Nuoro, Piazza Satta

The square acts as a link between the historic district of San Pietro and the nineteenth-century expansion area towards the Gardens and the cathedral of Santa Maria della Neve.
The square was arranged in 1967 by the sculptor Costantino Nivola. The buildings were painted white and covered with square granite slabs on the decking, Nivola distributed large blocks of granite in their natural state, in which he embedded bronze statuettes that represent the poet from Nuoro at different times in his life. The result is an environmental ensemble that, precisely from the contrast between the sculptor's intervention and the modest eighteenth-century architecture (with Satta's birthplace) that characterize the lowest section of the square, draws character and urban value.
When in 1965 the City of Nuoro commissioned Costantino Nivola, then not very well-known in Sardinia, to design a monument to the poet Sebastiano Satta, the sculptor, fresh from the American experience in contact with architects such as Le Corbusier or Saarinen, he thought of recovering an archaic and pastoral world, starting from the multifaceted personality of Satta, incarnated in small terracotta figures (which became bronze in the final version) in different attitudes and different moments of his life.
The initial sketches for the square show panels and sculptures that give way to the definitive idea, where Nivola obtains a place to live, rather than contemplate, in an irregular space, also obtained through the demolition of some buildings. Shaped stones with protective cavities for the figurines contrast with the geometry of the floor, in an almost metaphysical result, accentuated by the white of the buildings. There is no privileged point of view, but in reality, the different possibilities of arriving in the square determine just as many and changing perspectives.
The references to the landscape and environmental arrangements of Isamu Noguchi, active in those years in the USA, are evident, with a view to abandoning monumental rhetorical aspects and instead participating in an affectionate and thoughtful call to the genius loci.

History of studies
A review of studies can be found in the bibliography relating to the fact sheet in the volume of the “History of Art in Sardinia” on nineteenth-century architecture (2001).

Bibliography by
F. Masala, Architecture from the Unification of Italy to the end of the 1900s. Nuoro, Ilisso, 2001, sheet 161.