  | Cagliari was a yellow dry and dusty city . As Lawrence said in 1921: "a naked town rising steep, steep, golden-looking, piled naked to the sky from the plain at the head of the formless hollow bay" and Vittorini in 1932: "It is cold and yellow. Cold Stone and african calcareous yellowness. Rake ", that was before the unification of Italy, when a strong push bourgeois, moves in to give her a more modern tone. With a pioneering spirit, botanist greening the south of Italian, importing species knowing little about the behavior. It is so that come to Cagliari hundreds of Ficus from India, Australia and Africa, for their evergreen foliage, adaptability and rapid growth. Are planted in squares, avenues and private gardens, but that ignoring completely certain biological processes. A Ficus macrophylla from Australia was purchased by a major dealer who winds up as a decoration of the center where he stalemate his goods. After a few years the plant has grown so that the same dealer gets rid of it , "giving it" to the municipality that plant it in front of the dock. Today, this giant tree is also known by the name of "trident" because of its huge shape. Its roots raise the sidewalk and its hair shade two paths. Are Ficus, but Indians, the trees planted in the 20s along the Trieste avenue, here a private put four trees to decorate the front door of his courtyard, Stabling Meloni, a former station e-mail for freight wagons, used as a sports field (there was played the first game of Cagliari Calcio). A decade later, in 1936, the Fascist regime confiscates the Stabling Meloni to found the barracks of Air Force. Here, under the shade of the Indian trees, slept the pilots of Legionaria Aviation ready to leave from Cagliari to Morocco to join the Tercio, and a little later take the first bombing of civilian populations of human history. A few years after Italy entered the war, and Cagliari, in 1943 , is heavily bombed, according to the same strategies promoted by Fascism. The city was abandoned and turned in on itself in the rubble, it becomes, as Siro Vannelli told in the "green of Cagliari," a jungle overgrown with plants. Certainly not for its tropical nature, Cagliari had always been a yellow city, malaric and burnt, but thanks to the forced migration of a splendid army of exotic plants. After the war, the reconstruction begins, but leave abandoned many areas of the city. For legal disputes, real estate speculation or neglect, many spaces are transformed into third landscapes. Included the former Barracks "Trieste", which after a short life as housing officers, is abandoned to a lawsuit between the heirs Meloni and the Ministry of Defence. In this emptyness of planification is inserted a part of the history of the climate change in the Mediterranean. After the great drought of the 90s comed an extraordinary increase of precipitation and its start to talking about the tropicalization of the Mediterranean areas. In these years is began the transformation of the Cagliari urban landscape. The Ficus break up the road surface, and disturb the urban with an exponential growth of the branch. The Ficus of the former barracks "Trieste", undisturbed by the anxieties of urban planners, proceed in their making a little jungle inside a Mediterranean city, promoting the metamorphosis of the landscape. |
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