Cagliari has grown a bit
since those lines were written, but some
things remain the same. There is still a
stunning approach from the sea into the Gulf
of Cagliari. The city now has about 160,000
inhabitants (about 400,000 if you include
the greater metropolitan area).
As Forrester noted, the city is ancient,
probably established around the 7th century
BC as one of a string of
Phoenician colonies in Sardinia, including
Tharros. After
a long rule by the Romans, the island was
taken briefly by Vandal raiders and then
became part of the Byzantine Empire. An
interesting period is the one in which
Cagliari was the capital of its own
independent
giudicato
(or kritarchy) in the middle ages.
Both Pisa and Genoa, two of the so-called
Italian "maritime republics," had an
interest in Sardinia as a base for
controlling the commercial routes between
Italy and North Africa. Pisa took Cagliari
for a while but eventually lost out to the
Aragonese, who incorporated the entire
island into the
"Crown
of Aragon". With the fusion of the
houses of Aragon and Castille in Spain in
the late 1400s, Sardinia became part of the
new Spanish empire with Cagliari as the
administrative capital of the vicerealm of
Sardinia.
After the demise of the Spanish empire in
1700 and the subsequent Wars of the Spanish
Succession, the entire island wound up in
the hands of mainland Italian house of
Savoy, whose domain had been limited to the
Piedmont in Northwestern Italy. With that,
the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia was born,
the nucleus of the modern nation state of
Italy. The kingdom was alternately called
Sardinia-Piedmont (putting Sardinia first!),
but that doesn't mean that Cagliari was the
capital. The capital was the Piedmont
capital, Turin, the ancestral home of all
the Savoys; the government was in Turin and
most of the members of the government were
aristocrats from Piedmont. Cagliari had its
own class of landed aristocrats, none of
whom had a seat in the royal parliament at
Turin.
In the early
1790s, forces of the French Revolution tried
to take Cagliari and failed. (They also
tried to invade in the north and failed.
See this entry.)
On April 28, 1794, Cagliari was then also at
the center of a brief uprising against the
Piedmont monarchy when they chased viceroy
Balbiano off the island. Although this fling
with renewed Sardinian independence was very
brief, the island today celebrates
Sa die de sa
Sardigna (Sardinia Day) every year
to commemorate the episode. The city was,
however, good enough for the Savoy royals
when Napoleon occupied Turin between 1799
and 1815. They took up residence in the
viceroy's palace in Cagliari (photo, right),
a building the origins of which go back to
the 1300s and which has undergone constant
remakes over the centuries. The building now
houses the prefecture of the region of
Sardinia.
The Cagliari City Hall,
named
for
Ottone Bacaredda, mayor in 1900.
After the
unification of Italy, Cagilari started to
grow rapidly. Entire sections of the city
near the port are splendid examples of the
Art Nouveau style popular throughout Europe
at the end of the 19th century. During WWII
Cagliari was an important Axis naval port
and, thus, was subjected to heavy Allied air
raids. The Italian term
sfollamento
(leaving, deserting, emptying) is used by
historians to refer to the movement of the
citizenry away from the city and into the
countryside to get away from the bombing.
The Germans took over the island and its
capital city after Italy signed a separate
armistice with the Allies in September of
1943 (which made enemies out of the former
Axis partners, Germany and Italy). The
Germans then left the island (it was
essentially undefendable) and they retreated
to the mainland to shore up their defences
against the Allied drive up the peninsula.
The US Army took over the capital, and the
Allies then continued to use Cagliari and
the island during the remainder of the war
because of its strategic position in the
Mediterranean. After the war, Cagliari
suffered the same intense periods of
overbuilding as other major cities in Italy
as the Italian "economic miracle" geared up.
Today, among its many features and
attractions, the city of Cagliari has a
major university, founded in 1626, with
35,000 students; a number of museums,
including the National Archaeological Museum
and the Museum of Siamese Art; an excavated
Roman amphitheater; a 5-mile-long city
beach, the Poetto; and the Basilica of San
Saturno, the oldest church on the island,
dedicated to Saturnin, the patron saint of
the city. The urban infrastructure includes,
of course, the port and airport, a modern
city tram line, the railway station, with
connections to all points on the island (a
major feat of track laying in its day), and
street signs (or lack thereof) that will
drive you nuts. Cagliari is one of the most
attractive port cities of any I know. There
is nothing grimey about it; you drive
directly from the port out onto a broad
thoroughfare lined with art nouveau
buildings by virtue of which the city
retains a great deal of the charm it must
have had when those buildings were new.
