Cultural built heritage in cemeteries, between architecture and urban design. The Serramanna Cemetery Chapel

The birth of modern cemeteries marks a crucial moment in the history of urban planning in Sardinia, providing designers with the opportunity to express the tendency towards monumental architecture. In the regional scene of Sardinia, the cemetery of Serramanna is an interesting example of nineteenth-century cemetery. The discovery of some documents from the historical archives of Serramanna allowed to attribute the cemetery project to Enrico Pani, an engineer trained at the school of Gaetano Cima in Cagliari. Enrico Pani discussed his graduation thesis on October 13, 1864. Gaetano Cima with his school sets the rules that characterize a good number of the architectural works in Sardinia in the nineteenth century. His students worked in different parts of the island, in an historical moment characterized by major transformations both architectural and urban. The combination of these positive conditions led to the proliferation of numerous interventions including the construction of new cemeteries outside the urban perimeters. The cemetery of Serramanna was initially set to a plan of quadrilateral shape divided into four parts by two orthogonal paths. At the intersection of the two axes is placed a monumental chapel. The chapel, inspired by the model of the Pantheon, has a central plan layout, with an octagonal shape set. The construction of the cemetery began in 1893 and ended in June 1897. Enrico Pani worked in the context of Sardinia in the second half of the nineteenth century, designing some valuable architectures like the covered washhouse in Villacidro (VS).