Nuraghe Santu Antine

Santu Antine rises out of the Cabu Abbas plain in the Meilogu district of northern Sardinia, a dark mass of basalt blocks laid without mortar some three and a half thousand years ago. Sardinians have long called it sa domo de su re, "the house of the king", and the name fits: of the thousands of nuraghi scattered across the island, few match it for scale or for the finesse of its engineering. The historian of astronomy Michael Hoskin went further and described it as the most sophisticated dry-stone monument on the face of the earth.

The core is a round keep, begun around 1800 BC, that once stood more than 25 metres high and still reaches about 17.5 metres. Inside, three beehive-vaulted chambers are stacked one above another. Around the keep, later builders of the Middle Bronze Age added a triangular bastion with a tower at each corner, the towers roughly 42 metres apart. The real surprise lies within that bastion: long corridors on two levels, their walls leaning inward course by course until they meet in pointed corbelled vaults. Walking them in the half-light, some 27 metres of passage under stone laid entirely without mortar, is the moment most visitors remember. The courtyard also holds wells, and studies of the plan have argued that the structure is aligned on the solstices.

Outside the walls lie the footings of a village: round Bronze Age huts and, beside them, rectangular rooms from a much later age, when in the second century BC Roman settlers reworked part of the settlement into a farmstead. Antonio Taramelli led the first excavations in 1935 and fresh work in 2007 refined the dating, yet much of the village is still under the turf. Finds from the site are shown in the Museo della Valle dei Nuraghi in Torralba. The surrounding Valle dei Nuraghi takes its name from the many other towers dotting the plain, and Santu Antine is best read as the grandest piece of a whole prehistoric landscape.

Getting there

The nuraghe stands about 4 km south of the village of Torralba. The nearest city is Sassari, roughly 32 km to the north. The closest airport is Alghero-Fertilia (AHO), about 44 km away in a straight line; a car is by far the most practical way to reach the site and the museum in Torralba.