It was the last ‘town of Il Duce’ on the Island, after Mussolinia (then Arborea) and Carbonia, built in a position ‘explicitly’ opposite Alghero, on the northern side of the Coral Riviera, clearly visible from the bastions of the ancient Catalan city of which it is now a hamlet. Fertilia is a small village with two thousand inhabitants, very similar to the original village that survived on agriculture and fishing in the recent past and that is now Sardinia’s tourist ‘gateway’, thanks to the airport, five kilometres from the little village.

Towers, buildings and the surrounding countryside tells us about the village’s origins and events: rationalist architecture, land transformations, memory and removal policies and the superimposition of cultures starting from the nineteen thirties. In the context of a decade of reclamation and migration, the Ferrarese (later Sardinian) Colonisation Institution was entrusted with creating the conditions necessary for founding the ‘new town’ that, based on the intentions of the fascist regime, should have risen to become the fulcrum of the territory, an alternative to Alghero, while the new citizens were supposed to ‘Italianise’ the old community, guardians of the Catalan language and culture. And so it was that Nurra, a marshy, malarial land that was isolated and depopulated at the time, became an ‘exotic’ destination for rural families from Ferrara, who first lived in scattered cottages and later populated the newly formed Fertilia.