Route 2 · half a day to a full day
You climb once, cross the quarter on the level, and come down at the Bastione.
Castello is the upper quarter, on a limestone hill about a hundred metres above the sea. The Pisans founded it in the 1200s and until after the war it was the seat of power: the towers, the cathedral, the arsenal, the seven churches. From Via Mameli it is ten minutes up, but it is up: better to do it once, at the start.
The order we suggest saves you climbing the ridge twice. You come in from the west by the Torre dell’Elefante, cross the quarter on the level as far as the Cattedrale, and come down at the end by the Bastione di Saint Remy, which faces south-east: if you keep it for sunset, you have made the right choice.
On foot · 10 minutes uphill from Via Mameli
Finished in 1307 to a design by Giovanni Capula, the same hand as the Torre di San Pancrazio. Bonaria calcarenite, four floors, seventeen lookout slits and thirty-five stone corbels that carried the wooden gallery. Above the door is the small marble elephant that gave it its name, a symbol of the sea power of Pisa. In 1535 Charles V ranked it among the finest military works in Europe; over the centuries it has been a powder magazine, an armoury and a prison.
On foot · 3 minutes from the tower
A few steps further on, along the same street. It is a terrace with one of the widest views in the upper town, and it stands where the Giudaria, the medieval Jewish quarter of Cagliari, used to be. In 1492, with the decree of the Catholic Monarchs, the synagogue was turned into a Catholic church: it is the core of the present basilica of Santa Croce, which the Jesuits later enlarged in the 1600s. The two bell towers, one traditional and one with an eastern-looking dome, tell that story on their own. The bastion is free to enter.
On foot · 8 minutes from the bastion
This is where most of the time should go: on its own it is worth two hours. It was built between the 1950s and 1979 by Libero Cecchini and Piero Gazzola on the site of the Savoyard Regio Arsenale of 1727, destroyed by the bombing of 1943, and it takes in Roman cisterns, Spanish fortifications and Piedmontese prisons. Inside there are four museums: the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, with over four thousand finds and seven thousand years of history, from Nuragic bronzes to Byzantine goldwork; the Pinacoteca Nazionale, with Catalan and Sardinian retables of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the Museo d’Arte Siamese Stefano Cardu, more than one thousand three hundred pieces from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, the largest collection of Siamese art in Europe; and the anatomical waxes of Clemente Susini, sixty-four preparations in twenty-three cases, modelled from life on the dissections of Francesco Antonio Boi.
Musei Nazionali di Cagliari →Museo d'Arte Siamese · Musei Civici →Cere Susini · Università di Cagliari →
On foot · 2 minutes from the Cittadella
Next to the Cittadella, in piazza Indipendenza. Completed in 1305, again by Giovanni Capula, and taller than its twin: the terrace stands one hundred and thirty metres above the sea, the highest point in the city. From up there Alberto Della Marmora made the surveys for his map of Sardinia. In the 1500s the Aragonese turned it into a prison, and a prison it stayed until the end of the 1800s.
On foot · 4 minutes from the tower
In piazza Palazzo, and it is a building you read in layers: a Pisan Romanesque structure of the 1200s, an interior redone in Baroque between 1669 and 1674, a marble façade of 1931 built in imitation of Pisan Romanesque. Under the presbytery opens the Santuario dei Martiri, cut entirely into the rock and consecrated on 11 November 1618: three chapels and one hundred and seventy-nine niches, each with the memorial stone of a saint and the symbols of their martyrdom, and nearly six hundred carved rosettes. There are Roman sarcophagi of the second century in there as well. In the church above, the pulpit by Guglielmo, carved for the cathedral of Pisa and brought to Cagliari in 1312.
On foot · 5 minutes from the cathedral
The last stop, and the easiest: the terrazza Umberto I is free to enter. The complex was designed in 1896 by Giuseppe Costa and Fulgenzio Setti, taking up an idea of Gaetano Cima’s, and opened in 1902 above the Spanish bastions of the 1500s. The bombing of 1943 partly destroyed it; it was faithfully rebuilt from 1946. Below the terrace is the Passeggiata Coperta, which in its lifetime has been a banqueting hall, a wartime infirmary and an air-raid shelter, and is now an exhibition space. The name is that of the baron of Saint Remy, the first Piedmontese viceroy of the island.
The two towers and the cathedral bell tower are liable to close for restoration, and the four museums in the Cittadella have three different administrations — Ministero della Cultura, Comune and Università — so separate tickets and separate opening times, with no combined ticket. Check the official pages before you go up: the walk works even if you only see the towers from outside.
About forty-five minutes of walking in all. Two hours if you only look at views and exteriors, four or five if you really visit the Cittadella. The final descent from piazza Costituzione to Via Mameli, by via Manno and piazza Yenne, takes twelve minutes.
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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