Villanova Tulo

Near the Flumendosa and its lake, Villanova Tulo preserves murals by Pinuccio Sciola, a Gothic-Aragonese parish church, prehistoric burial caves hollowed nearby, and nuraghe Adoni, whose bronze hoard and Etruscan ewer handle record its ancient cultural connections.

Why it matters

Villanova Tulo is a village of about a thousand people in the Sarcidano, the historic heart of central-southern Sardinia, and its interest is exactly the disproportion between its size and what surrounds it. The town looks out from the foot of the San Sebastiano hill, topped by a little countryside chapel, over the right bank of the Flumendosa, the lake that bears the river's name and the woods of the Pantaleo forest. Bronze Age tombs hollow the rock nearby, and five kilometres away the nuragic complex of Adoni guards finds that connect this countryside to Etruria and to the late Roman world.

What to notice

The parish church of San Giuliano was rebuilt in 1663 in Gothic-Aragonese style over an older structure, and its pointed lines anchor the streets around it. On the walls, murals by Pinuccio Sciola — the Sardinian artist better known for his sounding stones — take their subjects from the writer Benvenuto Lobina, born here in 1914, author of the Sardinian-language novel Po cantu Biddanoa and honoured with a bronze statue by Piergiorgio Gometz. On the hill above town stands a small rural chapel. On the slopes the Grotte di Is Janas and of Frumosa open as prehistoric burial caves from the Early Bronze Age, an early layer of human activity in the area.

About five kilometres from the village, nuraghe Adoni stands on a limestone outcrop at roughly 800 metres. The monument stacks a central keep against a four-towered quadrilobate bastion, wrapped in a massive antemurale with the remains of a hut village attached; the differing masonry of tower and bastion shows more than one building phase. Excavations in 1997–99 directed by Mario Sanges, after a first survey by Alberto La Marmora in the early nineteenth century, brought to light about forty bronze objects — spearheads, axes, awls and fragments, perhaps a founder's hoard — together with pottery dated between 1350 and 1150 BC. Among the finds is a bronze handle from a late-sixth-century BC Etruscan oinochoe of the Schnabelkanne type; a deposit of vases and coins shows the crag reoccupied as a refuge in the sixth and seventh centuries AD.

Context and history

The present village took shape in the mid-fourteenth century from two older settlements, Villanova and Tulo. A local tradition connects the name Tulo with a Roman functionary named Tullius; a Roman arch is preserved in the village. The wider territory was frequented at least from the Early Bronze Age, as the burial caves and the nuraghe demonstrate. Like the rest of the Sarcidano, the village later passed through the feudal system of the Giudicato era's successors into modern times, and its economy remains agropastoral: dairies in the surrounding countryside produce cheeses of local reputation alongside cereals, vegetables and fruit.