How Was Cagliari Built

Cagliari is built out of the hill it stands on, and the hill is unusually generous material.

The stone

The ridge is a pale, fine limestone that cuts easily and hardens on exposure, and it has been quarried on site since antiquity — the Roman amphitheatre was not built so much as carved out of the slope. The same stone gives Castello its uniform bone-white colour, and the quarries left voids that later became cellars, shelters and, in 1943, air-raid refuges.

The Pisan towers

The Torre di San Pancrazio (1305) and the Torre dell'Elefante (1307) were built by Giovanni Capula for Pisa. Both are open on the inner face — three walls and a wooden stair, with the fourth side missing — so that if an enemy took the tower it would be useless to them. It is a rare and very legible piece of defensive thinking.

Castello

The citadel is a dense grid of tall, narrow houses on a compact walled plateau, with the cathedral and the viceroy's palace at its heart. Spanish rule added bastions outward rather than rebuilding inward, which is why the medieval plan survives.

The Bastione

Built between 1896 and 1902 over the old defences, a white limestone terrace with a triumphal arch and a monumental double staircase — the city's one grand nineteenth-century gesture.

The hollow hill

Centuries of quarrying left the ridge riddled with voids, and they have been reused continuously: Punic and Roman cisterns, medieval storerooms, wine cellars, and in 1943 a network of air-raid shelters that held much of the population. Some are open to visitors, and they are the part of Cagliari that most people never see.

After the bombs

The 1943 raids flattened much of Marina and Stampace, and the rebuilding was fast and plain.