Sant'Antioco stands on top of Sulki, and Sulki is very old indeed: Phoenician merchants founded it in the first half of the eighth century before Christ, roughly in the same years as Carthage, and more than one scholar, among them the archaeologist Piero Bartoloni, names it the oldest city in Sardinia and the oldest urban centre in Italy. The island it sits on is the largest of the Sardinian islands and the fourth in Italy, joined to the mother island by an artificial isthmus that is Roman work and, since the early eighties, by a bridge as well. To Rome it was the island of lead, Insula plumbea, and Strabo placed it beside Cagliari among the most prosperous cities of Sardinia.
Offshore, to the south, lie three uninhabited rocks called Il Toro, La Vacca and Il Vitello, the bull, the cow and the calf. It was probably between the first two that the battle of Sulci was fought in 258 before Christ: the Roman fleet of the consul Gaius Sulpicius Paterculus won, and the Sardo-Punic commander Hannibal Gisco was condemned for the defeat and later crucified. On those same rocks nest today the falcons that Alberto Della Marmora named the Queen's falcons, in honour of Eleonora d'Arborea. The town's own name comes instead from a doctor: Antiochus, martyred here in the second century, who left the island his.
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📅 Every year, on the 15th day after Easter, with the procession of the statue on the seafront
Sant'Antioco celebrates its patron, Saint Antiochus, on the fifteenth day after Easter, with the annual feast also called «Sa Festa Manna» and the procession of the statue along the seafront.
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 Sant'Antioco, but an easy day trip away.
