One of the most distinctive aspects of Sardinian cultural traditions is food, narrated in its evolution over thousands of years: not only foods, but also the cultivation, preservation, transformation and production techniques. All this inside a seventeenth-century Campidano manor house ‘with a courtyard’: it is Casa Steri, in the historic centre of Siddi, a rural village ‘lying’ at the foot of the giara of the same name. The theme of the museum exhibition is the history of the Island’s food since the Nuragic age and it is divided into various spaces, residential and productive. You will visit rooms dedicated to the production cycle of milk and oil. It is no coincidence that Siddi is part of the Italian ‘Città dell’Olio’ (Cities of Oil) circuit. You can also admire a grain mill with a rare eighteenth-century millstone powered by horses. In the kitchen, you will see traditional objects such as sieves, baskets and clay scivedde (containers).

You can also visit rooms used as shelters for work and farmyard animals, among which stables, where tools for branding livestock and wine-making equipment are on display. There is also a granary, with various tools needed for working in the fields: ploughs, hoes, sickles and seeders. In the various rooms, there are panels with texts describing traditional farming activities, which the inhabitants of the village helped write, as a ‘historical memory’ and source of knowledge handed down by the community. Events and temporary exhibitions are often held in the ‘reception room’ of the house, in which the walls are painted with Art Nouveau motifs. Workshops are also periodically organised in the museum, during which you can learn techniques for making products like pasta, bread and desserts and learn about the characteristics and curiosities of the products of Sardinian cuisine.

The Siddi territory combines captivating natural environments with an important archaeological patrimony: the two aspects coexist in the park of sa Fogaia, a kilometre and a half from the town. In a forest of holm oaks and Mediterranean scrub there are numerous plant species, aromatic plants and flowers, together with about 60 bird species – which you can learn more about at the Ornithological Museum of Sardinia, the only one of its kind on the Island –, without forgetting reptiles, hares and foxes. In the upper part of the park, you’ll find the nuraghe sa Fogaia, with a more ancient core and buildings added later on. A few kilometres further north, on the Giara di Siddi, one of the most famous and best-preserved Giants’ Tombs awaits you: sa Dom’e s’Orku. It is a megalithic tomb dating back to the Bronze Age and was made with large blocks of basalt from the same giara, set in a splendid landscape.