Carloforte, Church of San Carlo Borromeo

The island of San Pietro is volcanic in nature and has a post-Eocene formation. It has a predominantly hilly character, with numerous emergencies, the highest of which is Punta Guardia dei Mori (211 m above sea level).
The church is located on the median axis between the sea and the hill behind the city, arranged as a symbolic backdrop for those arriving from the sea and entering the regular perspective set by the eighteenth-century urban plan.
The building is an important attributive problem because the final result is decidedly composite and would give a somewhat anticipated time limit for the arrival of Neoclassicism in Sardinia by the same importers of Piedmontese Rococo.
A document from the Cagliari State Archives states that in 1738 the military engineer Augusto Della Vallea, who was working at that time on the new urban structure of Carloforte, also built the church. It certainly should not have been the current parish church because in a drawing from 1741, indicating the general floor plan with the index of the main houses, we read in the list of lots in point 11: “site where the church must be built”. So at this date the church of San Carlo did not yet exist and it is difficult to determine which building was referred to in the 1738 dispatch: whether to a temporary chapel or, more likely, to the Church of the New Innocents.
The hypothesis of a subsequent creation on drawings left by Della Vallea should also be discarded because this would mean admitting that a personality like his, so permeated by late-Baroque culture, has adopted for the façade a pattern so adherent to the neoclassical model that it represents an unthinkable stylistic precedent, difficult at this date.
Some stylistic data refer to the Palace of the University of Cagliari, offering well-founded reasons for the attribution to the same designer, the engineer Saverio Belgrano from Famolasco, who, during his period of stay in Sardinia, between 1761 and 1769, was present several times in Carloforte for urban planning and fortification works.
The church was reopened for worship in 1775, six years after Belgrano returned to Turin. The stylistic inconsistencies indicate a possible alteration of the project in the absence of the author and in reality, through archival documents, concerning the activity in Sardinia of another military engineer, Francesco Daristo, the parish church of San Carlo was included among the works he created with the date of 1773.
The façade is crowned with a tympanum and is divided into two orders by a projecting entablature, divided by sober pilasters that frame the portal and the rose window. The interior, with a single nave with three chapels on each side, is covered by a barrel vault and is crossed by a sturdy and jutting entablature that crowns the Corinthian order. The element closest to the Baroque aesthetic is the original bell tower, offset from the façade.

Bibliography
A. Cavallari Murat, “Saverio Belgrano di Famolasco, military engineer as architect in Sardinia”, in Proceedings and Technical Review of the Society of Engineers and Architects in Turin, 1961; G. Vallebona, “Carloforte. History of a colonization (1738-1810)”, Carloforte, 1962;
M. Cabras, “The works of De Vincenti and the first Piedmontese military engineers in Sardinia in the period 1720-1745", in Proceedings of the XIII Congress of History of Architecture, Sardinia, Rome, 1966;
D. Pescarmona, entry “Daristo Giovanni Francesco”, in Biographical Dictionary of Italians, XXXII, Rome, 1986; S. Naitza, Architecture from the late 17th century to purist classicism. Nuoro, Ilisso, 1992, sheet 19;
Diocese of Iglesias, edited by G. Murtas, series “Churches and sacred art in Sardinia”, Cagliari, Zonza, 1999; T. Kirova-D. Fiorino, The religious architecture of the Baroque in Sardinia, Cagliari, 2002.