Once a forum of the Roman Karales, it was in the city’s first urban development in the national style theorized by Camillo Boito: an eclectic reading of the so-called historical styles (classical, Gothic, Renaissance) diluted by the nascent Art Nouveau. Promoter of the project was the lawyer Francesco Todde Deplano, who, in 1886 presented to the City Council an intervention to redevelop an area for which between 1839 and 1842 the measurer Giuseppe Sbressa first, and the architect Gaetano Cima later, had imagined the construction of palaces with arcades, he never saw the light of day, leaving the area to its industrial and artisan vocation with the presence of mills, tanneries and brick factories. Todde Deplano’s project, of which the elevation drawings have remained, would have given the city a porticoed, perfectly symmetrical square, a great scenic backdrop with a perspective flight on today’s Viale Trieste, an obvious citation of the squares of Turin, Italy’s first capital. The “Piazza del Carmine” project failed due to excessive costs and too many debts incurred with banks. On March 17, 1891, the only building that had been started in the meantime collapsed, under the rubble of which Todde Deplano himself and four other people were left by a tragic fate, an event that aroused great emotion in the city. A number of palaces owned by Cagliari’s wealthy bourgeoisie were built on the disaster area at different times: that of the Aurbachers, designed by Dionigi Scano, the Boscaro, Chapelle, Rocca and Cocco palaces. Later on, the monumental Palazzo delle Poste Centrali, the Provveditorato delle Opere Pubbliche (today T.A.R.) and the “S. Satta” schoolhouse, built between 1899 and 1904 in neo-Gothic style designed by engineers Fulgenzio Setti and Dino De Gioannis; this was the first city school with longitudinal development and a U-shaped plan (to better allow light exposure of the classrooms), traced to northern and central European models.
In the center of the square, a statue of the Immaculate Conception (Luigi Guglielmi, 1882) was placed on a neo-medieval plinth, which suffered a rotation on its pedestal during the 1943 bombing due to air displacement caused by the exposures, and was never corrected.
