Today we drove from Cala Gonone, up the East coast of Sardinia and to Capo Testa, the extreme Northern area. Our guidebook gave us vague descriptions on how to do this 1.5 km walk through the forest, wildflowers, and up to the lighthouse at the cape. First thing was you had to find a the wooden sign that said “Ente Foreste”(Photo #1). Well, there were at least ten of those so we picked one that looked like it had a great trail through the forest up to the lighthouse…and after walking at least 1.5 km, we realized it wasn’t going in the right direction and we turned back the way we came…bummed out. The guide book we were following told us about this Roman quarry where the granite was extracted to build the columns on Rome’s Pantheon. So we looked for the “Colonne Romane” sign and found one posted with the “Tomb Gigante” sign (Photo #2 and #3) so we pursued. Notice the barely legible words on photo #2 (Tomb .6d). We lost the Roman Column signs after that and yet we persisted in driving up and down the road several times to no avail. But…we found the Giants tomb and were very inimpressed (Photo #4).
After our unsuccessful start we went ahead and drove to the lighthouse in Gallura. Then we got out and hiked around the granite formations.
The next half of our day we spent driving on the coast road to the West part of the island near Alghero. I had read about another tomb site with 37 tombs near our hotel. We were having no luck finding this site either when John actually stopped and asked directions from local Italians to get to the Anghelu Ruju. It cost us 10 Euro for both tickets and an audio guide. The tombs were carved by the Ozieri Culture between 3300 and 2900 BC and reused again until 1500 BC by the Copper Age culture. The tombs were dug so there were many different rooms and then sealed with a small stone door. They were discovered in 1907 by someone looking for construction material. They found shell and stone ornamental objects like necklaces, etc. They also found vessels, stone and bronze weapons and Goddess-like idols which accompanied the dead to the after world.
2 comments:
Sorry you never found the quarry. 2 years ago we stayed in a hotel about 50' from the Pantheon - would love to have seen where some of it came from.
It seems that Capo Testa has no less than 5 ancient quarries, and several more in the immediate area, but since there are also a host of Roman shipwrecks in the Bocche di Bonnifacio, the shipwrecks have received all the archeological attention to date.
Your pictures are just great. The scenery is amazing.
Yes, we were determined to find it since we are on our way to Rome. You can see by the signage though how hard it is to find something. They really need to update things for us tourist. It was an adventure I guess.
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