Farewell, Sardinia

Tharros

 Tharros, the most important city of Phoenician Sardinia in 600 BC, stands against a windy hill between a peaceful and a beating shore of the Gulf of Oristano. It has at least four mighty temples, one to Demeter, and three thermes (hot healing baths) were used by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and then the Romans. At sunset the wind is high and the water pounds a pale sandy beach. A Nuraghic village preceded Tharros on this remote tip of land, where sea gulls hang suspended in the strong wind. There was a tophet here, too.

Tharros

Two joggers have gone down to the water with some of the stray dogs that linger around here, but the sweet-faced retriever lies down in the cooling shadows as we walk the Phoenician village after hours.

At this beautiful cape with its Spanish tower mounted on velvet twists of the rocky hill, we complete our viaggia. We are finishing a little ahead of schedule, but I am so tired.

Spanish tower

On our journey the Nuraghe have captivated us most, and the rough proud land that insists on its own destiny. Within the brown stones of the prehistoric towers is a stillness that anchors one's being. Brown round stones, by the tonnage, piled high despite their inconceivable weight, surround you up to a high conical dome several meters high. A central tholos--the strange soaring ceiling of stones-- connects to the peripheral three or four towers, but the central tower is the one with the chill wind of a grotto. In these still thick stones the chamber tapers to a point, while the outside grows thicker, the chamber where the chieftain lived. Three thousand five hundred years ago these little people, who preserved their images in Giacometti-like bronzes, somehow wrestled such tonnage to build towers of up to 20 meters.

San Giovanni di Sinnis

Later stone-heavers were the Victorini monks, who around the millennium renovated the oldest church on the island, St. Giovanni di Sinis (540 AD), that stands outside Tharros. St. Giovanni had the simple Greek cross design of Byzantium, but the monks of Marseilles gave it an apse, making the shape of the building a more modern cross, though the outside still looks something like a hobbit dwelling. Two pigeons whir back and forth and complain of our presence in their haven of dense simplicity.

San Giovanni di Sinnis

Hiking the Devil's Saddle

Roman and WWII ruins

One of our last outings: a hike on the Devil's Saddle, a huge outcropping of calceous rock over the Poetto Beach where we have been staying. When Satan fell from heaven, his saddle fell here. We missed the path and took the periphery, a precipitous drop to our side into the indigo waters, finding our footing on white rock that suddenly seemed like a Roman road--it turned out it was. We came across a the ruins of a Roman fort and a WWII lookout that had been erected from the stone there to look like the crumbling Roman ruin. We came across a Roman well, as we trod the smooth white Roman road bed. All around us fragrance and brush, and then palm trees, and the exquisite blue against the stark white of the rock and beach. Far below two young men sunbathed nude. As we finished the treacherous uneven path, we encountered yet another Italian cyclist---about to do the crazy path on trailbike, as his girlfriend struggled behind.

On our last day out we saw the extensive Nuraghe Arrubiu, and I got my farewell embrace from a little wild cat filled with affection.

Like our affection, for this savage land. We'll miss you, Rebel Island.

The Nuraghe

What they once were

So close to concluding this chronicle--however sketchy---of our travels in Sardinia, I must once again return to the Nuraghe, the stone towers and huts that captivated us as we stood inside of them and experienced the stillness of their power.

How they look today

The name Nuraghe has unknown origins in oral history. Unique in the 1500 BC world of the Myceaneans and Egyptians and Cypriots and Etruscans, they were an architectural achievement of an apparently non-literate peoples who nonetheless created a major civilization from thousands of years B.C. Of the more than 7,000 Nuraghe that have been registered, only a fraction have been excavated. This is one project the European Union, rightly, funds. The seemingly crude ruins that are left behind bely the architectural soundness--the niches that lightened the load of the rocks, the corbels that supported upper terraces, the skill in splitting the stones using only pieces of wood that were swollen with water, the deliberate design of the lintels that balanced the weight over doorways--and the profound experience of standing inside of them. In Myceneaen (Achean, or Greek ruins), a similar stone structure is covered with an earth mound, but these bare stone towers of Sardinia have much more grandeur.

