Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia has got 6000 years of history

Cagliari is the political administrative capital of Sardinia beside being the homonymous province. The great writer D.H. Lawrence was enraptured by the limpid sky and by the sun that give a blinding brightness to the city. In the last twenty years, Cagliari suffred a progressive depopulation, due to the abnormal price-level growth of the estates: this facilitated the development of the nearby towns, which now are united in a town boundaries named “Area metropolitana di Cagliari” (metropolitan area of Cagliari). It is hard to distinguish their respective borders. Cagliari is one of the seven royal towns of Sardinia  together with Sassari, Oristano, Bosa, Alghero, Castelsardo and Iglesias.

Cagliari is full of historical-cultural cues, also because many are the archaeological sites, which point the transition of many dominating peoples in the course of millenniums: some are able to be visited only in the occasion of the public performance of the “Monumenti Aperti”(Open Monuments), organized by the municipality in collaboration with the leading cultural and vuluntary associations of Cagliari.

We recommend the Phoenician-Punic necropolis of Tuvixeddu (VI – III century B.C.), la Grotta della Vipera (the viper cave) (patrician grave digged in the rock by an aristocratic roman in the I century A.C., its name come from the two snakes, that appear in the ornaments of the entry gable), the Anfiteatro Romano (the roman amphitheatre) (II century A.C. It is the most relevant monument of the classic age existing in Sardinia, from years it contains musical and Thatrical performances) and the Villa di Tigellio (Tigellio's villa) (actually it is a fraction of a roman residential district of the II century A.C. ; inter alia, by now, it has been established that the latin poet, of the age of the imperator August, didn't live there during the III century A.C.).

Cagliari is full of many other intersting sites, beginning from the Basilica di San Saturnino, an early Christian church of the VI century A.C. : people say that in the nearby area, where it is possible to admire the remains of a roman and a byzantine necropolis, in 304 A.C. the Patron Saint of Cagliari has been martyrized as consequence of its refusal to repudiate the Christian faith. Don't miss the visit to the crypt of Santa Restituta (used by punics, romans, and maybe by the first Christians too; in 1943 it was used as anti-aircraft refuge during the bombardments) and the crypt of Sant'Efisio : it seems that in this one, in the age of the imperator Diocleziano, there were locked up the Saint-warlike before his martyrdom in Nora in 303 A.C.