Twenty-five minutes on foot from the centre of Cagliari there is a hill of white limestone pierced by hundreds of rectangular shafts. They are not quarries and they are not cisterns: they are tombs, and there are so many of them that the hill looks like a sponge from close up.
Tuvixeddu is the largest Punic necropolis in the Mediterranean, and you walk into it free, with no ticket, no booking and no guide. It is also the least visited place in the city, which is odd, because nothing like it survives elsewhere: Carthage lies almost entirely under modern Tunis, and the Punic necropolises of Sicily are far smaller.
Careful: the Roman amphitheatre of Cagliari, which many guides put in the same itinerary, is closed to visitors. You will find the current situation, with the sources, in the second-to-last section.
How a shaft tomb is made
What exactly are you looking at when you lean over one of those openings? A shaft tomb, the standard burial of the Punic world, and it works in two stages.
First a vertical shaft of rectangular section was cut into the limestone, between two and a half and eleven metres deep, with footholds carved into the opposite walls: these are the notches that let a man climb down and back up. At the bottom of the shaft a burial chamber opened to one side, closed with a stone slab.
Inside the chamber the dead were laid, usually one or two per tomb, with their grave goods: pots, amulets, jewellery, painted ostrich eggs, bronze razors. The shaft was then filled with earth and rubble, and almost nothing showed on the surface.
That explains the thing that surprises most. What you see today is not how the necropolis looked: back then it was a hill of beaten earth, not a colander. The shafts are open because they were emptied, from the nineteenth-century excavations onwards.
The numbers, and the fight to save the hill
The burials known at Tuvixeddu number 1,793, and they run from the sixth century BC to the first AD, which is to say they cover the whole life of Carthaginian Cagliari and its passage to Rome. Of those burials, 1,571 have been saved from building work. The gap between the two figures is the story of the last hundred years.
Why did a necropolis of this importance end up among apartment blocks? Because it sits a mile and a half from the centre of a growing city, on a hill with a view, and for decades that land was treated as building land. Limestone quarries, a lime works, villas and later residential schemes ate into the hill until the question became one of the longest environmental disputes in Sardinia.
Today the hill is a public park of about three and a half hectares, and as you walk you can see the conflict: house walls looking down on the tombs, the fence that cuts across the plateau, a lime tower left standing as an industrial relic.
The painted tombs, which the Punic world hardly ever has
The rarest thing at Tuvixeddu cannot be seen from the path, because it is at the bottom of the shafts: some chambers have painted walls, and they are among the very few in the Punic world that do.
The paintings date from the fourth and third centuries BC and use a repertoire that comes from Egypt by way of Carthage: friezes of interlaced palmettes and lotus flowers, bands of red ochre, geometric motifs, and frontal gorgons, put there to keep evil away.
Two tombs have names of their own. The Tomb of the Uraeus takes its name from the four-winged Egyptian serpent painted on the back wall, in the middle of the frieze, flanked by lotus flowers and two gorgons. The Tomb of the Fighter owes its name to a painted warrior, whom archaeologists have proposed identifying with the god Sid, the deliverer from all evil.
They are closed by grilles and cannot be visited freely: what you see on the surface is the structure, not the decoration. It is worth knowing beforehand, so as not to search in vain.
What you actually see as you walk
The park has paths, benches and toilets, and no audio guides or scheduled guided tours. It is an archaeological walk to be taken slowly, and these are the things to look for.
The aligned shafts, first of all: look at how they are oriented and how close they lie, because they show that the necropolis was organised in sectors rather than grown at random. Then the footholds in the walls of the best preserved shafts, which are the most human thing here: somebody used them to climb down. Then the Roman reuses, the Punic tombs widened or converted in the imperial period, because when Rome took Cagliari the cemetery was not abandoned but continued.
And finally the Roman quarry on the flank of the hill: the same Romans who buried their dead here also cut the stone to build in the city. Life and death on the same hill.
The Grotta della Vipera: a love story cut into the rock
Two hundred metres further down, on viale Sant’Avendrace, the rock face opens into a carved front with a pediment and a cornice: this is the Grotta della Vipera, a Roman rock-cut tomb of the first or second century AD. The name comes from the two vipers carved on the tympanum.
