The Old Graveyard

The building of the old cemetery in Ploaghe anticipated more than twenty years the rules imposed, on 12^th June, 1804, by Saint Cloud Edict, about burials.

Before this law, in fact, they used to bury the deceased inside or outside all around churches. In Sardinia they started to build cemeteries in areas at the borders of the villages at Carlo Felice’s times, with the income from Crusade Bull. Cagliari was the first city to have, in 1830, a cemetery outside city which, inaugurated on 29^th December, 1829, has a temple-shaped monument where Giovanni Spano rests in peace. After Cagliari, in 1836 Sassari, Bosa in 1838 and Alghero in 1841 had their outer cemeteries.

From Giovanni Spano we know that Ploaghe cemetery, thought in the last decades of eighteenth century, and consecrated in 1797, was the first in the island to be built detached from the church building. Besides, in 1847, Angius told that the cemiterio o camposanto trovasi all’estremità delle abitazioni a levante attiguo alla parrocchiale[i].

The old cemetery is in the area of Ploaghe called Cortile de cheia, like a hortus conclusus all’interno di un recinto[ii] (Vico Mossa, 1949), which originally had to be quite tall, delimited by the Rosary Oratory and the church of Saint Peter. Its architectural structure is like a church with its nave uncovered, sided by six big chapels with vaulted roof, three on each side, and closed in its front by the Crucifix chapel.

The Crucifix chapel, which on 6^th December 1814 by pope Pio VII was endowed a privileged altar, and later was named chapel of Purgatory souls (Spanedda, 1989), has inside two marble tombstones (one for each side) in memory of Giovanni Spano and his brother Giuseppe Luigi, canon in Bosa.

In the cemetery area the white marble slabs, fixed to the chapel walls, with their composure and simple originality, marked even by Della Marmora in 1860: … È forse uno dei più belli dell’isola, dopo quelli di Cagliari e di Sassari; il particolare che lo distingue da ogni altro è che tutte le numerose iscrizioni delle sue lapidi sono scritte in sardo, fra cui cinque riferite alla famiglia del canonico Spano, che si può annoverare fin d’ora fra i grandi personaggi del suo paese natale. Of course Spano, as good Ploaghese, soon rebutted: le lapidi della famiglia Spano arrivano sino ad otto[iii].

On 23^rd December, 1855, after the cholera plague which burst out in Ploaghe on 5^th August, when 327 people died, the Mayor Gio. Maria Fiori thought it was urgent to enlarge parish graveyard. As it is read on an order by Ploaghe Town Council, on that dramatic occasion, since in the parish cemetery there was no room left, the deceased had been buried, outside town, in Sa Mandra de Corralva . This new place was not so good. Actually, the Mayor told that some members of the Town Council, the clergy and every class people complained because of the discomforts and the inconveniences coming from the new cemetery. Those were: the impracticability of the ascent, made a puddle of mud by the rain, the total absence of walls, so that the corpses were eaten by savage animals, and, last but not less important, the hurting of people’s morality and spirituality as they were crossing the whole town with their late relative. So the Mayor proposed to enlarge parish cemetery: è costante desiderio e irreparabile istanza di questi popolani che venga allargato, e ripristinato l’uso dell’antico cimitero dove oltre la camera di deposito che vi esiste[iv]….

It is certain, however, that the enlargement was not done. They preferred to build up a new cemetery at the town outskirts, like they actually did in 1902, rather than readapt and expand the old one, now too close to the town and which was occasionally used till the first years of the twentieth century. In 1958, the other cemetery area which was between St. Peter’s church and Holy Cross Oratory, su zimitoriu of children, was destroyed and covered by the concrete used to build the base of the present House of Child.

The old cemetery, restored in 1982 by Cultural Goods Superintendence, has kept intact over the years twenty-nine tombstones, written in Sardinian-Logudorese Latin-like, and nine ones written in Italian. The most ancient is dated 1828, and is Antoni Spanedda’s, who died on December 14^th. At the entrance, a tombstone remembers the 1855 tragic events: DOMO SACRA. AD PIVER ET OSSOS QUI DENT RESUSCITARE[v].

Italiano

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