Nuraghe Tanca Manna

On a granite hill inside the modern city, the single-tower nuraghe of Tanca Manna keeps watch over Nuoro, with views running to Monte Ortobene. University excavations have uncovered an early village of rectangular huts around the tower.

Why it matters

Most nuraghi stand in open country; this one stands within the urban fabric of Nuoro, on the hill of Tanca Manna in a dominant position over the city, reached from Via Martiri della Libertà in its southern part. The regional tourism portal counts more than twenty nuraghi in the Nuorese territory and classes Tanca Manna among the simple, single-tower examples — but its setting makes it exceptional for visitors. The tower dates to the Middle Bronze Age, and the settlement around it was occupied from the Final Bronze Age to the beginning of the Iron Age. Few Sardinian towns can offer a Bronze Age monument a short walk from the centre, paired with research that is actively rewriting what is known about it.

What to notice

The tower rises on an outcropping rock spur that forms part of its base and walls, and the roughly hewn granite blocks give the whole structure the mass the regional portal calls a granite colossus. The central chamber is covered by a tholos, the characteristic false dome, and opens two opposing niches, one of them cut directly into the bedrock. Around the tower, the village once extended down the hillside towards the town with more than 150 huts. The striking detail is their shape: these are rectangular dwellings, reflecting an early nuragic residential model, unlike the circular huts of later centuries. Excavations have exposed internal dividing walls, benches built of horizontal slabs and central hearth plates set into the floors. Among recent finds are a pintadera — a stamp used for decorating — decorated jugs and spindle whorls, which the portal notes are now exhibited.

Context and history

Archaeological research has refined understanding of the site in the last decade. Campaigns run by researchers from the University of Bologna and the University of Sassari — Maurizio Cattani, Rossana Conti, Florencia Debandi and Demis Murgia — reported preliminary results for 2013–2014 and published the 2017–2023 campaigns in the peer-reviewed journal IpoTESI di Preistoria in 2024. Their ceramics place the tower's beginnings in the initial phases of the Middle Bronze Age, and they distinguish two coexisting phases on the granite spur: an earlier one that can be ideally likened to the protonuraghi, and the single-tower nuraghe itself. Earlier interventions in the 1960s and early 2000s, plus a 2005 restoration, had altered parts of the site, and later research revisited the site's layout, including the route affected by those restorations.