Gonnesa

A former mining town of about five thousand people in south-western Sardinia, Gonnesa sits in the gorge of Gutturu Carboni at the foot of Monte Uda, halfway between Carbonia and Iglesias. Its coast, a monumental nuraghe inland and a hard-won labour history mark the territory.

Why it matters

Gonnesa was one of the engines of the Sulcis mining epic. Ore was extracted here from at least the early fourteenth century, and the regional tourism authority describes the workings as intensive from the beginning of the nineteenth century until after the Second World War, feeding on deposits of silver, lead, copper and zinc worked since antiquity. The town also carries a rare honour in Italian labour history: on 20–22 May 1906 a popular revolt over wages and company-store exploitation spread across the mining basin, and in Gonnesa alone it ended with three dead and seventeen wounded when carabiniers from Iglesias fired on the crowd. Parliament responded with an inquiry commission created by law no. 393 of 29 July 1906. The municipality keeps 20 May as a civic holiday, and the story is documented in detail on the town's own pages.

What to notice

The oldest stone in town is the Romanesque church of Sant'Andrea Apostolo, built between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, around which the settlement grew. At the coast, the three-kilometre shoreline is closed to the north by a miners' village and to the south by an eighteenth-century tuna fishery at Porto Paglia, a reminder that fishing and mining shared this coast. The sandy shores include Fontanamare, Spiaggia di Mezzo and Porto Paglia. Inland, the quaternary sandstones of Morimenta yielded a rare fossil of a dwarf elephant, and the Grotta di Santa Barbara holds a small lake, stalactites and aragonite formations. Birdlife gathers at the Palude sa Masa marsh, where the purple swamphen lives alongside visiting herons, flamingos and mallards in season. On the Murru Moi plateau, rock-cut domus de janas tombs open the sequence of human occupation long before the mines.

Context and history

The territory has been inhabited since prehistoric times, and Phoenician, Punic and Roman communities were drawn here by its metals. In the Middle Ages the settlement belonged to the Giudicato of Cagliari until 1257, then passed through the hands of the Donoratico family, the Pisans and the Aragonese. Like much of the Sulcis interior it was later abandoned — famine, plague and pirate raids are the likely causes named by the municipality — and lay empty from around 1400 until 1774, when don Gavino Asquer Amat repopulated it with an act of vassalage signed on 25 May that year with fifteen new vassals. Mining grew considerable from the mid-nineteenth century, drawing workers and reshaping the town. Mining declined after the war but remains an important part of the territory’s history.