The post-unitary city

Cagliari, via Roma e Palazzo Zamberletti, cartolina, post 1905. Da collezione Colombini, Sardegna DigitalLibrary

In the aftermath of the unification of Italy, the urban structure of Sardinia revealed its extremely fragile structure due to a series of aspects and problems. The large part of the population (80.5%) resided in small municipalities scattered throughout the island, while only a small part (the remaining 19.5%) in the larger centers, only the largest of which, Cagliari and Sassari, exceeded 5000 inhabitants.
The changed political-economic needs led, as early as 1836, to rethink the administrative structure of the territory, which is why Nuoro, Tempio Pausania and Ozieri were awarded the title of city by King Carlo Alberto. This highlighted the shift of interests towards the Sassari hinterland and the crucial role assigned to Nuoro as a garrison of the Barbagie.
In fact, of the seven royal cities named Aragonese (Cagliari, Sassari, Alghero, Castelsardo, Bosa, Oristano, Iglesias), only Iglesias, thanks to the renewed impetus of the mining industry, a main resource of its territory for centuries, showed that it knew how to respond to the needs of the new course, while Castelsardo, isolated and with a marginal role compared to the past, Alghero, less suitable as a port than Porto Torres for traffic with the peninsula, Bosa, located in a difficult position compared to Macomer with respect to traffic serious; of the Royal Road “Carlo Felice” and the railway line, showed obvious signs of crisis.
Despite the small amount of population in the cities, for a total number of residents on the entire island of about 609,000, new needs were becoming increasingly pressing.
With the reform of the Civic Councils (1836), which provided for the establishment of a Council of Builders, responsible for safeguarding the care, decorum and healthiness of urban centers, determined a hitherto unknown attention to a new way of living the city itself, which had its roots in the “idea of civil magnificence”, conveyed by the Napoleonic revolution, and arrived on the island only in full Restoration.
Therefore, there was a twofold need to give the urban structure an order with regard to the building, with the assumption of a new relationship between public administration and private, and to provide efficient and new services for the community, such as the cemetery, the market, the hospital, the theater, the slaughterhouse, which would be joined in the second half of the century by schools and the railway station.

Update

6/8/2025 - 12:35