The landscape of Sardinia has very varied and articulated peculiarities, which are difficult to attribute to uniqueness and homogeneity. The only element of homogeneity found in the Sardinian landscape is in fact “diversity”.
This diversity is expressed in its various components: in the geological structure and its forms (abiotic), in the dynamics and associations of flora and fauna (biotic), in the dynamics of human communities (anthropogenic).

The Sardinian landscape can be considered a true geo-bio-anthropological mosaic.
On the island there are identifiable mountain and lowland environments, erosive fluvial and marine forms, accumulations of sandy sediments on extensive dune formations or beaches, relict forms of glacial climates, coasts high on cliffs or with marine entrances to rias, karstic morphologies, even hypogean, isolated plateaus in mesa areas (tacchi, tonneri, jars, gollei), fragmented wrecks of paleo plains, humid environments (swamps, ponds, lakes, rivers), meander shapes that bear witness to a ancient trace of plain rivers.

The diversity of physical forms found in the Sardinian territory, together with climatic variations, has strongly conditioned the establishment of flora and fauna, increasing environmental complexity. As a result, it has also influenced human settlement, which has taken on an extremely fragmented character. The state of relative isolation of communities has meant that the constant conflict between natural resources and human survival needs favors different forms of settlement. The natural environment has stimulated communities to develop creative solutions whose traces are still perceptible today in the archaeological landscape, for example in the circular stone structure of the 'pinnetos' and the 'coiles', an evolution of the nuragic hut and the nuraghe itself.

The rural landscape characterized by the division into farms, marked by the presence of dry stone walls and hedgerows, the network of paths (“caminus” and “andalas”) and the alternation of crops, stems from the application of a system of rules whose roots lie in the Carta de Logu of the judicial era and which, having evolved over the centuries, were generally observed until the fifties of the twentieth century. These rules, which represented a real code of agrarian law, tried to reconcile the conflictual relationship between cereal agriculture and nomadic herding, based above all on the alternation between arable land ('vidazzone') and pasture ('paberile').

The organization of the settlement space, starting from the villages (the current historic centers), branched out into the territory through a system of paths strategically placed near the water sources. The system took a more structured form in the “pardu”, a belt of small private plots immediately close to the town, which, characterized by a dense network of paths and dry stone walls, guaranteed access to individual farms; and then continued in open lands (“on municipalities”) divided between arable land, pastures and forests (“padentis”) that guaranteed acorns and wood.

The practice of the common use of environmental resources has been partly dismantled by some laws of the Savoy era: the law of closures (1820) and the abolition of obligations (1865). However, this was not enough to erase the signs imprinted on the territory by centuries of land use. The organic relationship between the village, the network of paths, the system of division into farms, the diversity of crops, the pastoral and forest environment still represent a unique landscape.

Starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, the characteristics of the Sardinian landscape have been altered by profound transformations due to the exploitation of mines and forests and more recently to the agrarian remediation of the first half of the twentieth century. These economic activities have also affected the social and economic structure of populations.

Since the 1950s, the advent of the mechanization of agriculture in the plains and hills has led to the abandonment of mountain crops and the consequent transition, in mountain areas, from an agro-pastoral economic system to one based on herding. The erosion of the system of exchange between agriculture and herding has also produced the phenomenon of forest fires, which has transformed a large part of the landscape.

In the sixties, the economic crisis and the demand for labor in the Northern Italian industry helped to cause the abandonment of the countryside and the depopulation of countries with the effect of a change in their physiognomy. Typical traditional architecture is replaced by concrete architecture, often unfinished, while the compactness of old urban centers gives way to a confused proliferation of the inhabited area in the surrounding land.

Industrialization and the creation of the related road, port and energy infrastructure system, as well as the related phenomena of environmental pollution, lead to new landscape transformations. We are witnessing the fragmentation of the agrarian landscape and the distortion of some typical landscapes. The industrial settlements and the processes of tourist urbanization of coastal areas have definitely marked a reversal of the trend in the settlement dynamics of Sardinia. Whereas previously the communities were facing inland, the coasts have become poles of attraction for an increasingly aggressive real estate market.

In recent decades, the regional territory has been affected by significant transformations both of a purely physical nature with direct effects on the morphology of places, and of a communicative-behavioral order with radical changes in the way of living and perceiving settlement environments. The consequent “anthropological metamorphosis” that has affected the communities of Sardinia has determined the birth of new models of culture and development.