The facade you see in piazza Palazzo looks Pisan Romanesque and is less than a hundred years old. It dates from 1930, and people who discover that usually feel they have been taken in.
The judgement should be turned round, and that is what this article is for. The cathedral of Santa Maria really does have a Pisan origin, documented in the thirteenth century, and inside it keeps two things no rebuilding ever touched: an ambo carved for Pisa cathedral in 1162 and a crypt cut entirely out of the rock in the seventeenth century, with a hundred and seventy-nine marble niches and a queen of France buried in it.
The facade is the least interesting part of the whole building, and paradoxically it is the one everybody photographs.
A facade of 1930, and why it is not a fake
What was there before? An eighteenth-century Baroque front, which the nineteenth century judged inconsistent with the church’s medieval origin. In 1930 it was replaced by the present neo-Romanesque one, designed by the architect Francesco Giarrizzo, in local limestone, with the capital lettering that dedicates the church to Saint Mary Queen of the Sardinians.
Look at it for what it is: a declared reconstruction, not a disguise. The small arches, the colonnaded galleries and the three portals with mosaic lunettes quote the Pisan Romanesque of Pisa and Lucca, which is the language the church really spoke when it was founded. On the left stands the thirteenth-century bell tower, with two-light windows and hanging arches, which is genuine material and serves as a yardstick.
The sensible criticism is not that it is false but that it is dry: the stone is pale and uniform, without the surprises of a front that grew by additions.
The Pisan doorway on the transept, which almost nobody walks round to see
Walk round the building, on the side of the right transept. Here is a fourteenth or fifteenth-century doorway untouched by any rebuilding, set into a wall built out of reused material: blocks of different periods, an ancient architrave and, walled in beside it, a Roman sarcophagus.
This piece of wall tells the building’s real story better than the facade does. A medieval cathedral was not born from a design: it was built with whatever was to hand, and what was to hand in Cagliari were the ruins of the Roman city. The sarcophagus is not an exhibit, it is a block of stone reused because it had already been squared.
The pulpits of Master Guglielmo: how a Pisan ambo ended up here
As soon as you are inside, turn back towards the door you came through. On either side of it stand two marble pulpits carved in relief and supported on columns of coloured marble: they are the pulpits of Master Guglielmo, and they are the most important piece of Romanesque sculpture in Sardinia.
They were not made for Cagliari. Guglielmo carved them as a single ambo for Pisa cathedral: the work was commissioned in 1158 and finished in 1162. It stayed in Pisa for a century and a half, until the cathedral acquired Giovanni Pisano’s new pulpit and the old one became an encumbrance. In 1312 the Pisans sent it to Cagliari, which was their territory.
Then came the thing that shocks us today: to fit the available space, the ambo was sawn in two and the halves were mounted either side of the door. This is not a modern restoration, it is an old intervention, and there is no putting it back together.
How to read the carved stories
Go closer and take one band at a time, because the reliefs read in sequence like a comic strip. There are the Annunciation and the Visitation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi with the Magi returning to their own countries, the Presentation in the Temple, the Baptism of Christ, the Last Supper, the kiss of Judas, the holy women at the tomb with the sleeping soldiers, the Transfiguration and the Ascension.
In the Last Supper above, look at how Guglielmo solves a technical problem: the table is seen from the side but the diners are lined up frontally, one beside the other, because every face has to stay legible from below. The relief is shallow, the drapery runs in parallel grooves, the heads are large in relation to the bodies.
This is not clumsiness. It is sculpture meant to be seen from a distance and from below, in a dark church, by people who already knew the stories and only had to recognise them.
The lions, which are now somewhere else
The original ambo rested on stylophore lions, marble lions carrying the columns, a motif found all over Romanesque Italy. When the work was divided, the lions were detached.
They now stand at the base of the presbytery, at the far end of the church, where they decorate an altar that is not theirs. Look for them, because they are the finest part of the whole thing and nobody connects them to the pulpits they came from.
