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Sardinia

Learn about Sardinia

Introduction

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Sardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean and the least Italian-feeling part of Italy. It sits far enough offshore — about 190 km from the mainland — that it developed its own language, its own prehistory and its own long habit of ignoring whoever claimed to rule it.

The island is geologically ancient, older than the Alps and the Apennines, which is why its mountains are worn granite rather than sharp limestone and why the interior feels more like a continent than an island. Around the edges are roughly 1,800 km of coast: granite inlets in the north-east, white quartz beaches on the west, and the limestone cliffs of the Gulf of Orosei.

What makes Sardinia unusual is what stands inland. Some 7,000 nuraghi — Bronze Age drystone towers built between about 1800 and 1100 BC — survive across the island, left by a civilisation that wrote nothing and is known only by what it built.

Geography

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Sardinia is a fragment of ancient continental crust, older than the Alps — worn granite mountains, a single large plain, and roughly 1,800 km of coast. The mistral blows across it for much of the year and has shaped both the vegetation and the settlement pattern.

Read the full Geography guide →

History

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Sardinia has been conquered repeatedly and assimilated rarely. Its Bronze Age civilisation left 7,000 towers and no writing; its medieval kingdoms governed themselves for centuries; and its language remains the closest living relative of Latin.

Read the full History guide →

Culture

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Sardinian culture is layered, inward-facing and unusually intact: a Romance language of its own, masked winter rituals older than any record, polyphonic singing on the UNESCO list, and a Catalan-speaking town on the north-west coast.

Read the full Culture guide →

Climate Patterns

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Mediterranean, with hot dry summers and mild coastal winters — and wind as a constant. The mountains are genuinely cold and hold snow, which surprises people who think of Sardinia only as a beach.

Read the full Climate Patterns guide →

Food & Traditional Cuisine

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Sardinian food is pastoral rather than coastal in origin — sheep, bread and cheese first, with fish arriving later. It is the most distinct regional cuisine in Italy after Sicily's, and it shares very little with the mainland.

Read the full Food & Traditional Cuisine guide →

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