Biddas - Sardinia's Abandoned Villages Museum

The Biddas Museum is the first museum in Italy dedicated to the theme of depopulation and abandonment of inhabited centers in borgo di Sorso in Sardinia. This phenomenon is a red wire of Sardinian history and many other Mediterranean regions, today as in the Middle Ages, in the Eighteenth Century and in the Fourteenth Century. The inhabited centers stable and winning by a side - able to survive and prosper- and other losers, which succumb and from which the inhabitants go away. Biddas, set in a plane of the Baronial Palace of Sorso, illustrates the sardinian case with a journey back in time from the depopulation processes of contemporary age of the internal areas of the Island, until arriving to the abandoned medieval village of Geridu, the first in Sardinia to be been excavated in extension.

To Geridu is dedicated a hall of the museum, where are shown the main results of the research to today carried out in this village. The case-study of Geridu represents a model of the informative potential of the abandoned villages of Sardinia. Biddas aims to become also a port capable of generating attention for the protection of the archaeological heritage of the abandoned villages of Sardinia and to emphasize the urgency of a territorial planning of this heritage widespread.

In spite of the fact that there is a museum based largely on an archaeological perspective of the theme of the abandoned villages, is not a museum of archaeological finds. Rather than as a place of contemplation of things, Biddas wants to establish itself as the place where read differently the reality of depopulation of rural areas of the interior of Sardinia and discover the wide dimension diachronic. Sociology, Anthropology and Archeology are closely intertwined in the exposure that aims at the construction of a structured learning environment that involves the visitor with suggestions, keywords, reconstructions, sounds and a direct contact with the materials. Biddas uses a communicative apparatus modern and efficient, with a particular attention to the school didactics and childhood, offering spaces playful and a path designed for young visitors.

Opening times:
Monday - closed
Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday - 3:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Wednesday, Friday, Sunday - 9:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m.

Guided visits on booking for groups (minimum 10 people), even outside the days and the opening hours.