The Meeting Hall

Climbing through the brush

The architecture seems to have been developed from earlier necropolises, where communal graves came to be covered with corridors of stone, that developed into tholos roofs. The tholos is the kind of ceiling in the Nuraghe that arches several meters overhead, as rocks were placed in a gradually narrowing dome, and then capped with the tholos or capstone. Above the capstone an earthen   floor was the basis of the next story. The outside walls of these stories, each closing to a narrow opening and a capstone, slope inward more gradually, so a thick layer of stone outside the dwelling protects it. Around these stories, usually three comprising up to 20 meters high, a winding stairway would often run through the outer wall, although dozens of different architectural designs have been found. The stairway might be missing, implying a ladder was used to reach upper floors, or might be found in external structures. One guide showed us how light reflected off slanted walls at each opening (oriented to a position of sunset or sunrise) lit the interior--her own conjecture. For lack of written records, the history of the Nuraghe is continually reinterpreted. But the Nuraghe are everywhere, in fields of sheep, by the side of highways, sometimes with ticket office and guide, but more often not.

In the women's tower

Warriors, chief, wrestlers

The lives of the Nuraghic people are recorded in their bronzetti, beautiful tiny cast bronze statues created since 1000 BC, though the Nuragic civilization is considered to have its earliest beginnings in 1800 BC. They show warriors with bows and arrows, wrestlers and figures with four eyes and multiple arms, perhaps demons or gods, women making offerings, a famous woman holding what seems to be a slain warrior on her lap, animals, ships, and what seem to be figures offering animals for sacrifice. Most men wear daggers around their necks. Women seemed to have prominent roles in a society that included builders and weavers and potters and warriors. From the structure of the village, with a large tower in the center sometimes surrounded by multiple towers, it seems that there would have been a chief, in a hierarchical structure of some sort. In the large ruin of Nuraghe Arrubiu, one of the towers is called the women's tower, because it contains the remains of women's work. In the lovely little village of Armungia which has preserved a Nuraghe in its center, there is a Byzantine well inside, and remains of a Vandal have been found, indicating ongoing use. In Arrubiu a Roman winery operation was found in the courtyard of the Nuraghe, which has some 17 towers. Other Nuraghe stand in fields as lone sentinels, solid as Genoan towers, still holding their secrets.

Excavations have brought to light objects buried in the ruins from throughout the known world, from Palestine, Egypt, Greece. The Nuraghe itself is represented in bronze miniatures, or stone, in significant places like the center of the meeting hall, implying that the architecture of the Nuraghe itself seemed to have a significant or magical meaning. The other plentiful excavations are of pottery, which was elegantly shaped and decorated from early years. Sardinia's rich mines yielded metals which brought contact with other civilizations, starting with the Mycenean in the 13-14th c. BC., continuing with the Phoenicians and Carthaginians. But by the time of Carthage's second attempt at a conquest, in 500 BC, the Nuraghic civilization had passed its strength. It was the end.

Nuraghe Losa

On our last day out, in a sudden chill that told us it was indeed time to leave the island, we saw the extensive Nuraghe Arrubiu with its long walls and many towers. "And that may be the last time we ever stand inside a Nuraghe," said Jacques. "No," I protested, "that can't be." It just can't.

Sant' Antiocho

Far from being the sunny, idyllic fishing village the guidebook promises, Sant' Antiocho seemed gray, the waters swampy.

The day turned gloomy. The famous Basilica with its catacombs was closed (naturally) till 5. A woman came over to the car to explain all this in a kind of dialect, and then she waved at me with a giant friendly welcome. We drove down the close, spiraling streets along countless closed stores and found a slightly more appealing café (than where we had desperately taken an espresso amid video machines and loud workers). This one was also alongside the waters swamped with something that looked like industrial waste. We had salad and sandwiches among the few customers. An old gray woman in a large scarf came in, touched me on the shoulder and then touched a man at the next table, who greeted her with a big smile. She sat at a table behind us and took off her scarf, her dolorous narrow face with its long nose draped in gray hair. When I turned back to smile at her her eyes swiveled sideways, as if she didn't want to be noticed. After we left I saw her leave the restaurant too, putting on her large scarf.

