Villanovafranca

In the nuraghe Su Mulinu, just outside the village, was found the only intact nuragic altar of the early Iron Age that is known. The finds from that site — they run from prehistory to the early Middle Ages — are in a museum opened in 2002 inside the old grain house, the montegranatico, the building where the village kept the wheat it lent out for sowing. In the territory the nuraghi are eight in all. The village of today is far younger: it rose in the Aragonese period, and in 1541 it was taken into the barony of Las Plassas, a fief of the Zapata family, from whose last baron it was redeemed in 1839, with the suppression of the feudal system.

The name seems to record a privilege: the village had franchises, that is exemptions, and from those it took its name. But no document says whether it was founded with those benefits or whether, like all the other Villanove, it was born as a farming settlement and changed its name later, when it obtained them. Goffredo Casalis, listing the villages of the Marmilla, wrote that they are all of immemorial antiquity and that the most recent seems Villanovafranca, at the far edge of the district and on the frontier of the kingdom of Arborea; Pasquale Tola was the first to put a date on the foundation, 1219. Today the fields give durum wheat, olives, grapes, almonds — and saffron: Villanovafranca is one of the three villages that produce the Sardinian saffron with protected denomination, and it is among the first producers in Italy.