Tuili

Tuili, a village at the foot of the Giara plateau, brings together a Gothic-Catalan parish church consecrated in 1489 that keeps the great retablo of the Maestro di Castelsardo, mud-brick houses with stone portals, museums of oil and Sardinian instruments, and a landscape closely linked with the Giara plateau.

Why it matters

Tuili is a small centre of the Marmilla in south-central Sardinia, at the foot of the Giara plateau, and it compresses a remarkably layered history into a village of roughly a thousand inhabitants. Its parish church holds painting declared a national monument; its fields hold obsidian workshops, Phoenician-Punic remains and a Roman settlement; its edge holds the trails that climb onto the Giara, part of which falls inside the commune. For a destination anchored on Su Nuraxi, the village adds the medieval, pastoral and everyday dimensions of the same landscape.

What to notice

The parish church of San Pietro apostolo is the centrepiece, built in Gothic-Catalan style and consecrated in 1489. Inside the single nave, three chapels open on each side; the third chapel on the left is the only element left of the medieval fabric, under a star vault with pendant gems. The great retablo of the Maestro di Castelsardo, painted between 1489 and 1500, measures about 5.5 by 3.5 metres and, with the Pentecost retablo of 1534 in the chapel of San Felice da Cantalice, was declared a national monument in 1893. The church also has a baroque marble pulpit of 1783, the late-baroque high altar, the diatonic organ, and the bell tower's hemispherical dome covered in coloured tesserae. The historic centre has ladiri houses — mud and straw brick — with their wide stone-paved loggias called lollas, late-nineteenth-century stone portals, and the neoclassical villas Pitzalis and Asquer.

Context and history

The village grew under the Giudicato di Arborea in the curatoria of the Marmilla and belonged to the diocese of Usellus; in 1481 it was enfeoffed to the Santa Creus family. The surrounding countryside runs deeper still: the regional portal records an obsidian-working site at Santa Elisa, Phoenician-Punic remains at Nuridda and a Roman settlement at Santa Elisabetta, with the finds now held in the National Archaeological Museum of Cagliari; the municipality adds a nuraghe in the Santa Luisa area at 571 metres on the Giara. Villa Asquer, a neoclassical residence attributed to the Cagliari architect Gaetano Cima, houses the Museo dell'olivo e dell'olio on the ground floor and the Museo degli strumenti musicali sardi above. Devotion to Sant’Antonio Abate and San Pietro remains part of the village’s cultural identity.