Duomo di Cagliari

Facing the royal palace across Piazza Palazzo, Cagliari's cathedral carries seven centuries of the city's religious and civic life in its walls. Begun by the Pisans in the 1200s, rebuilt in Catalan-Aragonese and baroque eras, and refaced in the 1930s, it guards a Romanesque pulpit carried from Pisa and a crypt packed with the bones of the city's early martyrs.

Why it matters

This is the principal church of the Archdiocese of Cagliari and the stage on which the city's ruling powers have always performed. First recorded in 1255, the church was elevated to cathedral status after the Pisan conquest of Santa Igia, the judicate capital, and every subsequent regime left its mark: four centuries of Catalan-Aragonese remodelling, a baroque enlargement in 1669-74 that widened the nave and added the dome, and a neo-Romanesque marble facade installed in the 1930s. Inside, the layers stay legible — a Pisan pulpit from 1160, an Aragonese Gothic chapel, a baroque vault, and beneath the main altar the rock-cut Sanctuary of the Martyrs, created from 1618 to house 192 relics of Cagliari's early Christians.

What to notice

• The two pulpits associated with Master Guglielmo, sculpted for the cathedral of Pisa and donated to Cagliari in 1312; the four lions at their bases, each clutching a different prey — bear, man, dragon, bull — once supported a single pulpit.
• The fourteenth-century transept portals that catch the style in transition: the northern one still Romanesque, its counterpart already Gothic.
• The chapel of the Holy Thorn in the Aragonese Gothic chapel, where the relic of Christ's crown, a gift of Pope Clement VII, is displayed on 15 August.
• The baroque coffered ceiling paintings by Filippo Figari, and the treasury in the sacristy, which keeps a triptych attributed to a 15th-century Flemish workshop.

Context and history

When the republic of Pisa took Cagliari in the mid-13th century, it needed a new bishop's church on the Castello hill, and Santa Cecilia — long honoured here as patron — gradually yielded first place to Santa Maria. The bell tower rose between 1254 and 1274, serving medieval Castello as both campanile and watchtower in a chain of sightlines across the quarter. Architect Pietro Fossati rebuilt the facade in baroque between 1699 and 1704; an early 1900s attempt to recover a medieval face beneath it stripped the front away and found nothing, leaving the cathedral bare for a generation until the early 1930s, when a neo-Romanesque facade was installed modelled on Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Pisa. The crypt commissioned by Monsignor Desquivel from 1618 gathered martyrs' remains from the necropolises of San Lucifero and San Saturno into one sanctuary.