Nuraghe is Paras

Raised in three Bronze Age phases on a limestone knoll at the gates of Isili, Nuraghe is Paras carries the tallest corbelled chamber known in Sardinia. Its bastion, courtyard and friars' name trace a story that stretches from the Padri Scolopi to Roman and Byzantine newcomers.

Why it matters

The archaeologist Giovanni Lilliu judged it "the most ample and harmonious of Sardinian tholoi", setting it beside the Achaean architecture of the second millennium BC. The chamber inside the keep rises almost twelve metres, the tallest corbelled chamber known in Sardinia. The whole compound spells out, in stone, how a Bronze Age tower grew into a fortified seat: one tower, then two, then a lobed bastion wrapped in its own outer wall.

What to notice

The keep is built of white and brown marly limestone laid in tight horizontal courses, circular in plan and nearly thirteen metres high. Its entrance faces south, lifted well above the courtyard, and a corridor with an ogival profile runs inward to a circular chamber roofed by an eccentric tholos. At the centre of the floor a finely worked well-cistern opens; high on the chamber wall a staircase begins its climb towards the destroyed upper floor. Around the keep, look for the three secondary towers joined by straight and curved curtain walls, the half-moon of open courtyard between them, and the antemurale that runs some thirty metres along the east side, about two metres thick.

Context and history

The first tower went up in the fifteenth or fourteenth century BC. Two or three centuries later a smaller tower rose opposite the keep, enclosing a courtyard of the tancato type; in a final phase around the twelfth to eleventh centuries, two further towers and curtain walls turned the whole into a trilobed bastion, encircled by an outer wall uncovered during the 1988 excavations. A village of circular huts pressed against it and remains unexcavated. People returned long after the nuragic world faded: pottery, hut remains and a bronze buckle showing a human figure between two Latin crosses document occupation in the Roman second and third centuries AD and again under the Byzantines in the sixth and seventh.

Digging began in earnest in the 1970s, with campaigns led by Maria Ausilia Fadda and Alberto Moravetti, and fieldwork has more recently resumed under Tatiana Cossu. The name Is Paras means "the friars": from the seventeenth century the land belonged to the Padri Scolopi, the Piarist fathers whose Isili convent now houses the Maraté copper museum; before them the spot was known as su Idili.