Cagliari Events

One enormous festival dominates the Cagliari year, with a full calendar behind it.

Sant'Efisio

From 1 to 4 May. The procession leaves Stampace on the morning of the first and walks the effigy of the saint about sixty kilometres to Nora and back, returning on the evening of the fourth. Ahead of the cart come thousands of Sardinians in the traditional dress of their own villages, each group distinct, with ox-drawn traccas, horsemen and launeddas, the triple clarinet played nowhere else. It has run without interruption since 1657, including through both wars, and it is not a reconstruction.

Holy Week

The Riti della Settimana Santa are Spanish in origin and unlike mainland Italian processions, run by confraternities in hooded robes, with a sequence of rites through the week.

Monumenti Aperti

In May, buildings normally closed to the public — palaces, crypts, cisterns, private courtyards — open free for a weekend, staffed largely by school students who research and present them. It began in Cagliari in 1997 and has since spread across Sardinia and beyond, but this is where it started and where it is largest.

Summer

Concerts and open-air events in the amphitheatre, the Bastione and along Poetto through July and August.

Autumn

Food festivals across the province as the harvest comes in, and the new Vermentino. The sea urchin season opens in the cold months and is taken seriously enough to have its own festivals along the coast either side of the city.

Christmas

Lights through Via Manno and the Marina, nativity scenes in the churches of Stampace, and a city that stays busy outdoors in December because it can.