Villacidro – Shadow Country.
Villacidro, with its 13,217 inhabitants, is the most populous center in the vast Middle Campidano area, and rises 45 km northwest of Cagliari, where the monotonous plain of Campidano gives way to the last spurs of the Linas mountain system. “A mountain town,” G. De Francesco called it in 1902, and it certainly was, not only because of its geophysical features.
Today Villacidro is a modern town that looks to the plains with its feet, however, firmly planted to its mountains and hills that over time have made it famous for its cherries, citrus fruits, olive oil, and healthy air.
In 1768, with Bishop Giuseppe Maria Pio, it became part of the diocese of Ales and soon became its main center; in fact, Monsignor Pilo, after acquiring the palace of the Marquis Brondo, former feudal lords of Villacidro, renovated it and moved there, imitated later by many of his successors.
From May 4, 1807, to Dec. 24, 1821, it was also the seat of the prefecture and, as the provincial capital, exercised its jurisdiction over as many as 42 municipalities, including Arbus, Gonnosfanadiga, Guspini, Sardara, San Gavino and Sanluri, while the Province of Cagliari then comprised just 28 municipalities.
Home to a Carabinieri Company Headquarters, the town is also home to three small but very interesting museums: the Villa Leni archaeological museum, the “Sa Potecarìa” pharmaceutical museum, and the museum of sacred art.
Vowed to agriculture and pastoralism for as long as I can remember, in the late 1960s Villacidro began to experience its own industrial adventure that also brought some prosperity, but which ultimately proved ephemeral. Today the spaces left vacant by that fleeting illusion are being filled again by the almost frenzied activity of more than one hundred and twenty small and medium-sized enterprises, many of them agribusiness-oriented, within an Industrial Consortium to which, in addition to Villacidro, numerous towns in the surrounding area adhere. The town therefore looks to the future with a certain optimism, while remaining anchored, with intentional firmness, to the most genuine values of its past, values that, on a cultural level, are celebrated in the works of the writer Giuseppe Dessì, the most illustrious Villacidrese, who in 1972 won the Premio Strega singing this land and its customs with accents of melodic nostalgia.
