Museo Nazionale Sanna

The Museo Nazionale Sanna in the newer part of Sassari is the main archaeological museum of northern Sardinia, with an extensive collection spanning the prehistoric through Roman periods. The Nuragic section is the highlight: hundreds of small bronze figurines (bronzetti) depicting warriors, priests, animals, and everyday objects, made between 1000 and 800 BCE with extraordinary skill and vitality.

The museum also has significant collections from the Phoenician/Punic period, when Sardinia was part of the Carthaginian world, and from the Roman occupation. The ethnographic section on the upper floors documents traditional Sardinian crafts, costumes, and rural life — the elaborate silver jewellery and embroidered traditional dress of the various Sardinian regions are particularly fine.

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The museum is named for Giovanni Antonio Sanna, a 19th-century Sardinian mining entrepreneur and politician who assembled a large collection of Sardinian antiquities and bequeathed it to the state on his death in 1875. The Nuragic civilization — which built the mysterious stone towers called nuraghi across the island between 1800 and 900 BCE — is the museum's strongest focus, and the Sanna collection contains some of the finest Nuragic bronzes in existence.

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