The sanctuary of the martyrs: a crypt cut into the rock
Go down the stair that opens in front of the presbytery, and the church changes. The sanctuary of the martyrs is the reason to come into this cathedral, and it hardly ever appears in the photographs that circulate.
It is a space cut entirely out of the rock for archbishop Francisco de Esquivel, and it was inaugurated on 27 November 1618. Every surface is worked: the barrel vault is covered with rosettes and diamond points carved into the stone, and the walls are lined with a hundred and seventy-nine niches of marble, each with the relief of a saint, spread over three chapels.
What is inside? The relics of the Cagliari martyrs, brought to light from 1614 onwards during excavations in the city’s churches, in a season when Cagliari and Sassari were disputing the ecclesiastical primacy of the island with bones and documents. This crypt is the monument of that contest: a Baroque machine built to prove that the saints were here.
The contest left its mark on the relics too. Several studies hold that part of those seventeenth-century finds is a forgery, produced by the rivalry with the church of Torres: a detail that takes nothing away from the crypt and explains why it is so large.
In the left-hand chapel there is a reused Roman sarcophagus, found in 1621 in the basilica of San Saturnino. The sources disagree about whose relics it holds today, so look at it for what it is: a pagan chest of the second century turned into a Christian altar.
A queen of France buried in Cagliari
In the right-hand chapel there is a tomb you do not expect: that of Marie Joséphine of Savoy, wife of Louis XVIII and therefore queen of France, brought here in 1811.
How did she end up here? Because when Napoleon took Piedmont, the house of Savoy took refuge in Sardinia, and for years Cagliari was the capital of what was left of their kingdom. Marie Joséphine died in England and her body was carried to the island that had sheltered the family. In the left-hand chapel, for the same reason, stands the tomb of Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, carved by Antonio Cano in 1799.
It is the historical detour that makes this crypt a strange place: under a Pisan cathedral, in a Baroque room cut into the limestone, an exiled French court lies buried.
Practical information
Details checked on 7 September 2026 on the official site of Cagliari cathedral, which updated its hours on 17 April 2026, and on the city council’s Cagliari Turismo portal. Hours and calendars change: check again before you travel.
Entry. The cathedral is free to enter and no booking is needed. The sanctuary of the martyrs is also free and is part of the visit to the church.
Hours. The cathedral opens 9:00-20:00 on weekdays, and 8:00-13:00 and 16:00-20:30 on Sundays and feast days.
The bell tower. The climb costs 3 euros and runs Monday to Saturday 10:30-16:00. There are a hundred and thirty-seven wooden steps, and for safety reasons children under ten are not allowed up.
Careful: this is a working parish church. During masses, weddings and funerals the visit is suspended, and the way down to the crypt may be closed. Weekday masses are at 19:00, Sunday masses at 9:00, 10:30, 12:00 and 19:00.
Getting there. The cathedral stands in piazza Palazzo, in the Castello quarter, five minutes on foot from the Cittadella dei Musei and ten from the Bastione di Saint Remy. The square can be reached without steps from via Fossario; in front of the facade there is a flight of steps instead.
How long it takes. Forty minutes if you stop at the pulpits and the crypt, an hour and a quarter if you also climb the bell tower.
How to fit it into the day
The cathedral never closes during the week and is free, so it is the stop that adapts to everything else. The only constraint is the bell tower, which closes at 16:00 and stays shut on Sundays.
Five minutes uphill are the National Archaeological Museum and the National Art Gallery, which share a single ticket. The sarcophagus in the crypt came from the basilica of San Saturnino, which lies outside the walls and closes at 15:30, while pre-Christian Cagliari is out in the open at the Tuvixeddu necropolis.
The complete two-day itinerary is in the guide on what to see in Cagliari.
Photo credits: facade by Holger Uwe Schmitt (CC BY-SA 4.0); the others by Sailko, CC BY 3.0. All from Wikimedia Commons.
