Tuili

In the church of San Pietro, at Tuili, there is a retable painted by an artist whose name is not known. Scholars call him the Master of Castelsardo, and this work of his is so important that it has taken the name of the place that keeps it: the Retable of Tuili. The village lies at the foot of the Giara plateau, in the Marmilla, in a most fertile territory that has always given it weight; and about the name runs a legend, that of Tulliola, sister of a praetor of Usellus, who died in Sardinia, from whom Tuili would come. The real documents, however, begin later: the oldest are in the Vatican Archive and are medieval, when the villa belonged to the giudicato of Arborea and lay in the curatoria of Marmilla, on the border with the giudicato of Cagliari.

Then Tuili changed hands a good many times, and once it was bought by a merchant. In 1355 the king of Aragon gave it in fief to Matteo Doria; from the Doria it passed to the De Doni, and from these, by marriage, to the Aragall and then to the Santa Cruz. When that house died out, in 1659 the lordship was bought by the Genoese merchant Ambrogio Martin, and from the Martin it came at last to the Ripoll-Sanjust, marquises of Neoneli, barons of Teulada and counts of Tuili: the county was redeemed in 1836, with the end of the feudal system, and the village had a mayor and a council. Today, besides the retable and the villas Pitzalis and Asquer, at Tuili there is also a park that remakes the whole island on a small scale: it is called Sardinia in Miniature.