Stintino exists because of an eviction. On 22 June 1885 the Italian government decided to put a quarantine station and a penal colony on the island of Asinara, and those who lived there — Sardinian shepherds and fishermen who had come from Camogli and from Ponza — had to leave. Before the eviction two brothers from Sassari pleaded their cause and obtained an indemnity of seven hundred and fifty lire per family, and bought the land for a new village. Forty-five families crossed over and founded what they called the Comunione dei 45. The plan laid the houses along a narrow tongue of land between two arms of the sea, and that tongue gave the place its name: isthintìnu, which in Sassarese means gut.
They brought their confraternity across with them too: it had been founded on the island in 1865, twenty years before the eviction, and it is still the one that in September carries the patron in procession over the sea, on the fishermen's boats, in memory of that year. In 1904 sixty-eight men of Stintino set up a mutual cooperative of fishermen; the story of the tuna trap that fed the village is told now in a museum on the quayside. The harbour is still full of lateen-sail boats, and since 1983 they race here: a journalist called this place the capital of the lateen sail, and in the arms of the comune the tower of La Pelosa stands precisely on top of a sail. Stintino was a frazione of Sassari until 1988. And the beach of La Pelosa, at the top corner of Sardinia, is now entered by booking.
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📅 Every year, on 8 September
On 8 September Stintino, a municipality of 1,501 inhabitants in the province of Sassari, celebrates its patroness the Blessed Virgin of the Defence (Beata Vergine della Difesa) with a procession at sea by the fishermen's boats.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Stintino, but an easy day trip away.
