There used to be a soccer field where the city team played, and then there was a market that was supposed to be beautiful, looking at the preparatory drawings from 1949, but then became a little less beautiful, however functional, with its exposed red bricks and travertines showing strange classical accents that had little to do with its function. Via Pola also had a twin born in the neighborhood of San Benedetto, more fortunate, more popular, better connected to the heart of the city, to the idea of the sea and the countryside that reverberates everywhere in San Benedetto where there is perhaps the most poetic fish market in the Mediterranean. Via Pola, on the other hand, was never as successful, its history a slow tale of decline. Until today when the old market re-entered the city’s history by undergoing a transformation that made it the current mediatheque. A fascinating place, which in a very short time has found its audience and a new and unprecedented social function for Cagliari. And the secret of the fascination of this place is perhaps all related to its history, to the fact that the restyling, the architectural rewriting, perfect, has not erased its ancient function as a container. It once contained sports passion, then meats, vegetables and cheeses; today it contains, with its archives and books, something that is very important in our city: memory. A memory that takes us back to 1925 when, at the end of Via Mameli, the City of Cagliari decided to create a soccer field, a dirt field with stands, known as the Via Pola Field, whose history is linked to the sporting and footballing events of Cagliari, as shown by the commemorative plaque that faces the street of the same name. A heroic history, written by young sportsmen, often from Cagliari, who for the love of sport faced epic journeys to the continent and laid the foundations for what came later: the Cagliari of the Scudetto. In 1951 when the field was replaced by the Mercato Civico building on Via Pola, designed by Engineer Crespi, history changed, but that place, always remained tied to the hearts of those who saw in soccer the dream of bringing the continent closer to Sardinia to a city that was then remote, isolated, far from everything but alive. The miracle of bringing Cagliari closer to Europe today passes through its new function a Mediatheque designed as if Cagliari were a great European capital, thinking big, sports did it in our city today architecture can do it too.
