outright stated but naturally implied. Antonio Lo Frasso, a poet born in Alghero (a city he remembered fondly) who spent his life in Barcelona, wrote lyric poetry in Sardinian. Agreeing with Fara's aforementioned , the Sardinian attorney Sigismondo Arquer, author of in Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia universalis (whose report would also be quoted in Conrad Gessner's "On the different languages used by the various nations across the globe" with minor variations), stated that Sardinian prevailed in most of the Kingdom, with particular regard for the rural interior, while Catalan and Spanish were spoken in the cities, where the predominantly Iberian ruling class "occupies most of the official positions"; although the Sardinian language had become fragmented due to foreign domination (i.e. "namely Latins, Pisans, Genoese, Spanish, and Africans"), Arquer pointed to there being many Sardinian words with apparently no traceable origin and reported that Sardinians nevertheless "understand each other perfectly". The sociolinguistic situation was characterised by the active and passive competence of the two Iberian languages in the cities and of Sardinian in the rest of the island, as reported in various contemporary testimonies: Cristòfor Despuig, in , claimed in 1557 that, although Catalan had carved out a place for itself as , in many parts of the island the "ancient language of the Kingdom" ("llengua antigua del Regne") was still preserved; the ambassador and Martin Carillo (supposed author of the ironic judgment on the Sardinians' tribal and sectarian divisions: “" "few, thickheaded, and badly united") noted in 1611 that the main cities spoke Catalan and Spanish, but outside these cities no other language was understood than Sardinian, which in turn was understood by everyone in the entire Kingdom; Joan Gaspar Roig i Jalpí, author of , reported in the mid-seventeenth century that in Sardinia "" ("they speak Catalan very well, as though I was in Catalonia"); Anselm Adorno, originally from Genoa but living in Bruges, noted in his pilgrimages how, many foreigners notwithstanding, the natives still spoke their own language ();); another testimony is offered by the rector of the Jesuit college of Sassari Baldassarre Pinyes who, in Rome, wrote: "As far as the Sardinian language is concerned, Your Paternity should know that it is not spoken in this city, nor in Alghero, nor in Cagliari: it is only spoken in the towns". Especially through the reorganization of the monarchy led by the Count-Duke of Olivares, Sardinia would gradually join a