Sardinia on Screen : The Construction of the Sardinian Character in Italian Cinema [1 ed.] 9789401210010, 9789042037502

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Sardinia on Screen

Studia Imagologica 21 Series editors

Hugo Dyserinck Joep Leerssen

Imagology, the study of cross-national perceptions and images

as expressed in literary discourse, has for many decades been one of the more challenging and promising branches of Comparative Literature. In recent years, the shape both of literary studies and of international relations (in the political as well as the cultural sphere) has taken a turn which makes imagology more topical and urgent than before. Increasingly, the attitudes, stereotypes and prejudices which govern literary activity and international relations are perceived in their full importance; their nature as textual (frequently literary) constructs is more clearly apprehended; and the necessity for a textual and historical analysis of their typology, their discursive expression and dissemination, is being recognized by historians and literary scholars. The series Studia Imagologica, which will accommodate scholarly monographs in English, French or German, provides a forum for this literary-historical specialism.

Sardinia on Screen The Construction of the Sardinian Character in Italian Cinema

Maria Bonaria Urban

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013

Cover illustration: Sonetàula (2008), dir. Salvatore Mereu. Photograph taken on the set by Paolo Bianchi (courtesy of Salvatore Mereu). The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3750-2 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1001-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction Imagology: Theory and Methods Tropes, Images and Exoticism National Characters: Origins and Development Sardinian Character National Characters from Literature to Cinema Description of the Corpus Structure of the Book 1. Sardinian Tropes in Literature before 1900 Sardinia in European Literature before 1900 Tropes of Land Sardinian Fertility The South Sardinian Wilderness The Barbagia Town and Rural Areas Primitivism Mysterious and Unknown Land People Physical Appearance and National Character Shepherds and Bandits Women Physical Appearance and National Character Eleonora d’Arborea as a Symbol of National Identity Character A People in “Perpetual Celebration” National Costume A Nation on Horseback, Ever Armed Conclusion

9 11 12 16 20 21 28 36 41 45 45 62 62 67 68 71 76 78 81 83 83 90 103 103 113 116 117 127 131 136

2. Sardinian Tropes in Literature after 1900 Sardinia in European Literature after 1900 Tropes of Land The Land as a Projection of National Identity The South Wilderness and Primitivism Solitude Incommensurable Time Mythical Island Modernity Unfulfilled Sardinian Forests The Barbagia Town and Country Counter-images: Urban Modernity Counter-images: The City and the Beach People The Shepherd The Sardinian Soldier The Bandit – from Hero to Anti-hero Alternative Models Women Physical Appearance and National Character Eleonora d’Arborea as a Symbol of National Identity Character The Festivity as a Theatrical Display of Identity National Costume Sardinian Identity Conclusion

139 139 148 148 150 157 164 169 176 178 183 186 193 198 206 211 211 231 238 243 245 245 262 268 268 274 281 300

3. Sardinian Tropes on Screen The ‘Ethnographic Spectacle’ Sardinian Landscape North versus South Sardinia as a Symbol of the South Mountains and Landscape Social-political Marginality Exoticism and Wilderness Sea and Tourism: Coast as Interface Cities and Post-modernity Conclusion

303 303 308 314 322 328 340 345 350 360 370

4. Sardinian Characters on Screen Physical Appearance and National Character Shepherds and Bandits Honour and Shame: The ‘Vendetta Barbaricina’ Shepherds versus Town-dwellers and Farmers The Sardinian Woman The ‘New’ Sardinian People Conclusion

373 373 379 401 405 410 424 434

5. Sardinian Identity on Screen The Festivity as an Icon of Sardinian Identity National Costume Prehistory as a Topos of Sardinian Identity Italian and Sardinian on Screen Conclusion

437 437 450 453 457 466

6. Cases La grazia (Aldo De Benedetti, 1929) Sequestro di persona (Gianfranco Mingozzi, 1968) Scarabea (Hans Jürgen Syberberg, 1969) Il disertore (Giuliana Berlinguer, 1983) Pesi leggeri (Enrico Pau, 2001) L’ultima frontiera (Franco Bernini, 2006) Post Scriptum: Bellas mariposas (Salvatore Mereu, 2012)

