The “Documentation Centre”

The “Documentation Centre”

The ideal starting point of a journey to the discovery of Baunei and Santa Maria Navarrese is the “Documentation Centre” on Via Orientale Sarda, which offers an overview of the significance of the millennial human interaction with the environment in the vast territory of Baunei. The “Documentation Centre” is located in a building that, up until the eighties, was home to the local police station. The construction of new barracks in the district of Monte Colcau meant that the Public Library (which had resided in a room in the Town Hall) could be moved to the “old barracks”. The Library then moved to the former High School in Via San Nicolò, which had closed in 2000, leaving the old building, which has housed the Centre since 2006, available to the community. It is an interactive museum centre spread over three levels: the ground floor, basement and first floor. On the ground floor, an information system on a computer allows visitors to view documents that provide details on various topics. From the ground floor to the basement there are a number of images that retrace backwards “the chronological jump, on a geological scale, from mankind to the emergence of limestone formations”. In the basement, the “Naturalistic Hall” contains a three-dimensional stratigraphy of the Golgo plateau and educational panels on geological and geomorphological aspects, as well as on endemic species of flora and fauna. The basement also houses a reproduction in scale of a portion of the “Grotta del Fico”. On the walls from the ground floor to the first floor are a series of images of the great milestones in the history of Sardinia from Prehistory to the Modern Age, representing the topic “from the appearance of man to the present day”. The interrelationship between man and the environment is illustrated on the first floor, with a dedicated study of the myths and legends that show how the territory has had an impact on the collective imagination of the local population. The first floor also exhibits the reproductions of eight maps, dated 1849, from the so-called “Catasto De Candia - La Marmora”, produced by a team of surveyors led by Captain De Candia in the forties of the nineteenth century and kept in the original State Archives in Cagliari (Fondo Real Corpo di Stato Maggiore, the first complete map of Sardinia). Among other things, the captions on the maps note that the work carried out by De Candia and La Marmora “is historically important for the delimitation of municipal jurisdictions”.