Medieval And Early Modern Pottery 397
conducted on samples from the excavations at Piazza Santa Croce and Forte
della Maddalena.28
In Sassari, the sole point of reference lies in a municipal deliberation that
imposed a two-soldi-per-pound tax on congius, discas e piattos manufactured in
Sassari or its district.29 These forms were recovered during urban excavations
necessitated by the reconstruction of Piazza Castello (2009–2010), during the
course of which fragments of objects that remained unfinished (in the sense of
lacking glaze) emerged from the strata of the Aragonese stronghold: majolica
with identical form, as well as spacers from the kiln—all unequivocal proofs
of ceramic manufacture.30 The excavation of the stronghold also intercepted a
second site: a refuse dump used by potters and located outside the stone wall
circuit. For some time, majolica pottery, consisting of items with pale yellow
or reddish ceramic bodies, has been reported in late sixteenth-century settings
from northwestern Sardinia. This type finds no parallels among known prod-
ucts and has been presumed to be of regional manufacture, though until now
no evidence has been found in other sources.
The majolica produced in Sassari consists primarily of bowls and jugs, deco-
rated above all in polychrome or with a white or turquoise glaze. The task of
sorting the material has hardly begun, so even what has been published until
now has a certain preliminary quality and cannot be deemed complete for the
types documented by recent studies.31 There is much left to consider from the
analyses of these indicators, beginning with the location of the shops, which is
presumed to have been outside the wall. Analyses of some of the spacers raise
questions about the rapport between the lathe-turners and the kilns. All the
spacers are triangular, of various dimensions, and of the type used to separate
open forms from each other. Many have identifying marks impressed on raw
clay. Some of them display legible letters, interpretable as the potter’s initials,
28 Marco Milanese and Alessandra Carlini, “Ceramiche invetriate di importazione e di pro-
duzione locale dagli scavi di Alghero (sec. XIV–XVI),” in La ceramica da fuoco e da dis-
pensa nel basso medioevo e nella prima età moderna (secoli XI–XVI) (Albisola, 2006), pp.
51–82. The text also points out that there is no reference to potters, but only to tile-makers
at the point in the document, Tarifa del Traballadors de cada Ofici, where the tariffs for
arts and crafts in 1653–1658 are listed; p. 57.
29 Enrico Costa, Sassari, 3 vols (Sassari, 1992), p. 1520.
30 The earliest information on majolica from Sassari appeared in Laura Biccone, Paola
Mameli, Daniela Rovina, and Luca Sanna, “La produzione di maioliche a Sassari tra
XVI e XVII secolo: primi dati archeologici e archeometrici,” in Fornaci: tecnologie e pro-
duzione della ceramica in età medievale e moderna (Albisola, 2009), pp. 297–310.
31 An early quantitative analysis of the findings in a hypogeal chamber was carried out by
Giulia Nieddu, Il deposito del “silos” del castello di Sassari, graduation thesis, University of
Sassari, 2010–2011.