Masullas

Masullas lies in the Marmilla, 60 kilometers northwest of Cagliari, on the southern slopes of Monte Arci. The town itself is a fusion: two medieval villages, each built around its own late-Romanesque church, grew together into the single settlement that stands today, the older of the pair raised in the 13th century. The Roman necropolises of Mitza Salida and Roia de sa Lua show that people were on this ground well before that medieval merger, evidence of settlement reaching back to antiquity.

What sets Masullas apart from neighboring Marmilla villages is the museum installed in the former convent of the Capuchin friars, dedicated to the geologist Stefano Incani. It holds thousands of minerals and fossils documenting a region shaped first by a tropical sea twenty million years ago and then by the volcano that followed. The territory belongs to the Parco Geominerario della Sardegna, the first geological park recognized by UNESCO, and Masullas is one of its main interpretive centers. What this adds up to is a small village whose layered history, volcanic, Roman, medieval, converges in a single former convent building at its center, a place that reads as regional archive as much as parish town.