Cagliari archaeology museum: €10, open every day

The Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Cagliari opens every day of the week from 8:30 am to 7:30 pm, and one €10 ticket covers both it and the Pinacoteca Nazionale in the same building complex.

€10, and the seven-day week

Entry is €10 full and €5 reduced, with a special €2 rate for EU citizens aged 18 to 25 and free entry under 18 (2026). An annual pass is €36, which pays for itself on the fourth visit.

The ticket is a single one, valid for the archaeological museum and the Pinacoteca Nazionale together. Opening runs daily from 8:30 am to 7:30 pm, and the desk stops selling at 6:45 pm.

Daily opening matters more than the price. Most Italian state museums lose Monday, and a Sardinian trip built around ferries or a Sunday flight often lands on exactly the wrong day. Prices on this page are in euros.

7,000 years in about 4,000 objects

The collection holds more than 4,000² objects covering close to 7,000² years, from the Neolithic to the early Middle Ages. Four groups carry it: Neolithic mother goddesses, nuragic bronze figurines, Phoenician and Punic jewellery, and Roman statuary.

The bronzetti are the ones people come back for. They are small, votive, and the closest thing to a self-portrait that the nuragic civilisation left, which is why they do more work than the architecture at explaining who built Su Nuraxi.

A museum cut out of an arsenal

The building is the Cittadella dei Musei, made between 1956 and 1979 out of the royal arsenal and the medieval walls of the Castello district. Since 2019 the museum has been part of a Ministry of Culture institute with special autonomy.

Special autonomy is why the timetable and the pricing here look unlike the rest of the regional network: the institute sets its own. The approach is uphill through the old fortified quarter, which is a walk rather than a stroll.

What this page does not claim

Nothing on the museum page we read documents a display of the Mont'e Prama giants, which are regularly attributed to this collection online. That claim is not verified here and is not repeated.

If the giants are your reason for the trip, write to the museum first. Sardinia moves that material between institutions, and a confident sentence on a travel site isn't a confirmation.

The amphitheater up the hill

Cagliari's Roman amphitheater was built between the late 1st and the early 2nd century AD in ancient Carales, held an estimated 10,000³ spectators on three tiers of seating, and was partly cut straight into the rock. It is ticketed separately and keeps the underground rooms for gladiators and animals.

The steel and timber cover installed for concerts between 2000 and 2011 has been taken off, and the site went back to being read as archaeology rather than as a venue. The rest of the city is at Cagliari.

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