Galleria comunale d'arte

At the end of the main walk through the Giardini Pubblici, under the rocky flank of the Buoncammino hill, a neoclassical building that began life as a royal powder magazine now hangs Cagliari's modern art. Opened in 1933 as the first civic museum in Sardinia, the municipal art gallery pairs the Sardinian Novecento with masterpieces of Italian Futurism.

Why it matters

Two collections make the gallery unusual. The first is civic pride: the Collezione Sarda 1900-1970 grew from acquisitions begun in the early 1930s and remains the core reference for painting and sculpture in Sardinia across seven decades. The second arrived in 1999, when the comune acquired the Ingrao collection, plunging a regional museum into the mainstream of Italian 20th-century art — 31 works by Umberto Boccioni alone, plus Giacomo Balla, Mario Sironi, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini, Carlo Carra, Filippo De Pisis, Ottone Rosai and Mario Mafai, with a whole room for Giorgio Morandi. The building is a story of its own: a late-18th-century sabauda powder magazine rebuilt in 1828 to a design by the military engineer Carlo Boyl di Putifigari, its neoclassical facade in Bonaria limestone crowned by three Carrara marble sculptures donated by Count Boyl.

What to notice

• The triple morphing of the structure: magazine, then barracks and warehouse, then museum adapted in the late 1920s by the Cagliari architect Ubaldo Badas and inaugurated in 1933.
• A room dedicated to Francesco Ciusa, whose plaster sculptures form the first nucleus of the civic collection of Sardinian artists; three loaned sculptures trace his evolution.
• Forty works by Mino Maccari form an unusually substantial public collection of the artist's work.
• Outside, sculpture in the garden from Roman times onwards, including Mimmo Paladino's Dormienti (2011) in the fountains.
• The SeSaMoNet tactile route for blind visitors, in place since 2011 with RFID-tagged platforms and a free kit from the museum staff.

Context and history

The gallery opened in 1933 as the first civic museum of Sardinia, an early statement that a regional capital could collect its own art seriously. The Sardinian core accumulated through purchase and donation across the century; the 1999 Ingrao acquisition changed its standing nationally, adding Futurist and Metaphysical masterpieces to the island's painters. Later restorations tied to the Ingrao collection shaped the current layout, and the museum now also houses a specialist library in art history, runs temporary exhibitions, education programmes and film and music seasons. A standing display section, "Collezioni di un Secolo breve", reinterprets the holdings for contemporary audiences.