Alghero 383
cemetery is considered ever more an equivalent to an archive of documents
and parchments, and a single tomb is viewed as a detailed biological identity
card of the buried individual.
The cemetery of San Michele, used for about 350 years, from the thirteenth
to the seventeenth centuries, is the biological archive of Alghero, the place in
which the material traces of the city’s troubled history reside. The medieval
cemetery is squeezed between Largo San Francesco and via Carlo Alberto,
known locally as Lo Quarter (the “barracks”). It first came to light in the sum-
mer of 2008 during construction to upgrade the vast Jesuit complex in Alghero.
The cemetery ceased to be used as such after 11 November 1589, when the
Jesuits took possession of the land and began to build their college.64
Prior to the archaeological excavation of the cemetery of San Michele in
Alghero, there were only a few references to its existence in post-medieval
documents, which mention the fossar de Sant Miquel (or cimenterio);65 in 1585
there was a report of an “yglesia de S. Miguel [...] con su simietrio.”66 The parch-
ment compiled by the Catalan notary Pere Fuyà on 11 February 1364 mentions
the Torre di San Michele as being in this area, which is indirect evidence of
the nearby church67—mentioned subsequently in the fifteenth century68—to
which the large surrounding cemetery, certainly in use in 1364, belonged.
The tombs fall into at least five different chronological phases from around
1280 until ca.1590–1620, characterized by individual and collective burials. The
earliest phase of the cemetery appears to date to the mid-fourteenth century
and can thus be related to the Sardo-Ligurian city. The second phase corre-
sponds to the time when Alghero was a Catalan population hub. A caesura,
marked by a layer of landfill separates the first two burial phases of the cem-
etery, and can be interpreted as an attempt to distance the remains of a new
ethnic community from those of the preceding one, while continuing to make
use of the same consecrated space.69 The fourth phase (in chronological order)
corresponds to a huge plague in 1582–1583, and offers the archaeologist a model
of burial in a “trench,” something seldom encountered in the Mediterranean.
64 Nughes, Alghero. Chiesa e società, p. 268.
65 Oliva and Paba, “La struttura urbana di Alghero,” p. 353.
66 Nughes, Alghero. Chiesa e società, pp. 88, 265.
67 Salvietti, Alghero. Le fortificazioni medievali.
68 Antonio Serra, Los Germans blancs: per una storia della Confraternita di Nostra Signora
della misericordia in Alghero nei secoli 16.–17. (Alghero, 1996).
69 The ethnic discontinuity between the Sardo-Ligurian (1) and Catalan (2–3) phases of the
cemetery has been verified by a collaborative effort of the anthropological departments
of the Universities of Sassari, Pisa, Turin, and Barcelona.