MuDIS: Museo Diffuso dell’Insediamento Sparso

Il Museo diffuso dell’insediamento sparso (The Museum of the Scattered Settlement; MuDIS) deals with the protection and enhancement of the cultural heritage of Sulcis, a region in southern Sardinia. This vast and wild territory is covered by a constellation of settlements, from Nuragic, Phoenician and Punic to contemporary ones.

Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, a new phase of repopulation of the Sulcis territory began, which took place through the use of a settlement system unique to the entire island, that of the furriadroxius and medaus: small, basically autonomous farms, which marked the area's landscape with unmistakable traits. Furriadroxius and medaus constituted one of the main sources of the population's economic livelihood until the modern age, when the local economy changed from agricultural to industrial.

In this particular historical moment, the strong crisis of metropolitan life models, return migration, conscious neo-entrepreneurship, conversion of traditional enterprises into ecological forms, new ethical farmers, can play a central role in the process of protecting and enhancing Sulcis by creating the opportunity to reinterpret these rural places for a desirable development of the territory, i.e. the best possible sustainable development.

We are convinced that there can be no valorisation without an appropriate use of the recovered asset and that there can be no development without continuity of the choices that have always characterised the local community. For this reason, the diffuse museum proposes initiatives aimed at highlighting the potential existing in Sulcis in order to define possible paths for a new rurality, for ecological transition and quality of life or, as Costantino Nivola preferred to call it, ‘the art of living’, which is the basic reference for all MuDIS actions.