469 469 476 486 490 499 503 509

Conclusion

519

Appendix Brief Summary of Sardinian History

535 535

Bibliography

539

Filmography

559

Index of Names

565

Index of Films

577

 

Acknowledgements

Several people have contributed to the completion of this book. I would like to thank first and foremost Joep Leerssen (University of Amsterdam), who offered invaluable input and constant encouragement in all stages of this project. I am also very grateful to Irene Zwiep and Jan Hulstijn, who both supported my research activities at the University of Amsterdam from the very first moment. I would like to thank the following people for their generous aid and critical advice: the colleagues of the Department of Italian Language and Culture (University of Amsterdam), especially Ronald de Rooy and Mauro Scorretti, Monica Jansen (University of Utrecht), Giovanni Serreli (Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea-CNR, Italy), and Linde Luijnenburg (University of Warwick). Very special thanks should be given to Mark Brady (University of Trieste) who translated the Italian quotations into English for the publication of this book. Special acknowledgements go to the staff of the Cineteca SardaSocietà Umanitaria (Cagliari, Italy) for enabling me to watch some films needed for this research. I would also like to thank the director Salvatore Mereu for his permission to see the film Bellas mariposas before it went on general release. Research for this project was partly made possible by financial support from the Faculty of Humanities, the Department of Language and Literature, the Department of European Studies, and the Department of Second Language Acquisition at the University of Amsterdam. Lastly, I am infinitely thankful to my husband Jan, who with his love, patience and humour supported me mostly when I thought that this project would never come to an end. This book is dedicated to my students of the University of Amsterdam.

 

Introduction

The aim of this book is to analyse how Sardinians and Sardinia have been portrayed in cinema, starting from a systematic examination of the repertoire of images canonised in the literary tradition. Forming part of a body of work in the field of imagology, this study adopts the theoretical principles and methods of the discipline.1 Since the imagological analysis presented here embraces literary texts and films alike, it becomes necessary to compare the construction of a literary image with that of a cinematic image, and to assess the continuity of a tradition between one medium and the other. Our starting point is the awareness that every construction of identity is essentially a representation of the Other (or a selfrepresentation) in which what and who is different is never entirely alien and extraneous. Every image of the Other tells us something about its observer as well as the object observed; all knowledge of the Other invariably entails a definition of Self.2 In this specific case research is focused not on Sardinian identity pure and simple – a futile enterprise in itself, since it is now generally agreed that identity is a cultural construct rather than an existential characteristic3 – but on the discursive and symbolic representation of Sardinian character in literature and later in films. The decision to concentrate on cinema rather than other forms of artistic expression derives from the conviction that it played an essential role in 20th-century culture and a belief in the importance of the relations between media representations and cultural identity: “[f]ilms, in the modern world, play a crucial role as a medium of entertainment and culture and in the dissemination of pleasure and desire. Filmic representations, in the context of globalization and the                                                                   1

See Beller and Leerssen 2007. Beller 2007d: 6. 3 The most influential works in this regard include Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 2012; Anderson 1991. See also Thiesse 2001 and Hermet 1997. 2

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experience of culture [...] create, challenge, and refashion identities in complex ways”.4 Since this research deals specifically with films, careful account must be taken of the specific features of the cinematic medium, its rhetorical and narrative strategies, its technical characteristics and how all of these developed during the 20th century. It should also be remembered that cinema came into being at a time when European culture was dominated by nationalism, to which the film-maker, with his power of enchantment, gave additional means for the symbolic construction of the idea of national identity.5 In absolute terms, though, what appears on the big screen is experienced by the spectator as different from himself, which is precisely what makes it fascinating: “cinema makes visible that the self is exotic in the Other’s eyes”.6 Imagology: Theory and Methods This study may be considered imagological because it analyses the repertoire of images developed by European culture to portray the Sardinian character. The discipline which classifies and studies “our mental images of the Other and of ourself”,7 imagology specifically describes forms of literary and cultural representation of national characters. The present research is in line with this tradition of study, of which Hugo Dyserinck was a pioneer and has been a fundamentally influential figure since the launch of the Aachen Programme.8 The concept of image is in this volume understood as “the mental silhouette of the other, who appears to be determined by the characteristics of family, group, tribe, people or race”.9 Such mental images of national character are not the result of simple perception of reality or of experience gained from an encounter with members of another ethnic group (French, Germans or Italians in the flesh) – indeed they are not capable of objective corroboration. They are rather a product of the synthesis of what we observe and our approach to                                                                   4

