The founding three-year period for rationalism in Cagliari runs from 1933 to ’35 and must necessarily be read together with two names: Ubaldo Badas and Salvatore Rattu, young torchbearers of that new sobriety in the island’s capital. Fearless and perfect with courageous innovative rigor the first, more moderate the other, but hybridized at times with bold futurist enthusiasms. In Remembrance Park, finished in 1934, Badas modulates a refined culturalist cue and addresses the forms of a glorious national past with a modern, innovative flair. In short, it reduces to a rational minimum a typology current in local Romanesque: it raises two high lictor walls to clamp the limestone threshold of a single nave – a space sacred to the memory of heroes – that stretches out, open under the vault of heaven, rises into the trachyte chancel, and concludes in the final exedra-apsis, dominated by the Cross. The entire monument, one of the most successful of its kind in the context of Italian rationalism, is governed by an orthogonal, calculated composure, enlivened by the refined chromaticism of the stone materials: skillfully combined and alternated to evoke ancient Pisan inlays but also, the stylized reds and whites of the insignia of the mythical Sassari Brigade.
