Route 1 · half a day
Crypts, hypogea and a Roman street under a church floor.
Cagliari is built on limestone, and limestone can be dug. That is why there is another city underneath this one: quarries turned into churches, tombs turned into air-raid shelters, Roman streets that ended up under parish floors. It is the most surprising walk you can do here, and almost all of it lies within a kilometre of our table.
These are cool places even in August: if you come in summer, this is the route for the middle of the day, when walking outside is out of the question.
On foot · 5 minutes on foot from Via Mameli
It starts five minutes from us, in Via Sant’Efisio. It is a hypogeum, part natural and part cut by hand: it began as a limestone quarry in the late Punic period, became a place of worship, was consecrated to Santa Restituta in the 1200s and rediscovered in the 1600s. In 1614 the saint’s relics were found there. During the Second World War the people of Cagliari sheltered in it from the bombing: the same cave, over twenty centuries, has been a quarry, a church and a refuge.
On foot · 12 minutes from the crypt, downhill towards the port
In the Marina quarter you go down below the floor of a church and find yourself on a paved Roman street, laid with large flagstones and more than four metres wide, which carried goods to the port. The site covers about 900 square metres and twenty-three unbroken centuries, from the fourth century BC to today. Systematic excavation began in 1990. The church above is dedicated to Sant’Eulalia, patron saint of Barcelona: this is Catalan-Aragonese Cagliari signing its name.
On foot · 3 minutes from Sant’Eulalia
Three minutes from the last stop, and it is worth asking for the combined route: they belong to the same museum group. You go in through a trapdoor in the floor of the nave. Below are three barrel-vaulted chambers cut into the rock, and the main room is painted entirely black, in charcoal tempera. On the wall Death is frescoed as a skeleton with an ermine cloak and a scythe, and the words “Nemini parco”: I spare no one. It was the crypt of the Confraternita dell’Orazione e della Morte, and it was only rediscovered in 1992.
On foot · 25 minutes on foot towards Sant’Avendrace, or by bus
This one is off the loop, to the west, and has to be booked: put it in another half day. It is a Roman funerary monument cut into the rock between the second half of the first century and the first half of the second, with two snakes carved on the pediment. The inscriptions in Latin and Greek tell how Atilia Pomptilla offered her own life to the gods so that her husband Lucio Cassio Filippo, an exile who had fallen ill in Sardinia, would recover. He recovered; she died; this is the tomb he had built for her. In 1822 the cave was saved from the road-builders’ charges by Alberto Della Marmora, and the holes drilled for the explosives can still be seen.
The Cripta di Santa Restituta and the Grotta della Vipera belong to the Monumenti di Cagliari circuit; Sant’Eulalia and the Santo Sepolcro to the MUTSEU group. They are two different ticket offices. The Grotta della Vipera has to be booked. Check the opening times on both sites before you leave the house: they change with the season.
The natural order is the Cripta di Santa Restituta in the morning, then down to the Marina for Sant’Eulalia and the Santo Sepolcro, and back up to Stampace for lunch. That is about forty minutes of walking in all, downhill except for the last stretch.
We don’t write the opening times and tickets ourselves: every stop links to the site of whoever keeps it open. They change, and theirs is the right source.
Halfway round
140 Grammi is at Via Mameli 91, in Stampace, below Castello: this walk starts here and comes back here. If you want the table ready, book. On Wednesdays the Carbonara is half price.
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