Almost everyone arrives in Cagliari in order to leave it. It is the city of the airport and the port, the place where you pick up the car to go somewhere else, and in guides to the island it gets two pages between the Poetto beach and the road to Villasimius.
Anyone who stops finds something they did not expect: a vertical city, built on a hill of white limestone, with a fortified quarter on top and, underneath, inside the same hill, the largest Punic necropolis in the Mediterranean. The two are a mile and a half apart and two and a half thousand years apart.
Cagliari is also the only Italian city where you can look at a civilisation that left no written line at all. The Nuragic bronzes in the archaeological museum are the only way we have of knowing how the Sardinians of the late Bronze Age dressed, prayed and sailed.
Careful: three things the guidebooks still recommend cannot be visited. The Roman amphitheatre has been shut for fifteen years, the Torre di San Pancrazio is not open, and visits to the Galleria dello Sperone are suspended. You will find the details, with the sources, in the practical information at the end.
Castello: the quarter you look at from below
Why would a seaside city put its old centre on top of a hill? Because for seven hundred years Cagliari was a fortress, first Pisan and then Aragonese, and the people who governed it lived inside the walls while the people who worked in it lived below, in the districts of Marina, Stampace and Villanova. The upper quarter still carries the name: Castello, Casteddu in Sardinian, which is also what the people of Cagliari call the whole city.
You climb up from the Bastione di Saint Remy, which is not a fortress but a late nineteenth-century invention: the double monumental staircase, the triumphal arch and the Umberto I terrace were designed in 1896 by Giuseppe Costa and Fulgenzio Setti, on top of the Spanish bastions of the Sperone and the Zecca, to give the city’s middle classes a drawing room with a view. The work was finished in 1902. From the terrace you see the gulf, and through the arch appears the Sella del Diavolo, the headland that closes the Poetto.
The other gate is the Torre dell’Elefante, raised in 1307 by the Pisans to a design by Giovanni Capula, in blocks of white limestone from the Bonaria quarries. Look at the corbel above the corner, to the left of the arch: there is a little white marble elephant on it, carved in the round and as old as the tower, which gives the tower its name and which nobody can explain with certainty. Under the great gate the portcullis is still in place, and from the top of the tower you look down on the quarter.
The Cittadella dei Musei: two museums, one ticket, one door
In the northern corner of Castello, where the Royal Arsenal stood, the architects Libero Cecchini and Piero Gazzola built a museum complex between 1956 and 1979 that, instead of demolishing the medieval walls, kept them inside itself. The result is a strange and successful building: concrete and glass leaning on fourteenth-century limestone blocks.
What is inside? The two most important collections on the island, and a single ticket that covers both.
The National Archaeological Museum holds the Nuragic bronzes, the Nora stone and Punic and Roman Cagliari. The National Art Gallery holds the Sardinian-Catalan retablos, the great painted altarpieces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which in Sardinia have a history of their own because the island looked to Barcelona and Valencia, not to Florence.
One practical thing nobody mentions: the art gallery can be entered only through the archaeological museum, where the tickets are sold. If you arrive convinced there are two separate entrances, you will walk round the building for nothing.
The cathedral, and what lies underneath
The cathedral of Santa Maria has a neo-Romanesque facade that looks medieval and dates from 1930. Inside, flanking the doorway, stand the two pulpits of Master Guglielmo: an ambo carved for Pisa cathedral between 1158 and 1162, which reached Cagliari in 1312 and was later sawn in two.
But the part worth the journey is under the presbytery. The sanctuary of the martyrs is a crypt cut entirely out of the rock at the beginning of the seventeenth century, with a vault worked in rosettes and a hundred and seventy-nine marble niches. In one of its three chapels lies Marie Joséphine of Savoy, queen of France, wife of Louis XVIII, who died in exile and was brought here in 1811.
All of this is free. The bell tower, on the other hand, costs three euros and asks for a hundred and thirty-seven wooden steps. The detailed guide is in the article on the cathedral of Santa Maria.
San Saturnino, and why it belongs in the morning
Outside the walls, in a garden on piazza San Cosimo, a Greek-cross building with a dome over the crossing survives: the basilica of San Saturnino is the oldest church in Cagliari, raised between the fifth and the sixth century over the tomb of the martyr who is the city’s patron. It is one of the most important early Christian complexes in the western Mediterranean, and to understand it you have to look at it the way you look at a ruin: the central body is whole, the rest is open to the sky.
It reopened on 1 April 2026 after five months of work on the windows and the lighting, and entry is free.
Careful: this is the one calendar decision of the whole trip. San Saturnino opens 9:00-15:30 and stays closed on Sundays and Mondays. It is the only stop in the cluster with a weekly closure, while the museum and the cathedral are open every day. If your weekend runs from Saturday to Sunday, San Saturnino has to be Saturday morning or not at all. The details are in the article on the basilica of San Saturnino.
