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.

In 1516 the nephew Charles V succeeded the Catholic Ferdinand in the Kingdoms of Aragon, Castile and Sardinia, who after three years became emperor. Cagliari welcomed the new sovereign in 1535, who arrived with a large fleet in tow and, to celebrate this important historical event, an inscription indicating six hundred ships was placed on the facade of Palace of the City, the first seat of the town hall. (But from other sources it emerged that they docked in just over four hundred).

Charles V wanted to strengthen and modernize the fortifications of Cagliari and entrusted the task to the military engineer and architect Rocco Cappellino who, in almost twenty years of stay, built a powerful system consisting of walls and ramparts.

The Cima brothers were so important for the city of Cagliari that they were remembered with a plaque, placed on the facade of the house, in Martiri square, in which the two lived.

Antonio Cima was a physicist and taught experimental physics from 1844 to 1851 in the university of the regional county seat, then he moved to the Faculty of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Turin. Later he was dean of the Vincenzo Gioberti classical high school in Turin and then supervisor of the studies in Venice.

Gaetano, however, was a great architect and his works, in neoclassical style, can be admired throughout Sardinia. He dealt with both civil and religious architecture. In Cagliari he built the civil hospital, the civic theatre destroyed by the bombings of 1943, the facade of the collegiate church of Saint Giacomo and the stairs located near the Church of Santa Chiara.

Alberto Riva di Villasanta was an Italian soldier decorated with a gold medal in memory and a silver medal for military valour during the First World War. He was born in Cagliari in 1900, ran away from home very young, when he was only seventeen years old, to join the Royal Army and he took part in several fights on Monte Grappa and Piave distinguishing himself for his value. He was the last soldier who died during the 1915-1918 war. He is remembered in various parts of the city: the barracks in Poetto Avenue, the primary school in Garibaldi Square were dedicated to him and a plaque in his honour was posted near his house in Costituzione square.

In 65, Nicolò Canelles street there is a plaque in memory of the Italian general and scientist Alberto La Marmora, who lived for a long time in Sardinia. A street in the Castello district is also dedicated to him.

Alberto Ferrero della Marmora (or Alberto della Marmora or Alberto La Marmora) born in Turin, was an Italian general, naturalist, cartographer and politician. He was the brother of three other important generals of the Kingdom of Sardinia and then of the Kingdom of Italy.

He made his first trip to Sardinia in 1819 and arrived in Cagliari after a 12-day crossing. He wanted to apply to the studies of ornithology and practice hunting. He was with prof. Keyser, a geologist from Cristiania, (today's Oslo) and the knight De Prunner, director of the Museum of natural history and antiquities in Cagliari. This first trip provided him with ample material, which he will use in his subsequent writings on Sardinia, to describe the island in all its parts. He spent most of his life back and forth between Turin and Sardinia; in 1836 he was also appointed Inspector of mines in Sardinia and, in 1841, he was entrusted with the command of the Navy School of Genoa. In 1834 was also knight of the Order of Saints Maurizio and Lazzaro.

In the Senate he always fought for the interests of the island and on 16 November 1851 he was granted Cagliari citizenship. To Sardinia he dedicated his studies in French on economic and physical matters: "Voyage en Sardaigne", published in Paris in 1826. Embellished with 19 illustrated tables by Giuseppe Cominotti and others, he expanded the studies previously conducted by Francesco Cetti, probably remaining the most famous work among the travel reports of the nineteenth century.

The text contains his observations, statistics, research on the nature and archaeological heritage of the region. The second edition of the work was even more organic as it was divided into three branches with expanded treatments. The work is divided into: "Physical and human geography of Sardinia", published in 1839; "Antiquity", published in 1840 and "Geology", published in 1857 in two volumes. The first volume begins with a compendium of ancient and modern Sardinian history, to then describe the island from a physical and climatic point of view and subsequently examines the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdom, the talk of the inhabitants, whose physical characteristics are also analysed, customs, habits and language and it concludes with a picture on the administration and economic activities of Sardinia. The second volume deals with the island's pre-Roman monuments, similar to the menhirs, and with some ancient inscriptions, with the nuraghes. Then he tries to reconstruct the geography of the island at the time of the Romans and tries to recreate the ancient road network, drawing much news from the research of other scholars, then he goes on to examine the Roman antiquities present on the island, deepening on the ancient Sardinian medals, on tombs, sarcophagi, temples, amphitheatres and theatres, and collects inscriptions from Roman temples. The third and final part of the work describes the island from a geological point of view, examining the various types of terrain and fossils from different eras and to do this La Marmora sought valuable collaborations especially for the examination of fossils and rocks becoming, of fact, a pioneer of Sardinian geology, of which he traced the basic lines. The exhibition is interspersed with anecdotes about the costumes of the inhabitants and the adventures that happened to him in his travels.

From 1851 to 1857 he made several trips to Sardinia to finish his studies.

Overall, the Count dedicated more than fifty scientific publications to Sardinia which, although they did not spread widely on the island, did so abroad, focusing attention on a land hitherto shrouded in darkness, giving it value and attracting other curious glances.

He travelled with his equipment for the districts taking notes and making topographical measurements. He was responsible for measuring the highest point of the Gennargentu, which has his name (Punta La Marmora - 1,834 meters).

In 1884 the first geographic map of Sardinia was republished in photolithographic reproduction with the title Atlas of the island of Sardinia in scale 1: 50000, made with scientific criteria, as a result of decades of work started from the nautical chart of Captain William Henry Smyth, of which Della Marmora served himself, in collaboration with the specialist Carlo De Candia, also a general.

As a scientist, he studied the seabed and the coasts close to the rivers. His studies and observations were used in the feasibility analysis of the Suez Canal. His considerations will then be taken up again by Luigi Negrelli and Pietro Paleocapa, who will have a primary role in the construction of the Canal.

Passionate archaeology investigator, in 1829 he entered the Academy of Sciences of Turin, of which he later became vice-president, and, in 1832, in the Geological Academy of Florence. He also became a member of several prestigious institutes of studies such as the Lombard Institute of Sciences and Letters in Milan, the Agricultural and Economic Society of Cagliari and the Royal Society of Naples, and a member of the Deputation of Homeland History of Turin. He obtained the diploma of the Geological Societies of France, Berlin and London and he was officially commemorated by prestigious institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society of London.

In Italy, since 2004, on 10 February (anniversary of the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty which sanctioned the passage to Yugoslavia of the former Italian provinces of the Adriatic), Remembrance Day has been celebrated, in homage to the martyrs of the sinkholes.

Between 1943 and 1945, over 10.000 women, men, old people and children were barbarously killed and thrown, often alive, into the cavities of the karst plateau, called foibas, victims of a planned ethnic cleansing that aspired to the extermination of the Italian presence in those lands, by the Slav communist troops of Titus. They were simple citizens with the only fault of being Italian. Often tortured, beaten and raped, then tied to each other with wire, then the first was pushed into the foiba, dragging all the others. Among the victims there also were 140 Sardinians, some of them Sulcis miners, transferred from Carbonia to the wells in Istria, but also some soldiers, especially financiers and carabinieri, serving in the eastern border.

Cagliari dedicated a park to them, called indeed, "Martyrs of the Foibe" Park which is located in Saint Lucifero street, and it contains the commemorative plaque.