Tophet

We went to the archeological museum and bought 4-in1 tickets for 13 euros, and were plunked down in front of a 4-screen video (an echo of the four quarters of the Sardinian flag that is 4 times the Corsican flag) that raved about Sardinia with very little relevance to the museum. Then we wandered through the rooms of relics retrieved from the nearby Phoenician and Carthaginian necropolis, which includes two tophets.

Tophets are usually thought of in connection with the Carthaginian rite of child sacrifice (controversial among historians), with urns of ashes from infant bodies. But here they are called graveyards of stillborn or infants who died very young. We keep seeing this explanation, keep wondering if we have been brainwashed by the Old Testament to hate the worshippers of Baal. Or do the Sardinians insist on sanitizing the origins of Western culture on their island? They clearly differentiate between Phoenician culture, which came from Lebanon, and the Punic, or the Phoenician North African colony of Carthage which they say was more "African.'" And why do these sacred tophets feel so unpleasant? Is it just my suggestibility? We walked up to a tophet, a windy grave of spiraling pines, a wind that sounded like the stillness of death. Little clay pots were strewn everywhere. Originally they had been tucked into niches in the tufaceous rock.

Now I am sitting at the Basilica, waiting for it to open and waiting for Jacques who is trying to establish why we have paid for 4 tours when 2 of them are closed. Across the cobbled street a lady in her bathrobe comes out of her house. Children are emerging from the church, dragged by harried mothers. Do we want to see yet another Punic necropolis, I wonder. And the fortress tower, which the Savoy rulers in Cagliari had told the townspeople to build at their own expense in 1814 as protection against the Barbary pirates? Ten pirate ships arrived from Tunisia and the few dozen defenders took to the tower and were killed. The pirates were pleased to make off with 158 white slaves, including some half-dressed women. Do we want to look at those bare stones?

Basilica St. Antiochus

The hour has struck for the Basilica to open.

The Basilica has the simplest of Romanesque interiors in huge squares of rough stone. This is the site of Sardinia's most ancient monument, says the plaque at the entrance.
An early Byzantine church of the 5th century, built in a simple Greek cross form, it was elongated in a similar rough, dark stone in the 12th c. The crucifix is in the womb of the convex altar, and the side chapels are as rough as caves. The decoration is simply wood-carved statues. Where normally the Stations of the Cross line the walls, instead we see portraits of Jesus' head, only his head, through the stages of the tragedy.

A lady has come to pray, right behind me. This is the hour of mass or of prayer. One by one short round ladies sit next to the priest in his white robes, a few rows ahead, and confide their sorrows. He growls sympathetially as they speak to him in half-whispers Now he exclaims. Now he shakes his white head. Behind me the lady is working through her rosary. Next to me another lady whispers her prayers. Just in front of me an old man is reading from a small book. This is no place for tourists. Outside Jacques is talking on my cell phone with his daughter, who is stressed out studying for her exams.

Another short round Sard lady has approached the priest. "Dice," he says, but she wants to speak more privately so they move into a corner. In this most ancient of churches I vaguely whisper my own prayers. The lady with the priest is weeping. Now she has come back to join another lady, who has already had her turn with him, and they whisper excitedly together.

Jacques has come into the church, like a tall Martian among these people. We speak to the elegant young guide who waits in the church office, and she shows us the crypt, the catacombs of Phoenicians and Carthaginians and Christians, and of the body of the martyr St. Antioch, all the while people praying a few meters away. She speaks quickly in Italian and we don't understand that much, but the old stone has its own language. It is a language deeper and older than the gloomy atmosphere of St Antiocho.

