518 Cadinu
vision inspired by the major merchant streets in the medieval Mediterranean.
Among them is Palermo’s “Cassaro,” an urban artery described at the end of the
tenth century as a street “paved in stone,” an “arcade,” “entirely devoted to the
market,” and “oriented from east to west.” These are exactly the same attributes
described with insistence in the documents regarding Sassari’s “Platha,” which
was taken as a symbol of urban and mercantile prestige.39
Immediately outside the original urban nucleus, the church of San Nicola
and mercantile courts are tangential to the later attested judería. The long av-
enues Turritana and “Carrela Longa” are main axes of the thirteenth-century
new cities, that welcome other social components.
The Oristano plan shows no particular geometric regularity; it is composed
of non linear streets, dead alleys, and building types, which is consistent with
the medieval Mediterranean tradition (Fig. 19.8). The city, apparently unified
by the thirteenth-century walls, is in reality a sequence of urban projects and
constructions.40 It is not possible to date Oristano’s first urban era, therefore
we rely on the vague citations of documents that indicates the eleventh cen-
tury as a period when the first nucleus was consolidated, with the interesting
exception of a “Vandal-era dump” found behind the convent.41 Even so, analy-
sis of the urban structure indicates that its development probably began in
a small urban center located in the same area where the later convent of the
Capuchins was built in the seventeenth century.42 This site stands a few meters
above the surrounding area, a topographical factor that is not secondary, since
canals and water surrounded the city until the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury. It is possible to place the city’s administrative center here, perhaps along
with the giudicale palace, whose first site has never been identified, but was
39 The regularity and the width of these roads, the stone paving, and medieval arcades are
all elements that indicate the capacity to plan and control the urban form, requirements
that are normally ensured by the presence of a government that benefits from market fis-
cal formulas. The east-west orientation of the street-square in Sassari, geographically not
real, is merely an archaic symbol that remains bound to the descriptions of the city from
the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century (see the “Pianta del Violinista,” Archivio di
Stato di Torino, 3.C.I rosso, 1806). See also cities like Palermo, Granada, and even Baghdad
in Fusaro, La città islamica, p. 21.
40 A prior urban nucleus was indicated on the inside of the thirteenth-century wall structure
attributed to giudice Mariano II; Falchi and Zucca, Storia della Sartiglia, pp. 129–158.
41 See synthesis and bibliography in Maria Grazia Mele, Oristano giudicale. Topografia e inse-
diamento (Cagliari, 1999), fig. 2.
42 This area is next to the Portixedda tower, near Putzu Puddinu, the church of Santa Lucia,
the Convent of the Cappuccine, and the church of Santa Chiara. Cadinu, Urbanistica
medievale, p. 81.