In the Castello district, in Arsenale Square, there is a plaque commemorating the passage of Miguel de Cervantes in Cagliari. The famous Spanish writer, author of the masterpiece "Don Quixote", participated in the battle of Lepanto in 1571 and, on this occasion, he was injured and lost his hand. Renamed the stump of Lepanto, King Philip II sent him to Tunisia, with scheduled departure from the Gulf of Cagliari.

In 65, Saint Lucifer street a plaque was placed commemorating the stay in Cagliari of the writer Grazia Deledda. It was in this building that in 1899 the young woman came from Nuoro, determined to work as a journalist. A few steps from Saint Cosimo square and the Basilica of Saint Saturnino. It was an intense year for the future Nobel Prize winner for literature. In the city of the sun, which Grazia renamed the city of love, she met a special man: Palmiro Madesani, who would soon become her husband for life.

The inscription reads:

In this house

where she lived in 1899

devoted to art and hope

Fervid she dreamed hours

Of a thoughtful youth

GRAZIA DELEDDA

In the year 1955

Auspice The Friends of the Book Association

In memory of the old building

which hosted Grazia Deledda

Grazia Deledda is remembered in Cagliari with three tombstones and a bust in the city hall. Two plaques were placed in Europe Avenue, one of the most beautiful viewpoints in the city, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the original literatus from Nuoro, the only Italian female writer to have received the Nobel prize for literature in 1926 with the masterpiece "Reeds in the Wind".

It is likely that, right in Monte Urpinu, the love for Palmiro Madesani, a Mantuan from Cicognara who had been assigned to the offices of the Cagliari finance commission and who asked her in wife a week after meeting her, matured. On the occasion of her wedding, an anthology appeared in the special issue of "The Sardinian Woman", to which some of the greatest intellectuals, born or elected from Cagliari, collaborated: "... we wander the fields. A pine forest seduces us. Oh adorable place ... the deserted green avenues stretch out and in the distance the branches embroider the rosy backgrounds ... Above ... white rocks guard over the mother-of-pearl ponds, furrowed by the slow flight of flamingos and the dark silver sea ".

In 1909, in a "special" of the Milanese "Nature and Art" in honour of the earthquake victims of Messina and Reggio, these verses in prose also appeared: «It seems to be between heaven and earth, in a bath of light, and to travel one of those golden ways of the sea that lead to the unknown east".

The Scano family, the Cambosu institute and especially the Friends of the Book Association chiselled the words of Deledda in the two large bronze tombstones that were discovered in 1972.

Grazia Deledda is remembered in Cagliari with three tombstones and a bust in the city hall. Two plaques were placed in Europe Avenue, one of the most beautiful viewpoints in the city, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the original literatus from Nuoro, the only Italian female writer to have received the Nobel prize for literature in 1926 with the masterpiece "Reeds in the Wind".

It is likely that, right in Monte Urpinu, the love for Palmiro Madesani, a Mantuan from Cicognara who had been assigned to the offices of the Cagliari finance commission and who asked her in wife a week after meeting her, matured. On the occasion of her wedding, an anthology appeared in the special issue of "The Sardinian Woman", to which some of the greatest intellectuals, born or elected from Cagliari, collaborated: "... we wander the fields. A pine forest seduces us. Oh adorable place ... the deserted green avenues stretch out and in the distance the branches embroider the rosy backgrounds ... Above ... white rocks guard over the mother-of-pearl ponds, furrowed by the slow flight of flamingos and the dark silver sea ".

In 1909, in a "special" of the Milanese "Nature and Art" in honour of the earthquake victims of Messina and Reggio, these verses in prose also appeared: «It seems to be between heaven and earth, in a bath of light, and to travel one of those golden ways of the sea that lead to the unknown east".