Dissanayake 2006: 43. Leech and Bussi 2003: 11. 6 Degler 2007: 295. 7 Beller and Leerssen 2007: XIII. 8 Dyserinck 1982 and 1988. Leerssen’s imagological programme is mostly based on, and an elaboration of, Dyserinck’s Aachen Programme. 9 Beller 2007d: 4. See also Wintle 2006. 5

Introduction

13

reality, that is to say the standpoint from which we look at the object of our observation. One explanation of the origins of mental images is provided by psychology: every individual’s experience of reality rests on a series of preconceived notions that determine how he relates to things.10 The selective perception lying at the root of our experience of the world is the product of “suppressed tensions between self-image and the image of the other”,11 which confirms the adage that there is “no representation without interpretation”.12 The preconceptions have no link to reality – they are a product of the mind which the individual transforms into mental images; that goes for the images with which we define a group, a people or a race and to which we resort every time we encounter what is different (and with which we describe ourselves). Such mental images have reached their fullest expression in the field of literature, which is distinguished by the length of its duration and the reverence in which it is held. That is why imagology is applied in the study not of a given society but of the principle ‘scenario’ in which mental images have been codified and disseminated in the most systematic fashion, that is to say in literary discourse.13 National characters, however, are also to be found in cultural products other than literature, including “fictional-narrative media, such as cinema or the comic strip”.14 Indeed, it has been observed that in recent years the repertoire of national characters has been adopted most of all in the most popular genres (crime and espionage thrillers, sentimental romances, pulp fiction),15 while they are being avoided by more aware writers who are intent on replacing them with images going beyond the rigid barriers of national identity to make room for new concepts which correspond to emerging questions of interest such as immigration, social marginalisation, multiculturalism and gender

                                                                  10

Ibid. Ibid. 12 Rigney 2007b: 415. 13 Leerssen 2007h: 26. 14 Ibid. 15 Leerssen 2007k: 354. 11

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relations;16 and when national characters are resorted to it is very often with ironic intent.17 The fact that national character images continue to be found in various forms of artistic expression stands as confirmation of their “intertextual tropicality”,18 in that they are ways of thinking, tropes, articles of common sense conserved and reproduced in cultural exchange and communication; rather than referring to empirical observations they are linked back to a pre-existing literary tradition. This is what is meant by intertextuality: the images of Sardinian character found, say, in a given work recall and renew the images of being Sardinian established in previous texts and require no comparison with ‘real’ Sardinians. Given the esteem and longevity enjoyed by a literary source, it is considered a privileged vehicle for the transmission of national images, yet it should be remembered that intertextuality also involves other forms of communication. One of the assumptions underpinning this research is therefore that the literary tropes regarding the Sardinian national character were taken on board by cinema; the specific features of this new art form enabled it to combine the force of language with the enormous evocative power of moving images, giving fresh life-blood to national tropes. And it has continued to reproduce and disseminate them, since the audio-visual medium, probably more than written expression, revolves around recognisable, standardised – and therefore exportable and reproducible – representations of characters and situations.19 Though resting on preconceptions, the vision of the Other is always expressed in a precise historical context characterised by tensions between dominant and subordinate forces. In the case in question it is fair to assume that the condition of political subjection which has characterised Sardinian history has influenced the ways in which the island has been represented and evoked, first in literature and subsequently on film, since “subaltern nations tend to develop a sense of identity and a self-image while under foreign rule, and as a result have their initial self-image thrust upon them, to be negotiated in the second instance by processes such as internalization, rejection,                                                                   16

Leerssen 2007f: 339. Leerssen 2007k: 354. 18 Leerssen 2007h: 27. 19 Degler 2007: 295. 17