St. Antiochus, a fervent Christian from Mauritius, had prayed down here before his death in the 4th c. He had been martyred here, buried here. Later more wealthy Christians had decorated their burial niches with frescoes, traces of which are still visible. The poor had undecorated pits in the floor. There are older graves, thousands of years old, many of which have never been excavated.

Hypogeal village

We then saw the hypogeal village, that is, reoccupied ancient stone tombs that had been carved into rock, underground. Now decorated with pretty ceramics, these little recycled burial tombs had slept 30 to a room, as people made the pilgrimage to see the remains of St. Antiochus and later redevelop the village. For this village had undergone the same sort of transformation as Nora and the other slender fingers that Sardinia sent out into the sea. First attracting Phoenicians with easy access and sparkling waters, they had been developed by the Romans (this one under Claudius), then abandoned as their vulnerability to Vandal and Arab attacks, and malaria, made life impossible. Later reinhabited, St. Antiochus had developed around the pilgrimage trade and then been peopled with poor migrants who lived in these underground homes.

Between the maracageuse waters and the tophets, the ancient Baal worship and vast acreage of necropolis, and the fact that this city was a kind of Siberia where the Romans sent people to work the mines, St. Antiochus has a savage feeling to it. Above the busy port the Punic burial sites and temple to Astarte and later Demeter feel windy and indifferent. The tophet feels unhappy. What did it really demand of the people here?

But the women of this village seem to cluster around us, eagerly smiling. It is a subtle, strange thing, the way they burst into a kind of fondness. We are pilgrims of a sort, and we are welcome.

Romans, Water Cults, Ancient Worship

The Romans found good reason to penetrate the western interior of southern Sardinia, a region ten times older than the alps, whose mountains emerged from the sea about 600 million years ago. Lead, zinc and silver drew them, like the Carthaginians before them and the Pisans after. Today the region is littered with abandoned mining facilities, majestic 19th c. monsters.

In the solitude of the Valley of Antas is a hint of the Romans who lived there. A temple has been reconstructed to some of its Roman glory, built on top of a crude stone temple of the Carthaginians that dated back to 500 BC. Its deity was called Sid Addir Babai, a father god who was distinctly Sardinian. The Roman temple constructed later was dedicated to Sardus Pater Babay, and then reconstructed under the Emperor Caracalla in the 3rd c. AD. It continued the preexisting Nuragic cult to the great idol of the water and vegation and father universal, the proto-Sard name Babay meaning father. A bronzetti found in a nearby grave is believed to be the deity, but the statue that stood in the temple was monumental. The temple of heavy tan stone columns with Roman capitals looms over herds of sheep clanking and echoing across the valley, as they feed along the facets of its hills.

Grotto di San Giovanni

Nearby we visited the Grotto di San Giovanni, entering past remnants of a pre-nuragic wall that protected its ancient habitations to a swelling chorus of pigeons, their cooing and gulping echoing in that pre-Cambrian cathedral of stalactites. The chorus died down to the whirring of wings and squeaking of bats as we walked through the 850 meters. An old dog barked at us from a side passage at the other end, where we emerged to a sweet forest of delicate oaks. A sign in Italian told us that this wood is not our heritage but is borrowed from our children.

San Salvatore

On another day we drove in search of a church called San Salvatore, following a sign that took us off the obscure two way rural road to a not-quite-village of squat cement blocks for houses, that was said to have been used in some spaghetti westerns, but even that was hard to believe. We drove through narrow alleys between perilous cement walls past a group of men gathered like rough cowboys, till we noticed that some of the small doorways had fine mahogany doors with brass heads for door knockers. A dog wandered in and out through a beaded curtain of one house. In the center of the square, marked by nothing but the iron outline of a small cross, was a tiny country church, 17th c, simple and rural. Inside a bright-eyed functionnaire sat under the wooden eaves. He motioned us down a stone stairway in the center of the nave.

