of arms, designed by the local artist Flaviano Ortu on research by the historian Stefano Pira, it placed beside the bell tower of San Leonardo precisely the arms of Aldonça de Besora, the woman of the franchises, and those of the first count of Serramanna, a title obtained in 1617 from Philip III of Spain. That bell tower, for that matter, is itself a small anomaly: its shaft is octagonal, whereas in the whole Campidano and in southern Sardinia bell towers are square. And out in the fields stands the menhir called Perda Fitta, a granite block representing the Mother Goddess, a metre and a half high, roughly shaped with ten cup marks to indicate the breasts.