The new Villa Sulcis museum opened in 2008 and is situated in the municipality of Carbonia, in Via Campania. As this is a municipal archaeological museum, it comes under the group of museums managed by the Autonomous Region of Sardinia. It is managed by the Società Cooperativa Mediterranea, that also manages the archaeological areas in the territory, and is run by the archaeologist Carla Perra.

Figs. 1-2 - The New Civic Archaeological Museum of Carbonia: entrance and territory room (photo from VILLASULCIS VIRTUAL TOUR 2015).

The previous museum building was the mine’s management building, built at the end of the 1930s.

Today the site is modern, arranged into three rooms and with indoor and outdoor, classic and multimedia learning equipment, aiming at giving value to places and reading materials via the presentation of contexts and plastic reconstructions (fig. 3). The main groups of the museum are the historical Pispisa and Doneddu collections, together with acquisitions from the public digs carried out in recent decades.

The documentation shown - that goes from Prehistoric times to the Nuragic Age, the Phoenician and Roman eras up to the late Middle Ages - has a value in all Sardinia and the Mediterranean basin.

Prehistory is documented by several sites, including materials from grottoes and rock shelters (on the whole Carroppu-Sirri) from the domus de janas and the wealth of materials about all phases of prehistory.

There is a lot of Nuragic and Phoenician-Punic age documentation, with well known materials such as the statue of the Astarte from Monte Sirai (fig. 4). There are several 3-D reconstructions, panels and scenographic representations of contexts (fig. 5).

Figs. 3-4 - Reconstruction of the Sirai nuraghe; glass case with several Phoenician materials and the Astarte statue (photo from VILLASULCIS VIRTUAL TOUR 2015).

Fig. 5 - Reconstruction of part of the area of the tophet at Monte Sirai (photo from VILLASULCIS VIRTUAL TOUR 2015).

The museum is connected to the municipal archaeological areas: together they deserve admiration, the maximum of public effort and initiatives in the direction of territorial development based on culture and landscape.