Come muore una città. Riflessioni a partire dalle indagini nell'isolato lungo la via del Porto, a Nora (Sardegna)

HOW A CITY DIES. REFLECTIONS FROM THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATIONS IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF THE PORT, NORA (SARDINIA). The birth of a city, the analysis of historical conditions, economic and political factors that determined the formation of a new settlement in the Antiquity, the procedures for development of an urban area and its relationships to surroundings are themes dear to the historiography. Less interest, however, has so far raised the abandonment and death of a city. Or rather, the historiography has generally focused on the causes, not the way it has gradually realized the abandonment. The city of Nora, lying on a promontory on the southern coast of Sardinia, was abandoned between the seventh and eighth centuries AD, after more than a millennium of life. The excavations carried out continuously over the past twenty years have allowed us to reconstruct with sufficient accuracy the history of the city, offering the opportunity to follow step by step, its slow decline and then death, when the last inhabitants left it