Kingdom of Italy

Sardinia's journey to modern art

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Sardinia shared the climate of urban renewal that characterized the entire peninsula, committed to the creation of the modern bourgeois city in post-unitary Italy.

In this sense, the figure of Gaetano Cima is fundamental, who, professor of Architecture at the University of Cagliari from 1840 to 1864, formed a whole generation of technicians who are increasingly qualified and aware of the importance of the design phase, based on principles of order, symmetry and proportion.

However, for a long time, public construction continued to be characterized in a historicist sense with a marked tendency to monumentalism and eclecticism of styles, marked by revivals. Emblematic in Sassari and Cagliari are the decorations of the representative rooms entrusted respectively to Giuseppe Sciuti and Domenico Bruschi, and to Cagliari the construction of the new Civic Palace, which combines neo-Gothic elements and Liberty elements.

A renewed architectural and urban impulse came from the fascist regime. Alongside the major road, hydraulic and port works, numerous public buildings were built during the Twenty Years: universities, government buildings, schools, are just some of the architectural realities inspired by that official and academic style, which characterized public construction throughout the peninsula.

However, there is no shortage of constructions that fully comply with the canons of Rationalism. The creation of the founding cities of Arborea, Fertilia, Carbonia and Cortoghiana was then fundamental, the only cases in which a new vision of urban spaces and architecture was realized