54 Schena
of Alberto Boscolo and the numerous students of his historical school,7 who,
for at least three generations—from the late 1960s to the present—have re-
searched, studied, and published Pisan, Genoese, Catalan, and Spanish sources
through which it has been possible to reconstruct a completely different his-
tory of Sardinia, one that it still being written today: that of an entity at the
center of the Mediterranean, open to the flow of people and ideas.
The history of early medieval Sardinia is actually conditioned by a chronic
lack of material and above all written sources, particularly for the period fall-
ing between the early seventh and the first half of the eleventh centuries. A
more than four-hundred-year-long silence in documentation has made any at-
tempt to reconstruct the political-institutional events of the island during the
long transitional period between the slow decline of Byzantine domination
and the emergence of new local powers represented by the four realms of the
giudicati of Cagliari, Arborea, Gallura, and Loguduro extremely problematic
and questionable. The difficulties, only partly mitigated by the recent valoriza-
tion of material, archaeological, and epigraphic sources,8 become even more
difficult to overcome if the objective is to investigate transformations in the
economic and social structures of Sardinia, not to mention aspects related to
the history of religious devotion and culture. Only in the second half of the
eleventh century does the panorama offered by the sources change, suddenly
and on every level, not so much from a quantitative point of view, but in the
diversity of the types of sources that have come down to us—a phenomenon
that goes hand in hand with the end of the “alleged” early medieval isolation
7 On the useful and indefatigable research of this Sardinian scholar and his vast scientific
work, see Olivetta Schena, “Per una biografia di Alberto Boscolo,” in Aspetti e momenti di
storia della Sicilia (secc. IX–XIX). Studi in memoria di Alberto Boscolo (Palermo, 1989), pp. 1–12;
Luisa D’Arienzo, “Alberto Boscolo,” in Sardegna, Mediterraneo e Atlantico tra Medioevo ed Età
Moderna. Studi storici in memoria di Alberto Boscolo, 1. La Sardegna (Roma, 1993), pp. 11–43;
see also the volume of miscellanea, Ricordando Alberto Boscolo. Bilanci e prospettive storio-
grafiche, eds Maria Giuseppina Meloni, Anna Maria Oliva, and Olivetta Schena (Rome, 2016),
which documents developments in the research on the Middle Ages in the Mediterranean
and Atlantic, a research nurtured by the teachings and observations of Alberto Boscolo,
a great scholar and true master.
8 On this type of source, see the essays in Settecento-Millecento. Storia, archeologia e arte
nei “secoli bui” del Mediterraneo. Dalle fonti scritte, archeologiche ed artistiche alla ricostru-
zione della vicenda storica: La Sardegna laboratorio di esperienze culturali, Atti del Convegno
(Cagliari, 17–19 October 2012), ed. Rossana Martorelli (Cagliari, 2014).