San Sperate, Megalithic Garden

Megalithic garden. Photo by Marta Cincotti, 2025, from Catalogo BBCC

The Megalithic Garden is a public green area located along Via Risorgimento, created starting in the Seventies on the initiative of the sculptor Pinuccio Sciola, as part of the larger “Museum Country” project that transformed San Sperate into an open-air public art laboratory. The artist, after international experiences and research on Mediterranean megalithism, conceived this space as an experimental place where art could dialogue with the community. The stone works, inspired by menhirs and archetypal Nuragic forms, are not archaeological reconstruction, but constitute a critical and symbolic reworking of the island's cultural roots. The garden, with its twenty-eight artifacts, represents one of the first applications in Sardinia of the concept of a widespread museum, anticipating reflections on the enjoyment of the urban landscape as a cultural space. Overall, critics have recognized a significant example of integration between contemporary sculpture, historical memory and territorial identity. The space, conceived as an urban park and meeting place, houses a collection of about twenty-eight sculptural stone works that reinterpret forms and symbols of megalithic and nuragic art in a contemporary key, including menhirs, dolmens, steles and sculptures in the shape of “ears”. The installations, large and distributed in space, are integrated with the vegetation of the garden, creating visual paths and relationships between the works. The sculptures are distributed in cores arranged according to radial and semicircular lines, with an arrangement that enhances internal views and overall perception. Along the central axis, the fountain at one end, the Memorial to the Fallen in the middle position and a small amphitheater at the opposite end define the perspective of the garden, configuring the rectangular space stretched through a sequence of focal points. The green area is characterized by lawned surfaces and dirt paths that wind through medium and tall trees in small, more natural wooded areas. Rows of trees and tree borders delimit the perimeter of the area and define its paths.

Aspects of interest
The whole is unique in the urban context, an expression of the “Museum Country” project initiated by Sciola in San Sperate, in which art, landscape and community merge into an experience of collective enjoyment. The garden is characterized by a scenographic layout that alternates full and empty spaces, with large scale sculptures that emerge like stone walls within the vegetation. The visual effect is based on the contrast between the monumental nature of megalithic forms and the collected dimension of the urban space that houses them. The semicircular arrangement of the stone benches, oriented towards the small theater, gives the whole a strong theatricality. The views change dynamically along the interior paths: the visitor experiences perspectives that relate the sculptural artifacts to the trees, in a continuous dialogue between nature and artifice.