The matter (and meaning) of monuments. The Carlo Felice statue in Cagliari and debates on difficult heritage and internal colonialism in Sardinia

This paper investigates the public biography of the statue of Carlo Felice in Cagliari to explore, through a specific case study, the historical intertwining of public and contested memory, asymmetrical power relations and later decolonial reinterpretations in Sardinia. Rather than assuming internal colonialism as a settled category for the Savoy period, this article tests its analytical usefulness against the documented biography of a single monument and its successive resemanticisations in public space. Drawing on archival, iconographic, photographic, material, and digital sources, this article reconstructs the process through which the statue was designed, produced, and installed, along with the networks of relationships that have characterised the social life of this artefact over time. This study shows how the monument’s uses and meanings have been continually produced and renegotiated by different actors, and how careful analysis of sources and attention to object history can better inform public debate. The article also shows that the Sardinian debate over the monument, including early demands for its reinterpretation or removal, predated both the wider circulation of Black Lives Matter and the 2020 European wave of protest against problematic monuments. The case highlights both the risk and potential of engaging with difficult and dissonant heritage.