Suelli

For centuries the feudal lord of Suelli was its own bishop. Towards the beginning of the 12th century the giudice of Cagliari Torchitorio II gave the villa to bishop Giorgio di Suelli, and when the Aragonese took the island the donation was respected: Suelli became a barony held in fief by the local bishop. In 1420 the diocese was suppressed and united with Cagliari, and it survives as a titular see; the barony passed to the archbishop, from whom the village redeemed itself in 1839. The former cathedral, the church of San Pietro, has attached to it the sanctuary of San Giorgio, where the patron's remains are believed to lie. The Sardinian of Suelli is the only one in the Trexenta that is central Campidanese: here the Latin l between two vowels gives a sound made in the throat that the surrounding villages do not have, and linguists take that to mean the central area once reached this far.

The nuraghe carries the bishop in its name too. It is called Piscu, which in Campidanese means bishop, from the Latin episcopus, because it was part of what the giudici of Cagliari had given him. It is a five-lobed structure, one main tower and four at the corners, among the best preserved in the Trexenta, closed today as unsafe with excavation under way. At Pranu Siara the rock-cut tombs have a plan without equal in Sardinia: inside were found Bell Beaker pottery fragments of 2000 before Christ and many well-preserved human bones. In the park of Santi Cosma e Damiano stand a nuraghe with a church built on top of it, a sacred well now covered, and the remains of the medieval village of Cixi, first named in 1215, when the noblewoman Pretziosa gave some of her property there to the church of Suelli.