Castle of Sanluri

Peter IV, King of Aragon, had the Castle of Sanluri built after the Peace Treaty of Sanluri, signed between the Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica (belonging to the Crown of Aragon) and the Kingdom of Arborea; it was completed twenty-seven days later, as recorded in a ledger from the Archives of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona, and is the only one still intact and habitable in all of Sardinia.

The Castle, with its square layout measuring approximately 27x27 metres, about 10 metres high, and its small crenelated turrets, stands not much higher than the village and, because it could not be easily defended and stood at the border between the Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica and the Kingdom of Arborea, it was often involved in the wars that marked the history of the island between the 14th and the 15th century and that saw the Crown of Aragon and the Crown of Arborea up against each other.

Over the centuries, the Castle changed hands until the 1920s, when Nino Villa Santa, an army officer and a member of the General Staff of the Duke of Aosta, bought it and converted it partly into a residence and partly into the Museo del Risorgimento, visited for the first time in 1939 by Prince Umberto and Princess Marie-Jose of Italy.

The Castle is currently home to lots of collections, the most outstanding being a collection about the Risorgimento and the First World War, which includes relics from Garibaldi’s age, weapons and military camping tools, vintage newspapers and the Tricolore, the flag of Italy which flew in a Trieste that had just been returned to Italy in 1918.

Of extraordinary beauty are undoubtedly the artistic wax sculptures that include over 400 works dating from the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the fascinating Napoleonic section and the prestigious collection of letters and autographs of the poet Gabriele d'Annunzio.