Introduction

15

adaptation or avoidance”.20 Sardinia’s subjection to foreign powers is of course a thing of the past, but the proposition upon which this study rests is that certain ways of conceiving and portraying Sardinia have persisted even after profound changes in the political, social and cultural conditions of its people. This stems from the very nature of tropes: mental images produced by preconceptions which do not stand comparison with reality but are used as rhetorical resources in the construction of a discourse. This would explain why, as will become clear in the analysis of the films examined here, representations of the Sardinian character still constitute a resource – sometimes serious, sometimes ironic, but in any case reassuring and satisfying – for depicting the encounter between the Self and the Other. In the light of recent cinema productions it is possible to discern some changes taking place, particularly as a result of the development of a Sardinian authorial voice,21 so it is fair to wonder whether the presence of these local authors and film-makers has had an effect on how Sardinia is represented in contemporary cinema. More specifically it may be asked, to use the terminology of an authoritative scholar of anthropology, whether a subordinate culture, long observed and assessed from an external and basically censorious standpoint, has at last managed to rise to the rank of an “observer culture” able to express an autonomous vision of itself and to tell its own story.22 An affirmative answer would appear to be provided by literary studies which have interpreted certain Sardinian works in the light of postcolonial theory, focusing on attempts made by groups of island intellectuals to reappropriate and reinterpret their history and tradition.23 One of the hypotheses guiding this study is that these cultural trends have also made their mark in the formation of the image of Sardinia in present-day cinema.

                                                                  20

Leerssen 2007f: 341. See also in the Appendix a Brief Summary of Sardinian History. 21 Olla 2008: 93-106. 22 The terms “cultura osservante” (observing culture) and “cultura osservata” (observed culture) were used by Alberto Mario Cirese on the basis of Gramsci’s teachings: Cirese 1976: 38. See also Idem 1973. On the concept of narration and selfnarration see Bhabha 1990. 23 Marci 2006; Pala 2001: 111-132.

16

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Tropes, Images and Exoticism Although it has been made clear that the analysis of Sardinian character as portrayed in literature and films in this study is conducted according to the principles of imagology, a few points should be made about the terminology to be used. Mental images are by their nature the product of a limited and selective perception of reality, determined primarily by cultural factors. In concentrating on particular characteristics in literary codification, such images do not render the observed object in its entirety and complexity, yet to our way of thinking they come to correspond to observed reality. The complexity of reality is thus reduced to a limited number of salient features and characteristics which tend to take on an all-encompassing value, alongside the systematic repression of the elements excluded from the representation of the national character.24 From this standpoint, every description of national character presents itself as an exercise in stereotyping. In social psychology textbooks the concept of a national stereotype is defined as a generalisation about a group of people applied to every individual in it irrespective of possible variations or differences between members of that group.25 Thus “[t]he stereotype combines minimal information with maximum meaning”;26 starting from details extrapolated from a more complex reality, general and absolute considerations are made about an entire nation and then reproduced in the same form, unhesitatingly and without variation.27 The strength of the stereotype lies precisely in its persistence and invariability – it continues to be reproduced and to be considered valid, even though in rational terms it may be false. Prejudices are essentially the result of a cognitive process subsequently articulated in the literary context, giving rise to the literary tropes studied by imagology.28 Though it is able to lay bare the fallacious nature of national tropes, imagology cannot set out to eliminate them because they stem from a deep-rooted human tendency, they are part of how                                                                   24

Beller 2007d: 7. Aronson, Wilson and Akert 2005: 434 quoted in Beller 2007e: 429. 26 Stanzel 1997: 12, quoted by Beller 2007d: 9. 27 Beller 2007d: 9. 28 Beller 2007e: 429. 25

