Villaspeciosa

The name is a compliment: villa speciosa, the beautiful village. Its most notable building is the church of San Platano, raised about the middle of the twelfth century by the Benedictine monks of the abbey of Saint-Victor of Marseille: it is Romanesque and has a double barrel vault which in Sardinia can be found in only one other church, Santa Maria di Sibiola at Serdiana. San Platano remained the parish church for centuries: the documents of the Cagliari curia still name it as such in 1591, and only in 1599 does the Beata Vergine Assunta appear in its place, one of whose two bells carries the date 1585.

Outside the village lies the late Roman site of San Cromazio, discovered in the nineteen-seventies and dug every summer: it holds a great mosaic with religious decoration, among the most imposing on the island, and a number of burials in which almost nothing precious was found. According to the most recent reading, the place served as a posting station for those going from Cagliari into the Sulcis and back. Nuragic settlements lie all around: at Bidda Itzu, on the boundary with Decimoputzu, and at Cuccureddus, with a nuraghe on the top of Monte Silixianu, a village and a nuragic spring. In 1421 Alfonso V of Aragon granted the fief to the Tola family, and later the village ended up in the barony of Monastir.