The Convent of St. Dominic was founded in 1254 over the old Benedictine church dedicated to St. Anne in the Villanova neighborhood. The first layout of the complex had close relations with Tuscan factories and the building rules of the mendicant orders. The church was set on a single nave with strong affinities to the Italian Gothic model of S. Francesco in Stampace. After Sardinia’s political and cultural incorporation into the Crown of Aragon, the convent’s architectural structures changed in an Iberian-Gothic direction. In 1580 the Rosary chapel was established. The Dominican complex, along with the conventual complex of St. Francis of Stampace, imposed itself in the city’s history as a fervent religious and cultural center; it housed, in fact, the headquarters of the shoemakers’ confraternity, the court of the inquisition and the Royal Printworks. Its important pictorial and sculptural furnishings were dispersed to public and private collections so, at present, the spaces can be appreciated primarily for their architectural value. In May 1943, the city of Cagliari was subjected to harsh and repeated bombings that did not spare the architectural complex of San Domenico. Part of the convent and the most important side of the Aragonese cloister remained standing. The difficult work of reconstruction was entrusted to the Tuscan architect Raffaello Fagnoni, who, between 1952 and 1954, adopted an intelligent solution, using the only partially preserved hall of the original church as the base of the new one above it and tracing the spaces of the ancient structure so that the integrated parts were perfectly recognizable from the ancient remains.
