370 Milanese
walls of Alghero were maintained and transformed at the onset of the modern
era. A vast project to embank the late medieval lime-bound walls with urban
refuse rich in inorganic (ceramic and metal artifacts) and organic (kitchen re-
fuse, ashes, and significant concentrations of charred grass caryopsis) material
was also attributed to the Catalonians. The archaeological intervention at the
fortress of San Giacomo revealed that the late medieval walls were in continu-
ous usage until the eighteenth century.
An urban renewal project around the fortress of Maddalena has enabled
preliminary archaeological research to be carried out in the area.25 At first,
the legibility of the structure was heavily compromised by much digging,
which has completely removed the embankment and preserved merely the
now empty shell of the wall structure. The sixteenth-century fortress of the
Maddalena, planned by Rocco Capellino in 1552, and designed to strengthen
the defense of the port and the land around it, was the crux of the new appear-
ance of the city’s defense system (Fig. 14.5). Work on the project was arduous
and concluded only in 1578.26
The fortress was positioned as a pivot between the lateral defensive works
along the sea, and those opposite the land, absorbing substantial stretches
of the preceding layout of the fortifications. A significant stretch of the Torre
della Maddalena was reused as an “oreccione,” which acted as a trunnion, and
the fortress’s late medieval walls project outwards, which is clear from the em-
brasure and the position in which the masonry of the stronghold was situated
(Fig. 14.6). Based on its circular structure, this tower was likely built in the sec-
ond quarter of the sixteenth century.27
Excavation samples were taken from the large open space in the stronghold
that was created by the fortress’s nineteenth-century demolition. Notably,
some samples taken close to the medieval city wall (Fig. 14.7) made it pos-
sible to use archaeological-stratigraphic means to date the medieval walls of
Alghero for the first time. The excavation also identified an extensive floor
connected to the walls and a hefty infill laid in the first half of the fourteenth
century, which propped up the city walls during construction or a phase of
reconstruction. This infill probably functioned to create an embankment
25 The project directed by Prof. G. Maciocco, included the construction of an open-air
theater, completed in 2004. Marco Milanese, “Alghero. Bastione della Maddalena,”
Archeologia Postmedievale 5 (2001), p. 333.
26 Guido Sari, La piazza fortificata di Alghero: analisi storico artistica (Alghero, 1988).
27 Guido Sari has established the chronology of some of the towers in Alghero, based on the
stylistic analysis of the manufactured goods and the known written sources; see La piazza
fortificata di Alghero, p. 151.