Urban Planning And New Towns In Medieval Sardinia 503
While the continued use of a few ancient sites through the Middle Ages
testifies to the persistent importance of some sites, it does not seem to have
informed later land-use decisions. In Sardinia, there were no cases of the su-
perimposition of medieval cities on Roman castrametations, the laying out of
military camps, comparable to the classic cases of Pavia and Florence.14 Given
the distance between the classical era and the world after 1000 AD, the impres-
sion is that the social structure of the ancient cities disintegrated with their
physical form.15 Exceptions to these dynamics are found in smaller urban
material evidence. Upon careful examination, they show completely autonomous me-
dieval forms. For example, this is the case of Santa Giusta, the linear medieval village
built anew in relation to the site of the famous of twelfth-century cathedral, near one of
the many archaeological sites located in the vicinity of the lagoon and the Roman city of
Othoca. The completely medieval character of Santa Giusta is shown in Marco Cadinu,
“Il contesto territoriale e urbano,” in La Cattedrale di Santa Giusta. Architettura e arredi
dall’XI al XIX secolo, ed. Roberto Coroneo (Cagliari, 2010), pp. 53–68.
14 Sites of the transformation and reuse of ancient edifices in the high medieval period fre-
quently occurred in urban and suburban environments. The difficulty in relating them to
the settlements of the Middle Ages is due to successive abandonment, radical functional
changes, or problematic stratigraphic records. The difference between the persistence of
use and the transformation of a site and a new planning and civic organization is not
readily detectable. See Pani Ermini, “Cagliari, località Santa Gilla”; Letizia Pani Ermini and
Francesco Manconi, “Scavi e scoperte di archeologia cristiana in Sardegna dal 1983 al 1993,”
in 1983–1993: dieci anni di archeologia cristiana in Italia: atti del VII Congresso nazionale di
archeologia cristiana, Cassino, 20–24 settembre 1993, edited by Eugenio Russo (Cassino,
2003), pp. 891–931; Rossana Martorelli, “Cagliari in età tardoantica ed altomedievale,” in
Cagliari tra passato e futuro, ed. Gian Giacomo Ortu (Cagliari, 2004), pp. 283–299; Maria
Antonietta Mongiu, “Cagliari e la sua conurbazione tra tardo antico e altomedioevo,” in
Il suburbio delle città in Sardegna: persistenze e trasformazioni: atti del III Convegno di
studio sull’archeologia tardoromana e altomedievale in Sardegna (Cuglieri, 28–29 giugno
1986), ed. Maria Vittoria Baruti Ceccopieri (Taranto, 1989), pp. 89–124; Rossana Martorelli,
Donatella Mureddu, Fabio Pinna, and Anna Luisa Sanna, “Nuovi dati sulla topografia di
Cagliari in epoca tardoantica ed altomedievale dagli scavi nelle chiese di S. Eulalia e del
S. Sepolcro,” Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana 79 (2003), pp. 365–408. The cases of religious
syncretism, with the well-known stratification of Punic, Roman, and Christian cultures in
predominantly non-urban areas (San Salvatore di Sinis at Tharros is of great interest) fall
into an interpretation that is still far from the concrete reuse of urban forms.
15 The consequences of this observation should be measured on broader time scales and
geographic areas. In any case, the survival of ancient institutions, limited in part to those
of bishoprics, appears discontinuous. The literary traditions do not indicate a particular
precocity of the so-called civic consciousness connected to civitates; see Giovanni Vitolo,
Città e coscienza cittadina nel mezzogiorno medievale. Secc. IX–XIII (Salerno, 1990). With
this in mind, we must follow the signs of a cultural heritage that to some extent crosses