Bithia

Bithia is the remnant of an ancient settlement on Sardinia's southern coast, today largely submerged or buried under sand and largely unrecognizable as a city. It appears in ancient sources under slightly different names — Pliny the Elder called it Bitia, while Claudius Ptolemy recorded it as Bithia — suggesting it was a recognized coastal town during antiquity, likely founded during the Phoenician colonization of Sardinia in the first millennium BC and later absorbed into the Roman sphere. Archaeological investigations in the 20th century uncovered traces of the settlement near modern Chia. For visitors, it is less a site to see than a place to contemplate: a town that effectively vanished, surviving only as a footnote in ancient geographical texts.