Cagliari, Citadel of the Museums, Arsenale square tel. 070/655911.
Timetables: 9-19 (every day, closed on Christmas, New Year’s Day and 1° of May).
Services: toilette, bar, entrance for disables, space for blind people.
The collection: the Museum has got remains of the prenuragical, nuragical, Phoenician, Punic, Roman and early-medioeval age.
They are kept ceramics of the Sardinian neolithic and eneolithic, stone tools,
tips of rise and obsidian little daggers, necklaces of bones and shells and, particularly meaningful, a series of little statues that symbolizes the Goddess Mother.
The remains of the nuragical period are: ceramics, tools of varied usefullness, an interesting collection of bronzee arms and above all the immense series of little bronzes, the little bronzee sculptures that represent subjects of varied type. Worthy of attention they are also the statues, in sandstone, of Prama Mount, the only known example of the nuragical statuary until now.
Some plastic models help to have an immediater understanding about how the nuraghi and the tombs of the giants would have been in origin.
They are interesting from the Phoenician-Punic age the resettings of a tomb for cremation and of a tophet (a place of Phoenician-Punic faith). From the same period they are kept a series of ceramics, a collection of coins and a series of jewels among which it stands out the famous polychrome necklace in vitreous pulp, that was found again at Olbia (SS).
One particular signalling must be made for the Stele of Nora: it is a sandstone stone stele that has got an engraving in Phoenician alphabet going back to the IX sec b.C., in which one for the first time it appears the name Sardinia.
To the Roman age they belong a series of ceramics and hand-manufactured articles, a collection of marbles and coins and a series of military certificates in bronze.
The early-medioeval collection includes jewels, ceramics, a series of fibulae and a series of coins.