San Sperate, Church of San Sperate

The town is located in the Campidano plain, about 20 km north of Cagliari, between the Rio Mannu and Rio Flumineddu streams.
The first peculiarity of the parish church is its naming after the town's eponymous saint, San Sperate Martire Scillitano (from Scillum, a Roman city in North Africa).
In Sardinia, the feeling of devotion to the martyrs, who died to witness their faith, spread widely and took root among the population in the early seventeenth century when, to assert their primacy over the Church of Sardinia, the archbishops of Cagliari and Sassari promoted numerous excavation campaigns aimed at discovering the holy bodies. In the context of this fervent religious climate, there is the discovery of the relics of San Sperate, which took place in 1616 near the ruins of a church on the edge of the town.
The building is quite simple both in plan and in its elevation and yet shows obvious signs not only of decoration but also of stylistic modernity.
On the façade with a flat crenellated end, there is a quadrangular portal with a frame and a low-slung window. The façade is further defined by a broken round tympanum with classicistic decorations above the portal and the square-barreled bell tower on the right side, developed on two orders, on the second of which there is a single-pointed monophore on each side.
The interior is divided into a single room with two chapels on each side and a deep presbytery. The barrel vaults are different in height: the nave has a larger dimension and the vault of the presbytery is higher than that of the chapels. The last chapel on the left and the last on the right have a starry vault.
Through archival documents, it is possible to roughly reconstruct the construction process of the church, from the foundation to the addition of the chapels, up to modern interventions. In particular, from the records of the Pious Cause (institute responsible for the management of revenues and ecclesiastical assets), we learn that the construction of load-bearing structures and masonry works began in 1646 and ended in 1650; the working workers came from Cagliari and the materials used were traditional: wooden beams and stones of different types (cantone stone in particular) for construction, wood for the fixtures.
The single nave, the quadrangular plan of the presbytery, the crenellated horizontal end of the façade and the bell tower lead us to think of an original construction in late Gothic forms, a fact that in Sardinia, although already in the middle of the 17th century, is not exceptional.
To the structure so defined, again during the second half of the seventeenth century, the chapels overlooking the last bay, both with stellar vaults, had to be added; while the others were built in the following century, more precisely in 1733 the one on the left and in 1772 the one on the right.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the entire building must have shown obvious signs of failure if in 1828 an architect was commissioned to draw up a restoration project; in 1890, the presbytery was renovated, which was covered with a barrel vault. Other works were also carried out in the twentieth century: by 1936, the new roof of the nave was built, in barrels, and in 1974 the marble flooring was redone.

History of studies
Numerous ideas for subsequent research on the building are offered in the volume by Salvatore Naitza dedicated to the town of San Sperate (1996).

Bibliography
L. Cherchi, The town of San Sperate and its patron. Historical notes for further research, Cagliari, Tea, 1987;
S. Naitza, “The signs of art: cues for a story”, in San Sperate. History, art, memories, Cagliari, Stef, 1996, pp. 125-132.