Military fortifications of the XX century in Arborea, Sardinia. History, scenaries, perspectives

The territory of Arborea is rich of military fortifications built during the Second World War as part of the long series of posts erected in Sardinia, designated to protect and control the coasts from assaults and landings. In this specific area, reclaimed and farmed thank to a great reclamation conducted by the company Società Bonifiche Sarde in the first decades of the XX century, several military fortifications such as bunkers, batteries and strongholds were built along the coast, starting from 1940-41. The typical pattern of the land, designed on the basis of a weave of orthogonal roads, determined a precise position of these works, so we can find a first line on the beach and inner groups of four or five elements at the beginning of the roads that led to the heart of the region; thus we notice a contrast between two opposite and tangible tensions that coexist here. On the one hand, in fact, there is the one related to the human capability of shaping a land by stealing it from swamps and making it productive and inhabited in a few years; on the other hand, the tension, also human, represented by the threat to its survival. Currently, these works, abandoned and often swallowed in the vegetation, are silent witnesses of a past that must be a warning for the future. Rediscovering and enhancing them is part of the wider path to the protection, conservation and promotion of the whole Arborea’s area, from the landscape point of view and from the architectural one, that consider reusing these “modern archeologies” giving them new functions in order to be used and useful again, but also making them vehicles of historical memory.