The Scano family, the Cambosu institute and above all the Friends of the Books Association chiselled the words of Deledda who greets her Sardinia while embarking for Naples after the wedding and then arriving in Rome, a city that would have given her fame and success, in one of the two large bronze tombstones that were discovered in 1972:

"The gulf laughs like a lake at the moon and the lighthouses shine on the sky and inside the water. (...) The lost soul looks at the immense circle of the sea and is dismayed before the infinite and what it leaves in the past to what is going on in the future ".

Giuseppe Dessì was one of the greatest writers and playwrights of the twentieth century, winner of the Strega prize in 1972 with his masterpiece "Country of the Shadows". He was born in Cagliari to a family originally from Villacidro. In the country seat he attended the Dettori high school, but he spent a good part of his life away from Sardinia, while always remaining present in his narrative tension, a constant background of novels and dramatic tales. His theatrical plays, often represented with great success by the public and critics, contain texts of precise political commitment: "Justice", "There is no war here", "Eleonora d’Arborea"; as well as "La trincea", which inaugurated the second Italian television network in 1962.

To celebrate his literary merits that have given prestige to an entire island, a commemorative plaque was placed in Mazzini street, where the house which saw him come into the world, now demolished, under the Bastion of the Balice, stood.

Giovanni Spano (1803–1878) from Ploaghe was an archaeologist, linguist, ethnologist, university professor and Italian presbyter. The canon was appointed university professor of sacred writing and oriental languages ​​at the University of Cagliari and director of the Archaeological Museum in 1834. In 1839 he became director of the university library, in 1854 dean of the Dettori high school and from 1857 to 1868 rector of the university. In 1871 he became senator of the Kingdom of Italy.

Giovanni Spano is one of the greatest Sardinian scholars of archaeology, history and history of art, glottology and ethnology of Sardinia, among the founders of the Anthropological School of Cagliari. The canon Spano explicitly posed the question of the Sardinian language, proposing the Logudorese variant as the literary language of Sardinia.

He died in Cagliari and he is buried in the Monumental Cemetery of Bonaria, and he made imprint the motto on his grave: Patriam dilexit, laboravit (He loved his land, and he committed his work for her).

A city street is also dedicated to him and in Canelles street, in the Castello district, on the facade of the building in which he lived, a commemorative plaque was fixed in his honour.

Giaime Pintor (1919 –1943) was an Italian journalist, writer and anti-fascist.

Born into a family of the small Sardinian nobility, he was the brother of Luigi, founder journalist of "Il Manifesto".

Faithful to the Enlightenment because convinced of the progressive and rational cultural affirmation of man, it has been publishing since 1938 in magazines such as "Oggi", "La Ruota", "Aretusa", "Letteratura", "Campo di Marte", "Primato". He was with Leone Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese and Massimo Mila among the first and most effective collaborators of the Einaudi publishing house.

Estimator of German literature, he studied Goethe and Nietzsche and translated the works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich von Kleist and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In collaboration with the Germanist Lionello Vincenti, for the project "Pantheon" of the publisher Bompiani, he edited the great anthology “German Theatre”, which also contained some of his translations and a series of short critical essays. He also edited an edition of Carlo Pisacane's "Essay on the Revolution" in 1942, in which he saw a socialist background.

On 1 December 1943 he joined the Resistance and tried to cross the enemy lines and reach Rome to fight Nazifascism. He died at the age of 24 torn by a mine that the German army had left in Molise.

A plaque in his honour is posted in Fiume street in Cagliari, which reads:

In the houses that once stood before the sea and the ancient walls of Cagliari, he lived his childhood and early youth and from there he went towards the fire of death of Castelnuovo al Volturno

Giame Pintor

1919 1943

Writer-fallen for the homeland while the blood of Europe was spilling.

March 30, 1985

The Friends of the Book and the Municipality of Cagliari.

