The G. Manno State Middle School is Cagliari’s oldest and most illustrious middle school of educational tradition for many generations of Cagliari residents; its main campus occupies, from its origins, a part of the old Jesuit College of Santa Teresa dating back to 1631. Under the Casati Law of November 13, 1859, the Santa Teresa Elementary School, the Royal Technical School A. Cima and the Regio Liceo Dettori. Manno’s history began on October 1, 1940: under the Bottai Law, the three first classes of the gymnasium were detached from the last two classes of the Dettori High School, constituting the Regio Scuola Media no. 2. The same principal of the high school-gymnasium acted as principal for the new middle school, which remains in the same building and occupies the premises facing College Street, with entrance from the nineteenth-century doorway with the lunette. The central door is reserved for the female classes of the high school, while the male classes enter the institute from the Dettori pizzetta. In 1948 the Royal Middle School no. 2 changed its header and was named after Baron Giuseppe Manno.
The school’s archives preserve the historical memory of the years of World War II: report cards, race certificates, balilla cards, requests for clearances due to displacement, sheets with teachers’ reports on the progress of the war punctually reported to the students, records that interrupted the annotation of classes in February ’43, when the then Headmaster G. Corrias was forced, as a result of the bombing, to close the building and move the archives to his own home.
The block of flats, completely renovated between 1994 and 1997, preserves in its interior the signs of the architecture of the old college and of the town’s history: the courtyards connecting with the church and the rest of the convent, the large portal, the arched vaults with lowered arches and criciera, stuccoes from the 17th century and the Fascist period, and a small monument to the fallen of World War I.
