Cagliari, San Michele Cemetery

The new cemetery was created with the task of integrating the monumental one in Bonaria, with a nineteenth-century structure, now saturated and above all completely surrounded by urban expansion. It was therefore planned in a vast area between Tanca Pias and Bingia Matta, then far from the village and now reached and surrounded by the further development of the city in the direction of the western exit.
The project for the San Michele cemetery (1933-34) was prepared by the municipal technical office, which used the collaboration of Cesare Valle, an architect of Sardinian origin and brother of the Undersecretary of the Air Force, who had won the competition for the Cagliari master plan in 1931.
The cemetery, inaugurated in 1940, was quickly filled with a burial for the victims of the 1943 air bombings and those killed in the Second World War, for whom the sanctuary was built, again in vulcanite, which recalls a Nuragic construction.
In the vast, square-shaped plot of land, the entrance was placed at an angle according to the diagonal axis with the domed dome in a central position, flanked by a pillared porch that ends with two side bodies intended for services, arranged perpendicularly. The external elevations have a monumental and austere appearance emphasized by the square volumes in Serrenti stone with the base and pillars covered in travertine. The internal part, on the other hand, has the niches arranged in a series of buildings that increase in level as you reach the end of a slope, where the simple and functional chapel is located in line with the main entrance.

History of studies
A review of the 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
S. Rattu, “The new cemetery in Cagliari and the extension of that of Sassari”, in L'Arquitettura Italiana, 11, 1941, pp. 327-332; G. Loddo, Cagliari.
Architecture from 1900 to 1945, Cagliari, Coedisar, 1999, p. 123;
F. Masala, Architecture from the Unification of Italy to the End of the 20th Century. Nuoro, Ilisso, 2001, sheet 121.