San Salvatore

Below were about six bare stone rooms, one with a primitive stone altar, several with wells or cisterns. The walls seemed smeared with traces of paint amidst the lichen, and were shaped in rough arches. There were remnants of drawings that had a Greek character, but it was impossible to tell when they had been drawn. Some were of primitive animals, one a gorgeous leopard with a forked tail, some beautiful muses.

This crypt had been used for water cults since Nuraghic times, then by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans and Christians. The larger well had the heavy cylindrical shape we had seen of a Paleo-Christian well in Cagliari. The subterranean temple had been dedicated to Mars and Venus about 300 BC. and had been in most or less continuous use, except for a brief Islamic period. The pagan cult of the divine savior became the Christian cult of San Salvatore, its life far longer than the church above it.

San Salvatore

San Salvatore

Crypt of a Cagliari church

We saw wells that had been constructed all over Sardinia in the Nuraghic and pre-Nuraghic times for water worship. And there were churches in Cagliari with crypts below that had wells, in long use that sometimes predated Christianity and its own fish symbol.

Cagliari

Cagliari is Sardinia's largest city with 140,000 inhabitants, breezy and lovely and splashed with sun. The fierce Barbagian spirit is missing here, though there is much to be proud of, but the architecture is largely due to the hated Spanish domination under which Sards were chased from the citadel of the city, even before the Jews were chased away after the directives of the Catholic Spanish Empire. Whereas we are traveling geeks following the ephemeral traces of time, most travelers would rightly see Cagliari as a fabulous place to get sun and sea and Mediterranean leisure.

The Citadel

Cagliari (KALyari)'s history began as a Phoenician port that came under Carthaginian rule, but under the Romans it became a real metropolis with an amphitheatre and water supply and paved roads on the flat coastal plain. The Pisans, who took over Cagliari from the Genoans in 1258, built up the hills to create fortified citadels, with a wall around the sector of the city still called Castello. Aragon conquered it next, bringing in Catalans and Majorcans as well to fill public positions. By 1328 a harsh trumpet announced the curfew, that all Sards must get out of il Castello on pain of severe punishment. The darkest age began in 1479, when Ferdinand the Catholic succeeded to the Spanish Empire.

We drove in after a morning jog on the beach, greeting all and sundry (oggi bella!). Cagliari is a little like San Francisco, airy and lovely, the via Roma that faces the port lined with elegant facades like Florence or Venice but more recent. And then we climbed up winding pedestrian streets where laundry hangs by a shop of gleaming Buddhas and an Indian grocery. A school boy's t-shirt read "I (heart) Sex and Drugs." At a sunny square a huge Roman general in bronze urged his soldiers on, marking with a Roman column Carlo Felici, the north-south former Roman road that is today one of the major highways.

St. Michele

St. Michele was a lavish Baroque Jesuit church with polychrome Genoese marble work and high Spanish cage-like galleries from which nuns and noblewomen hid from view as they attended services. As soon as we sat in a pew, a soft-spoken and well-informed guide introduced himself, and presented the paintings of Sardinian artists of the 17th and 18th.

Everywhere the cruel Spanish had created the grandeur of a the Mediterranean port, everywhere they had exiled and imposed penury on the Sardes. They were succeeded by the House of Savoie, benevolent rulers of the 18-19th c, whose portraits are in the Vice Regio Palace where outstanding grafitti art was also displayed.

Up the hill we climbed, where the climate was more sublime, to the Botanical Garden, simple and academic, an Italian Jardin des Plantes of seemingly 1000's of plants, and a Roman cistern where actors took their refreshment between acts at the ampitheatre. The amphitheatre is just outside the garden, its beauty marred by stadium seats and scaffolding. It seats 10,000, and its underground passages once used for the beasts of the spectacles were later used in WW II as bombing shelters and even homes. We passed students from the nearby university and old people, self-absorbed in the Mediterranean sun.