Introduction

17

people relate to reality and thus destined to persist.29 In addition, the structure in which national characters are delineated always matches the same model, whatever the object of observation. Every trope is built on pairs of contrasting characteristics, and is the product of a judgement expressed about the Other according to the value system of the self. In this sense “[l]iterary imagology deals with attitudes and judgements between nations as fixed in texts. Comparative study offers the impression of a rhetorical game with an invariant array of binary-opposed character traits”.30 In the case in hand the analysis of the Sardinian character starts from a description of the forms of representation found in literary discourse and then proceeds to a recognition of the tropes used in films, with the term trope understood as the repetitive and obsessive use of a particular image without which it seems impossible to create an ‘authentic’ Sardinian context. Though dealing specifically with Sardinian images, this study also entails a rethinking of the general strategies of dissemination and canonisation of the repertoire of national tropes. An important point in this regard is the distinction between self-images (or auto-images) and hetero-images, starting from the traditional imagological definition of the two concepts. The discriminating factor is usually identified as the observer’s standpoint with regard to the object observed: a self-image would correspond to a mental image of Sardinia developed by a Sardinian, the fruit of an internal gaze, while a hetero-image is the product of an external gaze, corresponding to a non-Sardinian observer describing Sardinia. This dichotomy between standpoints may be supposed to be reflected in the characteristics attributed to the image produced, whereas it is known that the two categories of images influence each other and that determining the observer’s standpoint is more complex than it may appear. The documentary corpus underpinning this study comprises sources produced by authors belonging to Sardinian culture and by outsiders alike, but it will become clear that all of them, irrespective of who developed them, present a model of Sardinian national character which is univocal and unvarying over time. It therefore becomes necessary to reconsider the concepts of self-images and hetero-images.                                                                   29 30

Beller 2007d: 11-12; Beller 2007e: 430. Beller 2007e: 432-433.

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The working hypothesis advanced here is that the discriminating factor may be found in the audience to which a given image is presented. Or, as the issue has been formulated elsewhere, when the standpoint of the author of a text is under discussion the question to be asked is not who the author is but “for whom does a text speak?”.31 Alongside these, another consideration arises. With regard to the unequal power relationships between cultures it is fair to postulate that the weaker culture is influenced and to some extent shaped by the dominant force, so that the subordinate group not only appropriates the standpoint expressed by the dominant culture but tends to internalise its hetero-image, reinterprets it and in so doing elevates and ennobles it.32 Applying this model to Sardinia, the repertoire of images produced from the internal standpoint would be identical in content to, but in terms of values a mirror-image of, the forms of representation developed by external observers, and would come to coincide with the process defined as auto-exoticism.33 This would explain why the repertoire of Sardinian characters is constructed on a series of contradictory images – images and counter-images – which do not cancel each other out but accumulate and co-exist in line with the concept of a “nation of contrasts”,34 what is called an imageme.35 It should also be borne in mind that some Sardinian tropes may fall into the category of meta-images, that is to say representations expressing “how a nation believes it is perceived by others”.36 Sardinian culture conceived as the product of a subordinate entity in the terms described here is explained by the specific context of historical events in Sardinia, especially at the time when the discourse on national characters reached its most intense literary expression, that is to say in the age of nationalism, which in Italy coincided with the Risorgimento, the formation of the Kingdom of Italy and the construction of a national identity. To cite a brief example of the synergy between self-images, hetero-images, autoexoticism and meta-images, to be discussed in more detail in later chapters, mention may be made of the emblematic case of Grazia                                                                   31

Leerssen 2007f: 338. Leerssen 2006: 31-52. 33 Ibid.; Leerssen 2007f: 341. 34 Leerssen 2007g: 344. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 32

