Castro Castle

Abbot Vittorio Angius in 1841 describes at the entrance of Sant'Antioco, a short distance from the Roman bridge, the ruins of a fortress that no longer exist today: Castello Castro, destroyed at the end of the century to obtain building materials.

In 1860, General Alberto Della Marmora observed that in its position the fortress had no character of the castles of the Middle Ages, “which tower on isolated and sharp heights, while this is in a perfect plane at the mouth of the sea”.

However, the two scholars disagree in the interpretation of the structure: for Angius it would be a judicial castle, for Della Marmora an Arab castle. Only in 1907 did Dionigi Scano, noting the diversity of the Sulcitan castle from others of judicial age, affirm its Byzantine origin, on the basis of the few remains, which then disappeared in the filling of the coastal stretch at the entrance to the current town of Sant'Antioco.

It is very likely that the Sulcitan castle was built at the time of Justinian, on the basis of the standard models that apply, with a few variations, in the construction of North African fortresses of the 6th century, and on the basis of the construction characteristics, which are unanimously described by the three nineteenth-century authors.
Angius is the most precise in this regard: “the construction is made of large crudely square stones, and more than an enormous volume. The lintel of the door is a little more than four meters long. Seeing this building after looking at the leftovers of the city walls, you can recognize with certainty where its material was taken from. The stones are not always in regular order, and among those that are flat, here and there, ashlar can be seen here and there, which were taken from the base of other ancient buildings. Della Marmora specifies that these were “trachitic porphyry stones from the town, which are well cut, but it is recognized that they were not cut for this building, but were removed by other ancient ones, and here confusingly used”.

It is important to note the use of bare materials, the presence of ashlar ashlar and the type of reuse, which seems to fall into the category of the “economic” one, that is, dictated by the significant reduction in factory costs, which was achieved by building with stones already worked, taken from ancient buildings, in this case probably the Punic and Roman walls of Sulci.

Even the Justinian fortresses of North Africa are largely built with bare materials, not only if a pre-existing structure is recovered, adapted to the new use, but also and above all in castles to defend coastal centers.

Procopius gives us an impressive picture of the Justinian program of fortifications, with a simple list of these fortresses, many of which have survived in conditions of good readability. While along the eastern “limes” the fortified wall generally delimited the perimeter of the town, as in Zenobia and Resafa, in Mediterranean Africa the “castrum” is isolated from the city and establishes a special relationship with it, placing itself near and defending the access road, as in Timgad, and assuming a much more regular and designed configuration, similar to that observed in the drawing of the plan and a glimpse of the ruins of Castro Castle, published by Della Marmora who visited it in 1821, accurately detect it.

To this image, for the moment the only iconographic memory of the destroyed Sulcitan castle, we can perhaps add another one, which appears in a 17th century print, reproduced in Filippo Pili's work on the Sulcitan martyr. Behind the impressive figure of Sant'Antioco, you can see the sanctuary on the right, on the left the access road to the town, the still existing Roman bridge, and the castle, with towers still equipped with blackbirds.

Update

22/9/2023 - 10:51