Tuvixeddu: the hill that is a cemetery
A mile and a half from the centre, in the Sant’Avendrace district, there is a hill of white limestone pierced by hundreds of square shafts. They are the tombs of the Tuvixeddu necropolis, the largest Punic burial ground in the Mediterranean: a vertical shaft was cut into the rock, a chamber was opened at the bottom of it, and the dead were lowered in with their grave goods.
The known burials number 1,793, cut between the sixth century BC and the first AD, and some chambers keep wall paintings with lotus flowers, palmettes and gorgons that have almost no parallel in the Punic world.
The park is public and free. Two hundred metres further on, on viale Sant’Avendrace, opens the Grotta della Vipera, a Roman rock-cut tomb that an official named Lucius Cassius Philippus had made for his wife Atilia Pomptilla, with the poems he wrote for her carved in Greek and Latin on the wall. I write about it in Tuvixeddu and the Grotta della Vipera.
The two days, in order
The order below follows the opening hours, not the distances: the centre of Cagliari can be crossed on foot in twenty minutes, so geography is not the constraint.
First day, on a weekday. Start at 9:00 at San Saturnino, the one thing that closes early, and allow forty minutes. Then climb to Castello and give the rest of the morning to the cathedral, crypt included. In the afternoon, the Cittadella dei Musei on the single ticket: three hours between the archaeological museum and the art gallery is the minimum, and the ticket office closes at 18:45. End the day on the terrace of the Bastione di Saint Remy, which faces south, at sunset.
Second day. In the morning Tuvixeddu and the Grotta della Vipera, which taken calmly need two and a half hours. Go back up to Castello for the Torre dell’Elefante, then walk down through Marina and Stampace. If there is time left, the Poetto is eight kilometres away and twenty minutes by bus.
If you only have one day, drop Tuvixeddu and keep the museum, the art gallery and the cathedral: they sit in the same quarter and cover two thousand years.
Practical information
Details checked on 7 September 2026 by cross-referencing SardegnaCultura, the Cagliari Turismo portal of the city council and the pages of the municipal monuments, because the site of the national museums of Cagliari refuses automated requests. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. The ticket for the Archaeological Museum and the Art Gallery is a single one and costs 10 euros; it also covers the sixteenth-century Cannoniera. The reduced ticket costs 5 euros, and visitors aged 18 to 25 pay 2 euros. The cathedral and San Saturnino are free, the bell tower costs 3 euros, the Grotta della Vipera 3 euros, and the park of Tuvixeddu is free.
The council’s combined ticket. A ticket of 8 euros, valid seven days, covers six municipal monuments: the Roman amphitheatre, the Torre dell’Elefante, the Grotta della Vipera, the crypt of Santa Restituta, the Passeggiata Coperta and the Galleria dello Sperone. Careful: two of the six cannot be visited at the moment, so it pays only if you use at least three.
Hours. The museum and the art gallery open every day 8:30-19:30, with the ticket office until 18:45. The cathedral opens 9:00-20:00 on weekdays and 8:00-13:00 and 16:00-20:30 on Sundays and feast days; the bell tower 10:30-16:00, closed on Sundays. San Saturnino opens Tuesday to Saturday 9:00-15:30. The Torre dell’Elefante and the Grotta della Vipera open 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.
Free entry. The museum and the art gallery are free for under-18s, and on the first Sunday of the month entry is free for everyone. The municipal monuments are free for children up to six, for people with disabilities and their companion.
Careful: three sites are closed. The Roman amphitheatre has been shut to visitors since 2011; the council announced a partial reopening for guided tours by the end of summer 2026, but the institutional page still publishes hours and prices as if it were open. Phone 070 6777900 before going. The Torre di San Pancrazio is not open, and the council says so itself. Visits to the Galleria dello Sperone are suspended. The counter-example is the Roman theatre of Aosta, which reopened in July 2026 while declaring that it is still half a building site.
Getting there. Elmas airport is six kilometres away and the train to the central station takes five minutes. From the station to piazza Yenne is a five-minute walk, and from there you climb to Castello on foot or by the public lift at the Bastione. Tuvixeddu is a twenty-five minute walk from the centre, with entrances on via Falzarego 49 and via Is Maglias.
How long it takes. Two full days cover everything in this guide. A single day covers the Castello quarter with its two museums and the cathedral.
Where to start again
Cagliari rewards anyone willing to look at it vertically: the Punic city below, the Pisan and Aragonese one on top, and in between a museum that holds the two together.
The five monographs of the cluster are here: the National Archaeological Museum and the Nuragic bronzes, the National Art Gallery and the Sardinian-Catalan retablos, the cathedral of Santa Maria, the basilica of San Saturnino and Tuvixeddu with the Grotta della Vipera.
Photographs: the Bastione di Saint Remy by Eduard Marmet (CC BY-SA 2.0), the Sella del Diavolo through the arch by Nilo1926 and the Torre dell’Elefante by Holger Uwe Schmitt (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
