Tomba dei Giganti di Coddu Vecchiu

The Tomba dei Giganti di Coddu Vecchiu, near Arzachena in the Gallura region of north-eastern Sardinia, is one of the finest examples of a Giants' Tomb — the monumental collective burials unique to the Nuragic civilisation. The monument was built in the Bronze Age: an earlier gallery grave of the Bonnanaro culture, dating to around 1800–1600 BC, was later monumentalised by the Nuragic people who added the great curved forecourt and its towering carved stele. Its defining feature is the central stele, a single dressed granite slab standing over four metres high, carved in relief with a framed panel and a low doorway at its base that symbolically marked the threshold between the living and the dead. Flanking it, a semicircular setting of upright stones forms the exedra, a ceremonial forecourt where rites for the dead were performed, while behind the stele a long rectangular gallery built of orthostats and capstones served as the communal burial chamber for the clan. These Tombe dei Giganti — so named in local tradition for their colossal scale — are found only in Sardinia and represent the funerary architecture of Nuragic society at its height. Coddu Vecchiu was excavated and studied in the 20th century and is well preserved, allowing visitors to read clearly the relationship between stele, exedra and corridor. It forms part of the exceptionally rich Arzachena archaeological park, and is most rewardingly visited on a combined ticket alongside the nearby Nuraghe La Prisgiona, a major nuragic settlement, and the Li Muri necropolis of pre-Nuragic stone circles, which together span Sardinian prehistory across more than a thousand years. Set among the granite hills and Vermentino vineyards of Gallura, the tomb is an accessible yet powerful introduction to the island's Bronze Age cult of the ancestors, its great stele one of the most photographed prehistoric monuments in northern Sardinia.