English: 'Ruins of Theatre at Nora. Coast at Pula, Bay of Cagliari, Sardinia, June 1857'

No. 15 in Fanshawe's Baltic and later album, 1843 - 83. Captioned by the artist on the album page below the image, as title. The third of a series of drawings of the Mediterranean fleet's summer cruise, from Malta and back, between 3 June and 7 November 1857. The ships shown are those of Admiral Lord Lyons's Mediterranean squadron, including Fanshawe's 'Centurion'. On 25 June he wrote to his father about their cruise: 'We were five days in the Bay of Cagliari, then at the watering place at Pula, near which there are the ruins of a Carthaginian town - Nuora, and two days at Cagliari, which stands well and has some fine views about it ...'. (Fanshawe [1904] p. 352). Nora is on a peninsula near Pula, in southern Sardinia. The Romans took it when they seized Sardinia from Carthage in 238 BC but it declined from the 4th century AD and was apparently abandoned during the 8th century. It was previously an important trading town with two good harbours, one on each side of the peninsula, but sea-level change has submerged parts of the site. Much also remains unexcavated but it is today well visited and the remains of the Roman theatre shown here, but now better cleared, are occasionally used for summer concerts. The towers shown are much more recent watchtowers, probably of 17th-century origin when (as it was in the 1850s) the island was part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Genoa.

'Ruins of Theatre at Nora. Coast at Pula, Bay of Cagliari, Sardinia, June 185