Ussana

Ussana has 4,285 inhabitants in the Campidano of Cagliari. Its name first appears in 1326 as villa Ussane, and from then on it crosses the documents in many different forms — Usana, Ussena, even Orsana and Orsola on the maps of two inattentive cartographers — before settling into today's spelling around the middle of the seventeenth century; for linguists the root belongs to the pre-Roman Sardinian substrate, the same one heard in Usini and Usanis.

The small Romanesque church of San Saturnino keeps a Roman marble sarcophagus, a funerary ark richly carved on the front and on both sides, made originally for a young patrician woman and found by chance during farm work. On the border with Monastir stand the ruins of the castle of Baratuli, raised in the twelfth century by the judges of Cagliari. That very castle is the reason why the coat of arms granted in 2019 lost the tower it used to bear: it stood outside the municipal territory, and in its place there is now a vine stock.