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The Former Royal Museum (Ex Regio Museo) is one of the exhibition spaces of the National Museums of Cagliari.
The Royal Archaeological Museum was built in 1904 based on a project of the Cagliari architect Dionigi Scano, in the area where was previously set the Mint building. The exposition of archaeological collection, previously housed in Palazzo Vivanet, was curated by Antonio Taramelli, Superintendent of Antiquities in Sardinia.
The Museum remained open to the public until the late 1980s, when it began relocating to its new location site within the Citadel of Museums.
It reopened to the public in 2022 and, after a series of renovations and redesigns, now hosts part of the Museums’ activities, like conferences and other cultural activities, as well as part of the storage facilities, which are accessible to visitors. These include a substantial selection of Spano, Timon, and Gouin collections.
In 2022, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the building’s atrium was dedicated to Doro Levi, the Museum’s Director, Superintendent and professor of archaeology at the University of Cagliari, who in 1938 was a victim of racial laws and was forced to abandon the important work he was carrying on in Sardinia. In the lobby are also commemorated Antonio Gramsci and Francesco Cocco Ortu, a politician who left to the Museum in his will the silver plaque given to him by the Sardinians for his 80th birthday in 1922. On display there are busts of three figures closely linked to the Museum and to the history of Sardinia: Alberto Ferrero della Marmora, Giovanni Spano (by Giuseppe Sartorio), Antonio Taramelli, and a portrait of Filippo Vivanet.
The first room, on the other hand, was dedicated in 2023 to Giovanni Lilliu, the father of Nuragic archaeology, with his masterful excavation and study of Su Nuraxi in Barumini.
Conference room is dedicated to Ferrucio Barreca (1923-1986), an illustrious archaeologist, Archaeological Superintendent for the provinces of Cagliari and Oristano, and university professor of Phoenician-Punic archaeology in Cagliari.
A spacious terrace at the rear of the building offers a panoramic views of the city of Cagliari, its gulf, and Campidano plain.
