Sardinian Medieval Monuments in Travel Writing. From Martin Carrillo’s Relación al Rey (1612) to Alberto Ferrero della Marmora’s Voyage en Sardaigne (1826)

Nicoletta Usai

First

2024-01-01

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Abstract

In the overall picture of nineteenth-century Sardinia, the descriptions and drawings, when present, of the island's medieval monuments and works contained in the seventeenth-eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century texts, which gave rise to this type of literature, extended by the mid-1920s. In the proposed intervention, the narratives of the buildings and works encountered, more or less casually, during the reconnaissances of Carrillo, Fuos and Della Marmora's travels will be examined, and they will be compared with the graphic representations, when present, to try to understand what value they gave to these contexts, in relation to classical antiquities, what critical categories they applied, what terminology they used in their repertoires, some of which were used in the second half of the nineteenth century by the island scholars in the first attempts to classify medieval architecture of Sardinia.