The mathematical and physical teaching in the University of Cagliari (1764-1848)

In 1720, when Sardinia was assigned to the House of Savoy following the War of the Spanish Succession, the university in Cagliari was a clear expression of the cultural model of the Jesuits who exercised full control over it. Owing to the policies of reform that Carlo Emanuele III and the Minister Bogino wanted for the island, it was founded anew on the model constructed for the University of Turin just a few decades earlier, with the clear intention of superseding the Jesuit model. A significant process of reviving mathematical and scientific culture thus took place, with the importation of the modern acquisitions of European science, which in one decade resulted in the strong growth of the university. This drive for reform came to an end when Vittorio Amedeo III ascended the throne in 1773 and until the 1840s the teaching of mathematics, in the hands almost entirely of the Piarists after the dissolution of the Company of Jesus, remained exclusively introductory to medical and legal studies or for the training of civil engineers and land surveyors, and excluded from significant scientific adjournment. In 1840, Carlo Alberto enacted a new series of measures which were to lay the foundations for a new and definitive revival of mathematical disciplines which took shape in particular from 1848 onwards when, with the “merger” of Sardinia with the mainland states, the measures on university education drawn up for the other universities in the Kingdom were also adopted for the University of Cagliari.