Franco d'Urso is remembered in Cagliari through a commemorative plaque posted in Martiri square where the Sicilian artist lived and worked in his small studio. He escaped from Catania when he was only fourteen years old and reached Rome to attend the Academy of Arts. He interrupted his studies because of the war, he left as a volunteer for the front and lived in the capital until 1960 becoming a mosaicist known throughout Italy. He moved to the Sardinian county seat, devoting himself exclusively to art and he created the splendid mosaic decoration inside the church of Santa Rosalia.

In Angioy street, at the center of Cagliari, there is a plaque in memory of the famous writer Francesco Alziator (1909-1977). Born in the county seat, he is recognized for the great merit of having studied and safeguarded Sardinian culture and traditions. He was an important philologist, writer and anthropologist. From a monarchic and aristocratic family, Alziator was initially a staunch supporter of fascism but then he embraced different political ideas following the death of his father, caused by the dramatic bombings of 1943.

He wrote numerous newspaper articles, including on "L’Unione Sarda" and his main works are:

• The Elephant on the tower. Cagliari itinerary, 1979-1982

• Through the paths of memory, 1979

• The days of the lagoon, 1977

• Towards the history of popular clothing in Sardinia, 1964

• The city of the sun, 1963

• Picaro and folklore and other essays on the history of popular traditions, 1959

• Sardinian Folklore, Cagliari, 1957.

• Historiography of the popular traditions of Sardinia, 1957

• History of Sardinian literature, 1954

David Herbert Richards Lawrence (1885-1930) was an English writer, poet, playwright, essayist and painter, considered among the most emblematic figures of the twentieth century. Together with several writers of the time, he was among the greatest innovators of Anglo-Saxon literature, especially for the issues addressed.

His most famous and controversial novel is "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and, thanks to his long stays in Italy and Sardinia, he was able to compose various poetic travel diaries. He dedicated beautiful pages to Cagliari in the third chapter of his work "Sea and Sardinia" of 1921. He thus described the city of the sun:

“Strange, stony Cagliari. We climbed up a street like a corkscrew stairway. And we saw announcements of a children's fancy-dress ball. Cagliari is very steep. Half-way up there is a strange place called the bastions, a large, level space like a drill-ground with trees, curiously suspended over the town, and sending off a long shoot like a wide viaduct, across above the corkscrew street that comes climbing up. Above this bastion place the town still rises steeply to the Cathedral and the fort. What is so curious is that this terrace or bastion is so large, like some big recreation ground, that it is almost dreary, and one cannot understand its being suspended in mid-air. Down below is the little circle of the harbour. To the left a low, malarial-looking sea plain, with tufts of palm trees and Arab-looking houses. From this runs out the long spit of land towards that black-and-white watch-fort, the white road trailing forth. On the right, most curiously, a long strange spit of sand runs in a causeway far across the shallows of the bay, with the open sea on one hand, and vast, end-of-the-world lagoons on the other. There are peaky, dark mountains beyond this—just as across the vast bay are gloomy hills. It is a strange, strange landscape: as if here the world left off. The bay is vast in itself; and all these curious things happening at its head: this curious, craggy-studded town, like a great stud of house-covered rock jutting up out of the bay flats: around it on one side the weary, Arab-looking palm-desolated malarial plain, and on the other side great salt lagoons, dead beyond the sand-bar: these backed again by serried, clustered mountains, suddenly, while away beyond the plain, hills rise to sea again. Land and sea both seem to give out, exhausted, at the bay head: the world's end. And into this world's end starts up Cagliari, and on either side, sudden, serpent-crest hills.

But it still reminds me of Malta: lost between Europe and Africa and belonging to nowhere. Belonging to nowhere, never having belonged to anywhere. To Spain and the Arabs and the Phœnicians most. But as if it had never really had a fate. No fate. Left outside of time and history.

The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens, and all that we think the real thing will go off with a pop, and we shall be left staring.”

To commemorate the stay of the famous English author, a plaque was posted in Queen Margareth Avenue at the former Hotel Scala di Ferro, where the man stayed.