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Housed in the Doria castle, the museum documents the ancient art of basket-weaving, a craft still practised by the artisan women of the medieval village.
The Doria castle stands at the summit of the promontory on which Castelsardo is built, sheer above the sea on the north-west coast of Sardinia. The medieval structure, erected by the Genoese Doria family from the 12th century onward and later contested between Ligurian lordships and the Crown of Aragon, passed through centuries of military and political history before finding, in its contemporary restoration, a different calling: housing the Museo dell'Intreccio Mediterraneo (Museum of Mediterranean Weaving), one of the few Italian museums devoted entirely to the working of plant fibres.
The castle's rooms gather artefacts from Sardinia and other countries of the Mediterranean basin, united by the technique of weaving. The base materials are those the land has always offered: asphodel, an herbaceous plant common in the Sardinian countryside, and the dwarf palm, the only palm native to Europe, found along the island's coasts and inland areas. With these fibres the artisan women of Castelsardo produce baskets, hampers, small boxes and everyday objects following patterns passed down orally and through direct imitation, with no support from drawings or written instructions.
What makes the museum distinctive is that the tradition it documents is not a closed chapter. In the medieval village, among the lanes that descend toward the harbour, it is not unusual to come across women sitting outside their homes, hands busy working the fibres. Their gestures are precise, quick, almost automatic: an embodied knowledge still passed on today directly, from one generation to the next. The museum, then, is not archiving an extinct practice, but offering a historical and comparative context to something that still happens beyond its walls.
The comparison with other Mediterranean production broadens the perspective. Placing Sardinian artefacts alongside those from other Mediterranean shores reveals how similar techniques developed independently in geographically and culturally distant contexts, answering the same material needs with formal solutions that are often strikingly alike. This comparative dimension is what sets the museum apart from a simple local ethnographic collection, situating Castelsardo's basket-weaving within a longer, shared history.
Gianni Careddu · CC BY-SA 4.0 — Wikimedia Commons
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