5 Best Sights in Sardinia, Italy

On the island of Sant'Antioco, off the southwestern coast of Sardinia, the fishing village and port of Calasetta draws visitors year-round for its beautiful beaches and fresh-seafood dishes. The pristine beaches of Spiaggia Grande and Le Saline, alternating with rocky areas, dunes, and local vegetation, form a rugged paradise. Founded by Ligurian settlers who worked as coral and tuna fishermen, Calasetta is connected daily by ferry boats with the smaller island of San Pietro, which also keeps intact its Ligurian cultural history and dialect.

If you like to seek out the esoteric, explore the rugged inland hills and town of Carbonia, less than 30 minutes' drive from Sant'Antioco and about an hour by car or train from Cagliari. Built in 1938 by Mussolini to serve as an administrative center of a once-booming coal-mining area, its time-frozen architecture—ordered rows of workers' houses around a core of monumental public buildings on the broad Piazza Roma—has been called an urban UFO set down in the Sardinian landscape.

Perched at about 600 feet in the southwest hills of the island, this authentic Sardinian town 35 km (22 miles) north of Sant'Antioco has two notable medieval churches: the Cattedrale di Santa Chiara and Madonna delle Grazie. The town is famous for its theatrical, Spanish-inflected Easter festivities. A short drive away, on the Costa Verde, you can enjoy unspoiled, uncrowded beaches, including the beautiful Masua cove at Porto Cauli beach.

Just outside Carbonia and strategically positioned atop a plateau that provides views inland and far out to sea, the remains of one of Sardinia's most important Carthaginian military strongholds were discovered by chance in 1962. The walls of Mt. Sirai were erected around 375 BC, and they continued to function as impregnable fortress barriers until the Roman conquest in 238 BC. For the full picture, try to combine your visit with a look at Carbonia's archaeological museum on Via Campania.

The chief point of interest in Sant'Antioco island's eponymous main town is the Archaeological Zone at the top of the old section, which has terrific views of the Sardinian mainland. Here you can see a tophet—a Punic sanctuary, necropolis, and burial site—which is scattered with urns that contained the cremated remains of stillborn children. Below the site is Sant'Antioco's excellent archaeological museum that showcases artifacts from the tophet as well as from the Neolithic, Byzantine, and Roman eras. You can also visit a nearby ethnographic collection and a Piedmontese fort. Various combined tickets are available.