Cagliari 325
Other historic excavations have brought to light the ruins of a long wall made
of big blocks of stone, running around the port district (La Marina), parallel
to the waterfront (Fig. 12.2). These structures sit underneath the nineteenth-
century Liberty Hotel “La Scala di ferro.”48 Along with other ruins preserved
under the transept of the church of San Michele (in Stampace),49 those found
in the 1950s under the public building in Via XX Settembre50 were built with
the same wall technique and seem to be part of the same ancient urban
48 Concetta Ghisu, “Vicende dell’Hotel cagliaritano La scala di ferro: un capitolo di storia del
gusto cittadino attraverso la committenza Setti,” Annali della Facoltà di Lettere di Cagliari
53 (1998), pp. 349–378; Donatella Mureddu and Raimondo Zucca, “Epitafi inediti della
necropoli sud orientale di Karales (Sardinia),” Epigraphica 65:1/2 (2003), pp. 117–145.
49 These discoveries are not yet published.
50 Giovanni Lilliu, “Notiziario. Scoperte e scavi di antichità fattisi in Sardegna durante gli
anni 1948 e 1949,” Studi Sardi 9 (1950), pp. 484–490; Donatella Mureddu, “Le presenze
archeologiche,” in Cagliari, Quartieri storici. Villanova, eds. Donatella Mureddu, Franco
Masala, Michele Pintus, Ester Gessa Maggipinto, Marina Vincis, and Giuseppina Cossu
Pinna (Cinisello Balsamo-Cagliari, 1991), pp. 15–17.
Figure 12.2 Cagliari, former Hotel “La Scala di ferro,” ruins of walls
photo: author.