About 20 minutes walk inland from the sailing yacht jetty in the northern corner of Porto Palma is a complex that houses a church, a café, a dolphin research centre and two small museums. All this is within the crumbling buildings that seem to have belonged either to the old granite mines or to some fish processing plant. It's good to see them being reused.
The dolphin research institute is one of a network monitoring sealife around the cetacean sanctuary of which this is the southern apex. It reaches to Toulon at one corner and nearly to Rome at the third. They have lots of doubtless fascinating information but sadly nearly all of it is in Italian. Some excellent pictures though.
One of the museums is dedicated to the complex mineralogy of Sardinia, and its exploitation over the last few hundred years. A huge carving is pictured which was made here and then taken by barges to Ishmalia, via Suez. You can also see examples of the many shells and crustaceans around here, many of which are now very rare but some, such as the green sea urchins, are readily seen when snorkelling.
The other little museum celebrates the sea and lives working at sea around the islands. It's rather a haphazard collection including this beautiful model of a working boat. There is also a fully rigged mast and spars and many smaller versions. Besides this, enormous basket-work cray-pots, a working, wind-up air-raid siren (demonstrated for us by the guide), an early diving bell, many ropes and the biggest knot-boards you've ever seen. Most baffling was a big metal disc, held in a vertical position, inscribed with arcs and mysterious formulae. This turned out to be a calculator for the cannon-batteries firing against enemy aircraft. Once you've got the range (see rangefinders in separate display case), you can calculate the parabola and shot weight you need. It must have taken a while to set up and then some lickety-split mental arithmetic.