Nuraghe San Pietro - Torpè

In the plain of the Rio Posada, the reddish keep of Nuraghe San Pietro rises from level farmland, a rare four-lobed nuragic complex whose story did not end in the Bronze Age. Excavations found nearly two thousand years of use: Nuragic ritual, an Iron Age votive deposit, and a Roman tower reused as a granary.

Why it matters

Most nuraghi are single towers; San Pietro belongs to the rarer family of quadrilobate complexes, a central keep with four towers added around it in concentric courses. The site’s occupation spans almost two millennia, from the early Bronze Age to the Roman imperial period. The main tower retains a lintelled entrance, a guard post and a stair to the upper level; rooms and a courtyard preserve the complex’s plan.

What to notice

Approach from the south and the entrance explains itself: a rectangular doorway closed by a lintel, a guard post at its right, and a spiral staircase with slab flooring climbing towards the terrace. Inside the keep, the central chamber opens three niches arranged in the shape of a cross, their walls corbelled and closed by pointed arches — a striking piece of engineering for the Bronze Age. The masonry tells its own story: large blocks of trachite laid in courses with small chocking stones build the reddish central keep, while the side towers use smaller schist blocks, a visible sign that the complex grew over time. In the irregular courtyard, find the funnel-shaped well, barely sixty centimetres across at the mouth but widening to nearly six metres in depth. Fifty metres south of the fortress lie traces of the settlement: Nuragic huts later reused in Roman times, with a possibly medieval quadrangular structure above them.

Context and history

The complex was occupied from the Middle Bronze Age into the Roman imperial era. The deepest levels produced pottery of the Bonnanaro tradition, linking the site's beginnings to the early Bronze Age, and the keep may be older than the towers that embrace it. A votive deposit — bronze tools and ornaments, figurative bronzes, lead rods and crude clay figures set in beds of ash and charcoal — led the archaeologist Giovanni Lilliu to read ritual use here in the ninth and eighth centuries BC. The southwest tower is the only one occupied in Roman times: around the second century AD it served as a granary, storing wheat, beans, wood and cork, its wheat of an eastern variety possibly grown locally; after its vault collapsed, a few second- and third-century burials were cut into the debris. Excavation began in 1973 after looting damage, continued for four consecutive years from 1980, and later campaigns brought the circular chamber against the keep to light, its bench still carrying vases, bowls and cooking pots.