Medieval Monumentalization in Sardinia – Petrophysical Investigation and Digital Documentation

The central position of Sardinia in the Mediterranean made it a crossing point of many cultural and political events, but at the same time, its isolation has favoured the manifestation of specific and unique Cultural Heritage phenomena, like the network of the Romanesque churches, disseminated all around the island, which shows how an architectural language can be declined to site-specific materials, always preserving its original logic and grammar. In the specific case of these Romanesque churches, the architectural language is more than ever subject to petrification: all the elements of the project are adapted to be realized in local stones. This is evident for all these churches, while the “imported” language of the Romanesque has no parallel with a similar process of reinterpretation for other kinds of buildings. The elements that elsewhere (like in Tuscany) are most of the time divided between facing elements and structural elements, here are often all structural, exploiting the features and differences in colours of the volcanic stones. In the research presented here, on the basis of architectural characteristics and petrophysical features, a significant series of these churches are analysed in this speciic nature using digital survey and petrophysical investigation.