The tomb was cut for Lucius Cassius Philippus for his wife Atilia Pomptilla, and what makes it unique is not the architecture: it is the inscriptions. Poems in Greek and Latin, written by the husband for his dead wife, are carved on the walls.
According to the account those poems hand down, Philippus had been struck by a malarial fever and Pomptilla asked the gods to take her life instead of his. He recovered, she died, and he made her this.
The story has been repeated for centuries, and it would be naive to take it as reportage: Roman funerary epigraphy is a literary genre, with its conventions and its exaggerations. But it remains a rare document, because almost all the ancient funerary poetry that has reached us is anonymous, and this has two names and a place.
The Roman amphitheatre, and why you cannot get in
This needs a long note, because the situation is confusing and it can cost you a morning.
The Roman amphitheatre of Cagliari, cut into the living rock on the Buoncammino slope and able to hold ten thousand spectators, has been closed to visitors since 2011, when the iron and timber structures put up from 2000 for concerts were removed. The city council announced a partial reopening for guided tours by the end of summer 2026, on three routes, with funds already allocated; an opening had also been promised for the summer of 2025 and did not happen.
The trouble is that the council’s own institutional page still publishes hours and prices as if the monument were open, with its last update declared in December 2025: anyone reading it sets off convinced they can go in.
The practical rule: before going, phone 070 6777900, the ticket office for the municipal monuments, and ask whether the visits have started. From outside, from the viewpoint on viale Fra Ignazio, the bowl of the amphitheatre can be seen anyway.
Practical information
Details checked on 7 September 2026 on the pages of the Cagliari city council’s monuments, updated on 12 December 2025, and on the 2026 local reporting for the state of the amphitheatre. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel.
Tuvixeddu. Entry to the park is free. The entrances are at via Falzarego 49 and via Is Maglias, with parking beside both. The park opens early and closes in the evening, with hours that vary by season, roughly 6:00-21:00 in winter and until 22:00 in summer. There are toilets and accessible paths; dogs must be kept on a lead.
Grotta della Vipera. Full price costs 3 euros, the reduced ticket 2 euros for students up to 26, over-65s and groups of at least fifteen, and 1 euro for school groups. Entry is free for children up to six, for people with disabilities and their companion.
Hours of the Grotta. It opens daily 10:00-17:00 from 1 October to 27 April, and 10:00-13:00 and 15:00-19:00 from 28 April to 30 September, with last entry half an hour before closing. No booking is needed.
The combined ticket. A ticket of 8 euros, valid seven days, covers six municipal monuments, among them the Grotta della Vipera and the Torre dell’Elefante. Careful: two of the six, the Roman amphitheatre and the Galleria dello Sperone, cannot be visited today.
Getting there. From piazza Yenne it is a twenty-five minute walk west, or a bus towards Sant’Avendrace. The Grotta della Vipera is on viale Sant’Avendrace, two hundred metres from the via Is Maglias entrance.
How long it takes. Two and a half hours for the park and the Grotta together. An hour and a half if you only walk the main plateau of the necropolis.
How to fit them into the day
Tuvixeddu and the Grotta della Vipera lie outside the city-centre circuit and need half a day of their own, preferably the morning: the hill is white limestone with no shade, and on a summer afternoon it turns into a hotplate.
The order that works runs from the bottom up: first the Grotta della Vipera, which is ticketed and has fixed hours, then the park, which closes late. That way a delay does not cost you the one thing with a ticket office.
The grave goods that came out of these tombs are displayed at the National Archaeological Museum, and seeing both on the same trip changes each of them. Back in town you have the cathedral of Santa Maria with its sanctuary of the martyrs and the basilica of San Saturnino, which also stands over a necropolis, five centuries later than this one.
The necropolis is the stop that wants comfortable shoes and no hurry: where to slot it without sacrificing the rest is in what to see in Cagliari in two days.
Photographs: the shaft tombs by Crimao, the necropolis from above by Dietrich Steinmetz, the Punic tomb by Cellin and the Grotta della Vipera by Giulianofigus, all CC BY-SA 4.0, from Wikimedia Commons.
