Franceschini's idea: take the Giants of Mont'e Prama on a world tour to promote them

Just four months ago, an uproar had broken out in Sardinia just because the giants of Mont’e Prama, the wonderful Iron Age statues discovered in 1974-1975, were to be moved from Cabras to Cagliari for conservation work: who knows what will happen now that Culture Minister Dario Franceschini has launched the idea, which will surely be considered crazy by many, of sending the giants on a world tour, as if they were rock stars, as the intent to promote them.

These are precisely the words of the minister, speaking at the presentation of the exhibition Sardinia Megalithic Island - from menhirs to nuraghi: stories of stone in the heart of the Mediterranean, which will open on July 1 at the National Museum of Prehistory and Protohistory in Berlin and will move in four stages between the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the National Archaeological Museum in Thessaloniki and the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. The July 1 date will also coincide with the birth of the foundation, formed by the Region of Sardinia and the Ministry of Culture, to manage the Giants. “We could reason,” the minister said, “while waiting for the work to create the museum in Cabras, about an international itinerary of the Giants, of course with all the guarantees of protection and safety, so that the opening of the final location could represent a major international event. Sardinia has an incredible natural and landscape heritage that can be complemented by an infinite cultural, archaeological, and artistic heritage that has not been known and valued by the country in past years. And this exhibition will make Sardinia’s extraordinary cultural heritage known all over the world.”

The first comments on social media are obviously completely against Franceschini’s proposal: there are those who propose, if anything, to send reproductions, but to keep the originals in Sardinia. A practice, that of traveling exhibitions of reproductions, which is certainly not new, which works, and which for “marketing” purposes could also be more suitable for the purpose (who will go to see the originals in Sardinia if they have already seen them, for example, in the United States or Japan?).

In the photo: the Giants of Mont’e Prama.

Franceschini's idea: take the Giants of Mont'e Prama on a world tour to promote them

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