Traditional and Folk

The Murats Museum, dedicated to textile craftsmanship, is located in Samugheo, a village renowned for its flourishing textile production. The museum, established to preserve the heritage of textile art throughout Sardinia, shows a vast collection of high-quality artifacts from different parts of the region: blankets, saddlebags, carpets, and very precious tapestries made by loom, patiently spun by women who, from the shearing to the pattern, carried out all the processing phases to make the wool ready for weaving.

The Costume Museum of Nuoro, the most important ethnographic museum in Sardinia, also features a significant collection of handcrafted textiles. Visiting the Museum is like travelling through time to an imaginary rural village in Sardinia, deeply devoted to its land and the cycles of nature, and to a lifestyle that today, in many ways, has mostly disappeared.

Scenes of everyday life like housewives making bread or shepherd making cheese, are suspended forever inside large glass dioramas. Divided into several rooms, each one is dedicated to a particular type of object, such as precious jewels, tapestries and carpets, and popular musical instruments. Moreover, you will be drawn to the weapons, religious objects, household and work tools, and hundreds of different types of traditional bread. The collection of archaic men’s clothes and the rich and diverse women’s clothes, both the ‘everyday’ and the ceremonial, is a strong point of the museum. They represent different clothing types from across the historical-geographical regions of the island.

And finally, there are the rooms dedicated to the carnival costumes of the shepherds and farmers of the Barbagia region: wooden masks, cowbells, and sheepskins, representing the rare persistence of Mediterranean rituals handed down from the dawn of time. The most famous are the Mamuthones and Issohadores masks from Mamoiada, a village that has its own museum dedicated to Mediterranean masks, and in particular to those from Sardinia.

The Museum of Canto a Tenore in Bitti is another museum that represents the culture and heritage of Sardinia. Through the use of multimedia technology, visitors learn about unique Sardinian song form, the canto a tenore, which has been proclaimed as a “UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.” A choral ensemble comprised of four tenores including oche (voice), mesu oche (half voice), contra (contralto), and bassu (bass), canto a tenore expresses four distinct sounds that create enchanting melodies that seem to reproduce the sounds of nature, like the whistle of the wind or the call of animals. Sounds assimilated by the shepherds who lived alone in the countryside, they were then transformed into this noble artistic expression.