We climbed through the original white rock boulders of the city's summit, past the prison where laundry hangs from the bars, and onto a rocky abutment which overlooks the city and fort. We strolled down through the public garden, utterly simple and beautiful, with herbs growing and a little lending library in the sun and shade. Now on the eastern side of Cagliari we descended terrace by terrace with views of the city below. The terraces are bars, and people recline with their cocktails on boxy furniture.

Tower of the Elephant

We continued on bumpy medieval roads down to the Museum Citadel and found the only open restaurant in the area, with an enchanting terrace, where we ate focaccio in the windy sun. The tourist season hadn't begun, but at InfoPoints overqualified staff eagerly plied us with maps and brochures. We passed the smooth Genoan Tower of the Elephant, with its carved eponymous beast on a bracket, while high above are the brackets where cages swung with the weight of the chopped heads in them, during the dark years. The Cathedral Santa Maria is elaborate and baroque, but most interesting were the four stone lions inside, gleefully and cruelly pinning down some antique beasts, as well as the extraordinary 12th c. carved Pisan pulpits.

Down we went into the old Jewish ghetto, with its close dark streets, always stopping at the terraces where people lounged, the most beautiful of which is the Bastion San Remy. We kept moving down the medieval stone streets, past a square where children played dodge ball with fond coaches. Ornate churches were filled with the drone of mass, its glum call and response, at this evening hour when everything reopens.

San Saturnino

San Saturnino

We went to Cagliari once more toward the end of our trip, to see the beautiful white stone San Saturnino, that had been built in the 6th c. and extended by the Victorini monks in the 11th. Cats gazed at us from the safety of the archeological dig, either nursing their litters or nestling together. Again we went up the rocky road to the Museum Citadel to see the Archeological Museum, which contains the treasures unearthed in the places we had been visiting throughout Sardinia. The Nuraghic art of the bronzetti, thin geometric bronze figures like tiny Giacometti sculptures, from about 850-500 BC, are perhaps the most striking and most native of anything in this large collection of masks, statues, gravestones and tiny burial objects that have been excavated from Sardinia's old earth. The sea has also yielded Roman, Greek, Egyptian treasures and art from throughout the civilized world of those times. Exquisite jewelry, Egyptian and Roman and Phoenician and Carthaginian accompanied people to the underworld.

Carthaginian necklace

During lunch at the outdoor café we watched as a troup of young people carrying paper shopping bags whisked past us and up to the pinacotheque where we were headed to see the few paintings collected there. What happened next was surreal.

Mercury

Bastion San Remy

When we entered the museum the 20-somethings all stood there, as many uniformed guards as there were paintings, hovering over us as we stopped at each, fairly unremarkable, work. Large healthy young people, they stood at attention like military officers, but not at our service. One guy began giggling uncontrollably, another turned his soulful eyes toward me. We moved the next level down and two of the guys marched past us officiously to take their posts ahead of us, so we moved to a further level down. We looked up to see 5 or 6 young women's heads looming over the banister at us. Was this a joke? A happening? Performance art? We'll never know. As we left they gathered around us once again, shoulder to shoulder. It was the best thing we'd seen in the pinacotheque.

Phoenicians in Sardinia

View from the promontory of Nora

The Phoenicians, merchants and fishermen who originated in Lebanon, came to southern Sardinia at what is now Nora about 800BC. Like the other Phoenician city Tharros in the west, Nora forms a promontory, with sparkling harbors on either side. The Phoenicians found abundant fish in the lapis waters, and could transfer their fishing boats from one harbor to the other, protecting them from high winds. Travelers of the "known world," they brought with them abundant artifacts that have been found in the Nuraghic sites (including Mycenean, Egyptian and Semitic), and a written language. There is no trace of writing among the Nuraghic peoples (1500-800 BC) though one of our tour guides is positive that they must have had one, and that it is lost with the decomposition of writing surfaces. Perhaps the word "Nora" comes from the ancient word "Nuraghe." Or, according to classical tradition, Norax was a son of Hermes who founded Nora. A Phoenician tablet has been found at Nora, so far untranslatable because it seems to use the Phoenician alphabet to write in another language--perhaps the Nuraghic one. On it is the first known use of the word for Sardinia, Sardara.

