La Maddalena Archipelago

The Archipelago of La Maddalena spreads out along Palau coast and it is one of the most famous tourist places both in Italy and abroad. La Maddalena, twenty square kilometres wide, is the only one inhabited island of a seven island Archipelago and it is worth a try to visit it by boat.

Every year thousands of tourists visit the Archipelago by big boats, yachts, rubber boats and canoas because of the presence of a transparent sea and legendary beaches. Since the ancient times of the Romans, the Archipelago islands were called Cuniculariae Insulae, although they had been frequented by the Phoenicians, Etruscans and Carthaginians.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the islands were conquered by some foreign pirates. Only after the Pisans and Genoeses conquest of the coast, in the thirteenth century, the first Benedictine monks who docked at the Archipelago founded a monastery on the island of Santa Maria and later they founded another one called Saint Angelo, on the island of Porcaria, the present La Maddalena.

The long stuggles between the Pisans and the Genoeses ended with the Aragoneses conquest of the Archipelago itself, which was abandoned for other three centuries.
At the end of the seventeenth century some sheperds families settled down in the island, spending the summer with the cattle and living by fishing and by the agricultural products they cultivated. During the night of the 14 october 1793 a Savoy contingent invaded the island, ready to take possession of the north-eastern side of the Sardinian coast, after the Treaty of London had conceded Sardinia to the Savoy. The Savoy reign intended to subtract La Maddalena to the French and to the Genoese aims.

The king of Sardinia sent some of his soldiers to the sheperds to warn them they had settled in La Maddalena. So the sheperds were forced to respect the new king’s laws. The moment of the conquest was October 1767. Thanks to a document we know the precise places where the first 114 inhabitants of La Maddalena island and the 71 of Caprera had settled. All of them came from Corsica, Liguria and from the Toscan Archipelago. During the following July the population began to grow and in La Maddalena there were about ninety soldiers. They built the church and the parish priest house, whose design was projected by the engineers of the Piedmontese Genius.

Amongst the French commanders who occupied La Maddalena island, Napoleone Bonaparte began to overcome the area and La Maddalena harbour with artillery. Domenico Millelire was the only one Maddalenian citizen who rebelled against the French invasion. He provided a big boat with cannons and shot against the enemy fleet from every corner of the roadstead, forcing the French to retreat from the coast after a short time. Thanks to that glorious enterprise Millelire received the gold medal of the first Sardinian-Piedmontese Navy, that later became the Italian Navy. In 1887 the Archipelago became a military base and in the following century it became the protagonist of sad episodes of the Second World War, such as the sinking of the cruiser Trieste and of the battleship Roma caused by the Americans after the armistice of 8 September 1943.

The demographic, economic and building development of La Maddalena

In the course of history La Maddalena has lived periods of commercial, demographic and town planning development and periods of crisis and stagnation. Some important choices of domestic and foreign politics of the State had a great influence upon them. They were:
- The Naval Base displacement of the Sardinian king’s small fleet during the Napoleonic period, during which the town took advantage of the Continental System to damages of Great Britain, imposed by Napoleon in 1806: La Maddalena became a neuralgic place of depot and of sorting of the English goods.

• The transfer of Sardinian Navy to Genoa after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which assigned Liguria to the small Savoy State.
•  The new administrative, fiscal and judicial duties performed by the town in the administrative distribution the Savoy State created in the ’40s and ’50s.
• The location of the naval base in 1887, due to a series of events on international policy, such as the French occupation of Tunis in 1881, the traumatic break of the trade relations with that Country and the approach to the central empires, strenghtened by the Triple Alliance. That’s a particular situation that forces Italy to strenghten its western front and to create a naval base.
• The institution of the American Base in 1973.

The turning points in the history of La Maddalena are two. The first one, between the ’50s and the ’80s of the nineteenth century, is the birth of the granite mining industry, the harbour growth, but above all the naval base birth. The building of fortifications, arsenal, barracks, offices and quarters caused a great migratory flux which quadruplicated the population after a few months.

At the end of the century the inhabitants were about 8.000 and the urbanistic development had to face huge troubles in the organization of space. In 1898 the choice of constructing the communal building dedicated and titled to Garibaldi caused a very lively debate. The opposite faction to the project fought hard to obtain that the town hall was built in the square 23 February 1793, place of great business relations, the navigation agency and the harbour-office. Cala Gavetta became the unifying symbolic place of the town.

The second turning point, in the ’70s of the last century, was the institution of the USA base, the Admiralty return, the naval units supports and the settlement of thousands of American soldiers in Trinity Village.
Nowdays, the experience of the Marine Park opens a new phase for La Maddalena as well as for Caprera, an important island for the whole tourist area.