The 19th Century: Foundations for Modern Representation

During the early decades of the 19th century, a strong interest in understanding the local territory emerged in Sardinia—a land that had remained on the fringes of the Enlightenment’s cultural developments and the political events of Napoleonic Italy.
Admittedly, the island lacked the material and objective prerequisites that—elsewhere, and thanks to modern administrative frameworks—had fostered a renewal of cartographic studies. These prerequisites included the introduction of land registries, hydraulic systems designed to expand irrigation, and topographic surveys conducted for road-building and military purposes. In Sardinia, by contrast, the modernization of agrarian structures was a belated and contradictory process: "perfect land ownership" was established in 1820, the feudal system was abolished between 1936 and 1939, and a land registry was not introduced until 1840.
It is against this backdrop of backwardness that we find the work of the Piarist friar Tommaso Napoli—specifically his "Nuova carta dell'isola e Regno di Sardegna" (New Map of the Island and Kingdom of Sardinia). His work reveals its limitations precisely through an outdated approach to the fundamental issue of map projection. By the late 18th century, the Newtonian hypothesis regarding the Earth's ellipsoidal shape had led geographers to experiment with more precise methods of representing the terrain. These methods involved astronomical and mathematical calculations, triangulation, the establishment of ground control points, and the refinement of observation instruments—elements entirely absent from the cartographic work of the Piarist friar, who also authored short geographical treatises on the island. Between 1822 and 1842, the French Ministry of the Navy sponsored an extensive hydrographic survey of the Sardinian coast. The first set of surveys—covering the Strait of Bonifacio, Caprera, La Maddalena, Logon Sardo, and the Gulf of Arzachena—was the work of Captain Hell, while the second set of charts, dedicated entirely to the southern coast, was coordinated in 1841–42 by Captain Jean-Pierre Jurien de la Gravière. Existing nautical charts were riddled with errors regarding seabed depths—errors that frequently caused maritime disasters—and these surveys were an attempt to rectify the situation.
Another significant study of the Sardinian seabed and coastline was conducted by Captain William Henry Smyth, a British naval officer. Having carried out two missions to the island during the Napoleonic Wars, he became captivated by it and returned to produce an accurate map. His work yielded excellent results in measuring the coastline, charting depths, and delineating coastal terrain. He also authored one of the finest travelogues on Sardinia, "Sketch of the Present State of the Island of Sardinia" (published in London in 1828), which included a small map of the island reproducing his original 1827 version. La Marmora himself relied on Smyth’s chart for the coastal outline and sea depths shown on his own 1845 map.
Alberto La Marmora’s "Carta dell'isola di Sardegna" (Map of the Island of Sardinia), at a scale of 1:250,000, marked the end of empirical cartography, as it was based on precise triangulation; this heralded the beginning of geodetic cartography in Sardinia. Confined to Sardinia by the Piedmontese army due to his liberal convictions, the young officer devoted himself to studying the island's geography, history, folklore, institutions, and society. La Marmora himself left a vivid account of those long "years and months of hardship, labor, and activity" in his "Notices sur les opérations géodésiques faites en Sardaigne pour la construction de la carte de cette île" (1839). For the 1839 map and—above all—the 1845 map (on which Major Carlo De Candia collaborated), La Marmora utilized high vantage points and a "camera lucida"; this allowed him to record panoramic landmarks via horizon surveying and mathematically coordinate them with numerical data obtained using a theodolite.
La Marmora’s work marked the close of a chapter in the history of Sardinian cartography—one characterized by a conceptualization (or rather, a subjective and often literary interpretation) of space—and ushered in an era of increasingly precise and accurate map production.
The "Atlas of the Island of Sardinia"—compiled between 1840 and 1859 by Major Carlo De Candia and Lieutenant Coda using the mathematical "Tychonic scale" method—consisted of 49 sheets at a 1:50,000 scale. Based on La Marmora’s triangulation method, it delineated municipal boundaries for the first time and provided a detailed description of the territory.
Following the unification of the Kingdom in 1861, the topographic offices of the various Italian states were merged into the Technical Office of the Italian General Staff; the Military Geographical Institute would subsequently emerge from this body in 1882. The Hydrographic Institute of the Royal Navy was established in 1897; these would be and geographical institutions produced all the official cartography of Sardinia between the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The general map of Italy (1:100,000 scale), begun in 1875, was not completed until the 1920s (the sheets covering Sardinia were published between 1903 and 1921); the geological map of Italy (1:100,000 scale), begun in 1881, was not completed until 1970.
In recent years, thanks to the research and cartographic work of geographers studying Sardinia's physical and human environments, knowledge of the island's territorial layout has improved significantly; likewise, the evolution of cartographic technologies—through aerial photogrammetry and the electronic processing of satellite imagery—has recently made giant strides. The most significant work of the post-war period is the "Atlante della Sardegna" (Atlas of Sardinia, 1971–1980), edited by Roberto Pracchi and Angela Terrosu Asole, which comprises 83 maps.