Discover Nuoro

Nuoro is a town of about 34,000 people at around 550 metres in the mountainous interior of Sardinia, under the granite mass of Monte Ortobene.

It is the provincial capital of the Barbagia, the highland region that was never fully subdued by Rome and has kept more of the island's language and customs than anywhere else.

The town is mostly modern. What it has are museums of unusual quality for its size: the Museo del Costume, the island's principal ethnographic collection; the MAN, a serious contemporary art gallery; and the house where Grazia Deledda, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926, was born.

Around it lie the Barbagia villages — Orgosolo with its painted walls, Mamoiada with its carnival masks, Oliena under the Supramonte — and beyond them limestone mountains, the Gorropu gorge and the Bronze Age sites of the interior.