Sassari, Church of San Giuseppe

The district where the church is located was organized with the 1907 Plan according to the nineteenth-century urban plan of the block closed with the building on the outer edge of the lots.
Between 1884 and 1888, the church of San Giuseppe was built in Sassari, designed by the chief engineer of the Municipality Francesco Agnesa. The area concerned was the one in front of the Piazza d'Armi, where the artillery exercises continued to be held, equidistant from the hospital and the prison, and at the time extremely peripheral, so much so that, for about twenty years, the church remained detached from the urban context, on which it “turned its back”, turning its façade towards the expanding areas destined for new services.
A façade that, with considerable evidence, is inspired by the architectural purism of Gaetano Cima and, almost blatantly, by the Palladian church of San Giorgio in Venice (1556), without having its domed structure. The two orders, major and minor, which correspond respectively to the central and the two side aisles, are superimposed in two systems in front of the temple, which mark the structure of the internal space, and therefore appear as a perspective section of the three-dimensional organism that develops behind it longitudinally.
The façade has the central body marked by four giant columns with Corinthian capitals, resting on tall dice, while on the sides there are two round niches, to which, in the side bodies, two windows of the same shape and size correspond. In the middle register, a tripartite semicircular window and two fake rectangular windows open in the center. The side aisles are marked by a theory of gable windows, while the central one, punctuated by buttresses, has round arched lights.
The bell tower, positioned at the apse, is inspired in the design by the one completed in 1871 by Salvatore Calvia for the church of Santa Caterina in Mores: with a square barrel, domed, it is spread over three different levels, the first two marked by false openings, and the last, which houses the bell cell, by single-window timpaned windows.
The interior has a large central nave, barrel-vaulted, ending with a semicircular apse, and two lateral ones, on which the chapels open, including the first one in the s., which houses the altar made by Antonio Usai, a student of the sculptor Giuseppe Sartorio. In the church there is a wooden statue of the saint, made by the latter and dating back to a period between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.
Only on the eve of the First World War did the isolation of the church of San Giuseppe come to an end with the progressive construction of the Technical Institute, now Magistral (1912-13), the elementary school of San Giuseppe (1932-36) and the house of the GIL (1935).

History of studies
A review of 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
F. Masala, Architecture from the Unification of Italy to the end of the 1900s. Nuoro, Ilisso, 2001, sheet 18.