Phoenician tablet mentioning Sardinia

Nora

Nora was therefore an important port of call for the Phoenicians, so close to the north of Africa, which would bring it under the Carthaginians in 5th-3rd c. BC , until the Roman conquest began. The Carthaginians are called "Punic" by the Sards, referring to their status as a Phoenician colony, but distinguishing them as the more warlike invaders. In 283 BC Nora became the seat of the Roman governor during the late Republican era, and "caput viae", i.e. the place from which measurements were taken. Nora was a rich and prosperous Roman city at least until the Vandals occupied Sardinia, between 456 and 466 AD. The city was probably abandoned because of Arab raids, 7th c AD, that forced the coastal population to retreat inland.

The heart is a Carthaginian signature, in a Roman mosaic

We would visit Tharros--the most important Phoenician city--later in the trip, at twilight after the ticket office closed, accompanied only by a sweet-faced dog who, content with our presence, lay down to sleep on the windy point. But first we saw Nora in the full heat of the day, rewarded by the knowledge of one of those intense, quiet and scholarly guides. Round-faced, in shorts and a baseball cap, he switched softly between English and Italian to explain the ruins as we wandered through their thousand or so years of being Phoenician, Carthaginian and Roman. There was a Roman theatre--not amphitheatre, but an artistic forum--near temples of the Phoenician fertility goddess Tanit, near workshops built in Carthaginian architecture, and even a sign of Carthaginian workmanship on the Roman mosaics. A clay statue of a boy with a serpent has been found, which is believed to be the oracle which spoke from one of the temples.  In the final years Nora became a Roman resort with three thermes, as the center of power moved to Cagliari.

Oracular boy of Nora

Another major Phoenician settlement is on Mount Sirai, which was from the 7th c. BC an extensive necropolis, though only 270 bodies have so far been excavated. Carthaginian burial chambers succeeded the Phoenicians. We could descend into these stone vaults by stairways, and enter various rooms, sometimes with columns. There, as near Nora and later at St. Antiochus, we would see the remains of tophets.

Tophets have long been considered burial sites where infants, sacrificed to Ba'al by being burned alive, are buried. This would have been a Carthaginian practice, not Phoenician. The practice is mentioned in the works of Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, Tertullian and others, but not in the writings of Livy or Polybius. It is mentioned in the Old Testament, and by rabinnical commentators. But in Sardinia, the information on tophets is different, of:

"a sacred place where stillborn children who died before integration into the community were buried. The divine protectors are Baal Hammon and his female partner, Tinnit. It was an open space around an altar built on a rock outcrop, which would later become a temple, with the remains of children in cinerary urns, and steles for various deities."

At first I considered that the Sardinians couldn't stomach the idea of child sacrifice, particularly those who would have aided in the excavations. But in the Cagliari museum tophets are clarified as follows.

"Till a few years ago, the tophet was supposed to be the place where the children of the most important families in the city were sacrificed to give welfare to the city. Now, new studies of the ashes, of the inscription on the stele and of the ancient written sources, bring us to consider the tophet a cemetery where are buried the children born dead or dead shortly after birth."

Apparently, there is wide disagreement among scholars, but, according to Wikipedia, there is general agreement that there were some Carthaginian places where child sacrifice was practiced.

Temple to Ashtarte, Mt. Sirai

Egyptian fertility god, Bes

Mt. Sirai also has a temple to the Phoenician goddess Ashtarte, that was an open-air altar from the 8th c. BC, over a pre-existing nuragic tower and a water tank. In the 3rd c. BC an actual temple was built, with an 8th c. BC statue of Ashtarte. Later Demeter replaced the Phoenician goddess, while the male deity was Bes, the Egyptian fertility god.

The Phoenician temple and houses were constructed using rhyolite, or the local red marble, which I found moving--it is a semi-precious stone I often wear.