Largest city in Sardinia, Italy
About Cagliari
Cagliari is a municipality and the capital and largest city of the island of Sardinia, an autonomous region of Italy. It has about 145,981 inhabitants, while its metropolitan city, including 69 other nearby municipalities, has about 536,245 inhabitants. According to Eurostat, the population of the functional urban area, the commuting zone of Cagliari, rises to 476,975. Cagliari is the 27th largest city in Italy.
History
The legend, narrated by the Latin writer Gaius Julius Solinus, says that Caralis was founded by Aristaeus, son of the god Apollo and the nymph Cyrene. Aristaeus introduced hunting and agriculture to Sardinia, reconciled the indigenous populations who were fighting among themselves and founded the city of Caralis, over which he later reigned. The Cagliari area has been inhabited since the Neolithic. It occupies a favourable position between the sea and a fertile plain and is surrounded by two marshes (which provides defence against attacks from the inland). There are high mountains nearby, to which people could evacuate if the settlement had to be given up. Relics of prehistoric inhabitants were found in the hill of Monte Claro (Monte Claro culture) and in Cape Sant'Elia (several domus de janas). …
Geography
And suddenly there is Cagliari: a naked town rising steep, steep, golden-looking, piled naked to the sky from the plain at the head of the formless hollow bay. It is strange and rather wonderful, not a bit like Italy. The city piles up lofty and almost miniature, and makes me think of Jerusalem: without trees, without cover, rising rather bare and proud, remote as if back in history, like a town in a monkish, illuminated missal. One wonders how it ever got there. And it seems like Spain—or Malta: not Italy. It is a steep and lonely city, treeless, as in some old illumination. Yet withal rather jewel-like: like a sudden rose-cut amber jewel naked at the depth of the vast indenture. The air is cold, blowing bleak and bitter, the sky is all curd. And that is Cagliari. It has that curious look, as if it could be seen, but not entered. …
Culture
The city has numerous libraries and is also home to the State Archive, containing thousands of handwritten documents from the foundation of the Kingdom of Sardinia (1325 AD) to the present. In addition to numerous local and university department libraries, the most important libraries are the old University Library, with thousands of ancient books, the Provincial Library, the Regional Library, and the Mediateca of the Mediterranean, which contains the municipal archive and library collection. In the first century B.C. a famous singer and musician from Cagliari, Tigellius, lived in Rome and was satirized by Cicero and Horace. The history of Sardinian literature begins in Cagliari in the first century A.D. In the funerary monument of Atilia Pomptilla, carved into the rock of the necropolis of Tuvixeddu, poems are engraved in Greek and Latin dedicated to his dead wife. …
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