On the emerged ridge of an ancient sea, that the millenia had forged, the men of the purple, those Punics that the sea itself had bring up to here, carved their eternal abodes. ;xNLx;The place chosen for the last pietas, today green with centuries-old pines, appeared to them in all the dazzling brightness of the nude, white limestone: area of rough rock in which to dig burials, far from the urban area, so that the life of the living wouldn’t remain infected by the stench of death.;xNLx;Who will want to follow us on this path, will see, in place of the modern buildings that have rewritten the anthropization of the area, a single, vast necropolis, extended up to the current via Sonnino, in an interrupted succession of Punic, Roman and early Christian tombs: traces of the different dominations that the city of Cagliari knew, each of which testifies to the care of the dead, exalted, in the Christian age, by the cult of the martyrs.;xNLx;The church of San Saturnino will appear in its primitive structure of martyrdom Basilica, with its stone walls, born from the blood of the Christian martyr, as an everlasting memory of his sacrifice; and a little further on, the church of San Lucifero, built on the tomb of the holy bishop. The church of San Bardilio will rise again before his eyes, like a shadow in the shadows, disappeared over a century ago, in which the respect for the dead and devotion of the living merged in one place. And it will feel, finally, in the brackish air, which rises from the port and channels itself on the hill, centuries of litanies for the Virgin that was carried by the waves, whose stone temple, which sinks in the life that was her roots, dominates the horizon, in an incessant dialogue, which even today sea and wind weave on the ancient city of the dead.
... Who will want to follow us on this path, will see, in place of the modern buildings that have rewritten the anthropization of the area, a single, vast necropolis, extended up to the current via Sonnino, in an interrupted succession of Punic, Roman and early Christian tombs...
Together with the hill, through unknown paths from different directions, there‘s what, starting from the 3rd century b. C., was going to become the Roman necropolis, extended from outside the suburbs to the Saint Lucifer‘s church. The most ancient grave was made of a mausoleum from the Roman age: a monumental grave where sarcophagi and urns were kept. As time went by, the landscape was enriched with more mausoleums and more different kinds of burials, the whole area looked like a huge expanse of gravestones underground and built in the walls, both pagan and Christian, trying to fight the oblivion of death, but they have been wiped out by time. Here, in the wide burial ground of the Roman Cagliari, between the shadows of his ancestors, lies Saint Saturnino, beheaded in 304 b. C. when he was only nineteen years old, in a small crypt that seems to be the ancient apse from the original martyrial basilica described by the bishop of Ruspe, Fulgenzio, who was exiled in Cagliari in 507. Based on the Christian tradition the grave was supposed to contain ampoules filled with the martyrial blood, which represents the gift of given life and offering for immortality. The place of burial became a pilgrimage destination, the sacrifice of the martyr was remembered by the building of a church that, despite the fragility of the rock that it was used, survived to our day.
Technical specification S02 - work in progress
... The place chosen for the last pietas, today green with centuries-old pines, appeared to them in all the dazzling brightness of the nude, white limestone: area of rough rock in which to dig burials, far from the urban area, so that the life of the living wouldn’t remain infected by the stench of death...
On this uninhabited hill of limestone rock, beaten by the winds, the Punics excavated their necropolis, consecrating to the cult of the dead an area which, after 2.400 years, still welcomes our ancestors’ remains. There are very ancient burials, above which there are other burials: they are remote traces of cultures that cross and mix each-others in the use and reuse of cubicles, recesses and grooves. What remains is very little compared to what it was, but what it was needs your gaze and your steps in order to be able, even for a very short time, to revive!
