Carloforte is located on the island of San Pietro and constitutes, together with the nearby island of Sant'Antioco, the Sulcis archipelago. It belongs to the circuit of the "most beautiful villages in Italy".
It preserves the language and culture of its founders, the fishing families originally from Pegli and coming from the Tunisian island of Tabarka, where they had resided since the 16th century. In 1738, the Tabarchini obtained permission from King Carlo Emanuele III to colonize the island of San Pietro, uninhabited and known as "of the sparrowhawks" since the time of the Phoenician settlement (8th century BC), followed by the Punic one with a temple and necropolis. About 40 years later, the same fishermen founded Calasetta on the adjacent island of Sant'Antioco.
Carloforte (Ligurian: U Pàize) is an Italian municipality in the province of Sulcis Iglesiente in the Autonomous Region of Sardinia. It essentially comprises the island of San Pietro about 10 km off the southwest coast of Sardinia and some other insignificant islets of the Sulcis archipelago. The small town with 5983 inhabitants (as of December 31, 2022) is the only settlement on the island of San Pietro.
In 1542, the inhabitants of Pegli and the neighbouring communities left their home on the Ligurian coast in the wake of the Lomellini, a powerful trading family from Pegli and Genoa, and settled on the island of Tabarca off the coast of Tunisia, where they dived for coral until 1735. When coral mining and thus the tribute to the Lomellini continued to decline and was no longer profitable for all sides, and the conflicts with the Muslims intensified, King Charles Emmanuel III of Savoy, on the initiative of the Piedmontese architect Augusto de la Vallée, made the offer to settle the still uninhabited island of San Pietro. A part of the Tabarchini under the leadership of Agostino Tagliafico accepted the offer and settled on the island off Sardinia in 1738. In honour of the king, they named the new place Carloforte ("Charles the Strong"). Over time, other emigrant families arrived directly from Liguria and helped to strengthen the small, thriving community. In 1798, Carloforte was attacked by pirates and around 900 inhabitants were captured and held as slaves in Tunis; one of them became the mother of Bey Ahmad I al-Husain. After five years, they were finally ransomed. The parts of the old city walls and the fortress that still remain today are evidence of this barbarian invasion. The population, also known as the Tabarchines because of their origins, united the towns of Carloforte on the island of San Pietro and the neighboring community of Calasetta on the nearby island of Sant'Antioco. A smaller part of the emigrants from Tabarca headed towards the Spanish coast to Alicante and founded the town of Nueva Tabarca there. Although this colony retained some of the original surnames, it was absorbed by the Spanish-speaking community in terms of language and customs. The Tabarchini are scattered all over the world, mainly in Genoa, on the Ligurian coast, in Gibraltar, in Boca near Buenos Aires and in other port cities. They are estimated to number 18,000 people in total.
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