Un comune sardo-italiano: il caso del nuovo palazzo comunale di Cagliari (1897-1914)

After centuries in a modest building in the district of Castello, in 1897 the Cagliari city administration announced a national competition for a new town hall, to be built in the commercial areas of the port. The initiative was made possible by the victory of a millionaire lawsuit against the state in 1896 and was associated with the urban transformation of the seafront of via Roma, another municipal initiative. In this perspective, the need for a new monumental building becomes a much more complex operation than the search for office space: the objective is the definition of a new urban centrality. The competition was won by the proposal of Crescentino Caselli and Annibale Rigotti, both from Turin but far from being strangers to the Cagliari environment, since they had been involved since 1896 by the mayor in a debate in which also the island’s leading figures of cultural debate were involved. At the centre of the controversy exploded in the local press is the architectural image of Sardinian civilisation as glorious as hypothetical, naturally expressed in the romanesque age. These figurative choices reveal their political nature, showing all the ambiguity of a tendentious reinterpretation of the remote past, less than fifty years after the Unification of Italy. Therefore the building becomes the epitome of the compromise between an artificial redefinition of regional identity and the claim of a Sardinian role in the Risorgimento mythology