Cagliari Old Town
— the high town the light leaves last.
Not only on a wall.
“The old citadel of Cagliari, stacked on a limestone hill above the harbour. The Pisans walled it in the early 1300s and left two pale towers standing over the rooftops; the stone came from a hill just down the coast, and at the end of the day it goes warm, the way the water below goes dark. From the terrace at Saint Remy the whole Gulf of Angels opens out. People come up in the evening, when the heat lets go and the streets begin to fill.
Cagliari Old Town, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Cagliari Old Town is the Castello district, the medieval citadel at the top of Sardinia's capital, rising on a limestone ridge about 100 metres above the Gulf of Angels on the island's southern coast. The Pisans fortified the hill in the thirteenth century, walling it with towers and bastions and moving the seat of civil, military and religious power up from the older settlement of Santa Igia. Through Pisan, Aragonese-Spanish and Piedmontese rule the quarter held the palaces of government and the noble houses, and much of that fabric still stands. Cagliari itself is a city of about 146,000 on a low shore, but Castello looks down on all of it. The district is reached on foot through the old gates or by the public lift beside the Bastione di Saint Remy.
The walls and towers are built of pale limestone quarried from the Colle di Bonaria, the hill southeast of the citadel. Two of the original Pisan towers still stand: the Torre di San Pancrazio, finished in 1305 and rising about 37 metres to guard the northern gate, and the Torre dell'Elefante, finished in 1307 and named for the small marble elephant set into its base. Both were the work of the Cagliari-born architect Giovanni Capula, built open on one inner side in the Pisan manner, with wooden galleries climbing four levels inside. The later Bastione di Saint Remy, raised between 1896 and 1903 by Giuseppe Costa and Fulgenzio Setti in white and yellow limestone, carries the same pale stone up into a broad terrace and gallery on the southern wall.
Cagliari sits under a cold semi-arid climate, and from mid-June to mid-September rain is a rare event, so the citadel spends the long Mediterranean summer dry and bright. Pale calcareous stone takes warm light readily, and Castello stands higher than anything around it. In the last hour before sunset the walls, the two Pisan towers and the columns of the Saint Remy terrace turn from white to a deep honey, while the Gulf of Angels below shifts from blue to slate. Because the hill rises about 100 metres over the lower city, the light reaches it first in the morning and leaves it last in the evening, after the streets below have fallen into shade. The terrace looks roughly southeast over the water, which is why evening, not midday, is when the old town is most itself.