Sardinia Sardinia Sardinia ( ; ; or ; ; ; ; ) is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea (after Sicily and before Cyprus). It is located west of the Italian Peninsula and to the immediate south of the French island of Corsica. Sardinia is politically a region of Italy, whose official name is "Regione Autonoma della Sardegna" / "Regione Autònoma de Sardigna" (Autonomous Region of Sardinia), and enjoys some degree of domestic autonomy granted by a specific Statute. It is divided into four provinces and a metropolitan city, with Cagliari being the region's capital and its largest city as
History of Sardinia the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1324. The Kingdom was to last until 1718, when it was ceded to the Piedmontese House of Savoy; later, in 1861, it would thus become the Kingdom of Italy and finally in 1946 the Italian Republic. The oldest trace in Sardinia of the anthropomorphic prehistoric primate called "Oreopithecus bambolii" is dated to 8.5 million years ago. In 1996 a hominid finger bone, dated up to 250.000 BC, was found in a cave in the Logudoro region. Modern humans appeared in the island during the Upper Paleolithic, a phalanx dated to 18000 BC had been found