Cagliari mattered because of what surrounded it. The Elmas and Decimomannu air bases hosted both the Italian Regia Aeronautica and the German Luftwaffe, giving the Axis the ability to strike Allied shipping across the western Mediterranean. The city's port served as a submarine base. From 1940 to 1942, British Fleet Air Arm aircraft launched from Force H carriers out of Gibraltar struck the port and airfields repeatedly, but these raids used small numbers of planes -- never more than a dozen -- and caused limited damage. The real destruction began in early 1943, when American B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-26 Marauders, operating from newly captured airfields in Algeria and Tunisia, brought Cagliari within range of sustained, heavy bombardment.

The escalation was swift and merciless. On February 7, 1943, fifty-one bombers dropped 81 tons on Elmas airfield, killing 31 servicemen and two civilians. Ten days later, heavy cloud cover caused 43 B-17s to miss the airfield entirely; their fragmentation bombs fell on the city instead, killing some 200 civilians. The raids of February 26 and 28 together killed an estimated 600 people -- 411 civilians and 189 military personnel. Prefect Leone Leone wrote on March 4 that there was not a single street left without destroyed homes, and in many parts the destruction was complete. The population fled. State offices relocated to Sassari and Oristano. Those who stayed lived in air raid shelters. Then came May 13 -- the heaviest single raid. A force of 197 B-17 bombers, escorted by 186 fighters, dropped 404 tons of bombs across the city. Propaganda leaflets fluttered down alongside the ordnance, urging Italians to pressure their government to make peace.

The May 13 raid was devastating to buildings but caused relatively few civilian deaths -- estimates range between 30 and 60 killed -- because most of the population had already abandoned the city. What it left behind was barely recognizable as a capital. Murzi's report painted a picture of total collapse: no functioning infrastructure, no electricity, no water, only a handful of standing homes in the suburbs. The raids continued through the summer -- RAF Wellingtons on June 31, British bombers on July 2 and 3, USAAF B-17s on July 4 -- but by then the Allied focus had shifted to the actual invasion target: Sicily. Cagliari's suffering had served its strategic purpose, both as genuine military targeting and as a feint in the broader deception campaign.

When the accounting was done, the numbers were staggering. Of 4,500 buildings in Cagliari, 720 were completely destroyed, 540 badly damaged, and 2,295 moderately or lightly damaged. Of the 945 buildings that escaped substantial bomb damage, 855 had lost their doors and windows to blast. The Treccani Encyclopaedia recorded that 75 percent of buildings were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. One thousand civilians died. Over 40,000 were left homeless. Seventy percent of the city's cultural heritage suffered damage -- the Basilica of San Saturnino, Cagliari's most ancient church, along with multiple other churches, the municipal palace, and the municipal theater. On September 17, 1943, nine days after the Armistice of Cassibile, Allied troops landed in a city that barely existed. Through 1944 the population slowly returned, and Cagliari began the long work of rebuilding itself from what the bombs had left.