Nuoro, Museum of Sardinian Popular Life and Traditions - Costume Museum

The Museum represents all aspects of the material culture of traditional Sardinia (clothes, jewelry, textile and wooden artifacts, weapons, masks, breads, popular music instruments, household and work tools and tools, etc.). Particular attention is also paid to the representation of intangible assets (popular religion, superstition festivals, traditional carnivals, music, song and dance, etc.).
The collections include about 8000 finds, dating mostly from the period between the end of the 19th century and the first fifty years of the 20th century. About 80 men's and women's clothes and various children's clothing are on display, all authentic and actually used before the museum's acquisition. They are representative of the typologies of the different historical-geographical subregions of the island and are exhibited on a rotating basis both for conservation purposes and to make it possible to enjoy most of the collection.
The Museum presents a vast collection of jewels and amulets. Many finds are an integral part of popular clothing (buttons, brooches, chains); others are objects of adornment for the person (earrings, pendants, rings); still others are amulets, votive offerings and objects of devotion (rosaries, reliquaries, medals, crosses).
There are several textile creations that constitute examples of a tradition practiced in every village on the island in the first half of the twentieth century and which formed the basis on which the well-known current artisanal production is based.
Wooden face masks, cowbells and sheepskins represent the various manifestations that have their roots in the distant events of the peoples of the Mediterranean. The rooms dedicated to these unique testimonies display the masks of the 'Thurpos' and 'Eritaju' by Orotelli, the 'Boes' and 'Merdules' by Ottana and the 'Mamuthones' and 'Issohadores' by Mamoiada. About 60 instruments of popular Sardinian music can be seen, together with various devices and sound toys.

Numerous wooden objects with carving work, pastoral tools in worked horn, cork, ornaments for oxen, vegetable fiber baskets dating back to the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century are exhibited.
Finally, the museum's windows display about one hundred traditional breads, part of the collection of more than 600 varieties, most of which have long since gone out of use. A staple food, common to many Mediterranean peoples, bread marked the rhythms of Sardinian life: the succession of seasons and work cycles, holidays, happy and sad family anniversaries. They document an extraordinary and widespread complex of skills in figurative modeling, which forms part — such as spinning, weaving, running the house — of the more general body of knowledge typical of Sardinian women.

Why it is important to visit it
The Museum is the most important regional ethnographic collection permanently open to the public. The number, the quality, the aesthetic value of the materials on display, the contents and the exhibition methods make a visit essential both for those who visit Sardinia for tourist purposes and for all scholars of demoethnoanthropological subjects.