Introduction

19

Deledda (1871-1936). Born in Sardinia, from an early age this author expressed a desire to make her native culture known to other Italians. The declared intent was to give her home region a status equivalent to that of the other regions of Italy, free of any inferiority complex, by virtue of its ancient traditions. To further her aim of ennobling Sardinian culture, Deledda internalised the viewpoint expressed by foreign observers and took on board the tastes prevalent at the time.37 In so doing she reworked the stock of popular Sardinian images (produced mostly by foreign writers), extolling the virtues of what had hitherto been the object of criticism and scorn. The hypothesis advanced here is that Deledda’s method of constructing images of Sardinia in her literary production was not an exception, it was actually followed by all the writers considered in this study. Similarly the synergy and mirroring between self-images and hetero-images are also to be found in films produced from the beginnings of cinema to the present day, that is to say in a historical and cultural period markedly different from that in which the repertoire of images of the Sardinian character was formed. The homogeneity between the representation of Sardinia in literature and on film necessitates a search for a factor, other than the observer’s viewpoint, which could have produced such identity. It is postulated here that this factor is to be found in the audience to which the images are addressed. All the sources analysed in this study (written and cinematic) share the aim of making Sardinia known to an audience different from the Sardinian public, or at any rate are intended for an audience which may comprise Sardinians who do not identify with the pastoral world of the island’s interior, which is the main, if not sole, protagonist of every traditional portrayal of Sardinian identity.38 In other words, the representations of Sardinians and Sardinia examined here are produced from an external viewpoint, at times internalised and ennobled, but are to be identified with those to whom they are addressed: an audience made up essentially of individuals who embody a culture different from the one observed. The present analysis therefore sets out to show that the audience                                                                   37

Paulis 2006: 79. In Sardinia the urban elite may be said to have considered itself culturally closer to mainland Italian society in the modern towns and cities on the peninsula than to the lifestyle of their fellow-islanders in the agro-pastoral interior. 38

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constitutes a crucial variable in the definition of the terms self-image and hetero-image. National Characters: Origins and Development39 Although ancient writings contain examples of national character descriptions indicating the alleged qualities, temperament, and behavioural and moral characteristics of a given people, they were not systematically classified until 1561 in Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetices libri VII, an encyclopaedic work in which all knowledge is arranged in thematic lists including a taxonomy of the temperaments and characters of individual nations.40 Modelled on Aristotle’s Poetics, Scaliger’s book became a fundamental work of reference for 17thcentury European culture, providing writers with a thoroughgoing classification which lent itself to repetition and canonisation in literature. It was then that the idea of national character acquired a clearly defined position in the European imagination and began to be used in the construction of literary characters.41 But above all else this systematisation implied that nations in Europe started “to locate their identities in their mutual differences”.42 The concept of national character was taken on board by the Enlightenment, as is shown by the thesis underpinning one of the most significant works of the period. In his De l’Esprit de Lois (1748), Montesquieu assumed a position of cultural relativism from which he emphasised the indissoluble link between the character of a people and the physical and climatic features of the land it inhabits.43 This reasoning was developed by Johann Gottfried Herder, who took issue with Enlightenment ideals and expressed an idea of nation which was subsequently of great influence in the Romantic movement. He held that national character revealed the true spirit of a people and was                                                                   39

For a systematic discussion of the origins and development of national characters see Beller and Leerssen 2007, in particular Leerssen, ‘The poetics and anthropology of national character (1500-2000)’, ibid., 68-69. 40 Nippel 2007: 33-44. The author explains that Tacitus’ Germania is the earliest known specimen (ibid., 33). Leerssen 2007k: 64-68. 41 About the concepts of character (dramatic, moral and narrative) see Hoenselaars 2007: 281-284; Leerssen 2007b: 284-287; Rigney 2007a: 287-289. 42 Leerssen 2007l: 69. 43 Ibid., 70-71.

Introduction

21

expressed uniquely and inimitably in its language and culture. This standpoint was adopted by the philosophers and philologists of German Romanticism Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, who saw the spiritual essence of a nation in its character and culture.44 That the idea of a Volksgeist bulked large throughout the 19th century is demonstrated in literary history by the positivist determinism of Hippolyte Taine, who thought that every cultural artefact should be situated, characterised and categorised according to three parameters: race, milieu and moment, which meant respectively the artist’s membership of a given race, his geographical origin and the spirit of the time in which the work is produced.45 In this position Taine did not go as far as Ernest Renan, whose famous essay Qu’est-ce qu’une nation (1882) identified nationality as a “set of human choices”, thereby taking the study of nations from anthropology into the domain of history.46 The concept of national character continued to inspire academic thought in the 20th century, taking a variety of directions. In postmodernist thought the idea of national identity as an existentialist absolute was replaced by a vision in which identities are seen as cultural constructs, while the revival of nationalism at the end of the cold war breathed new life into national character images.47 After several centuries, albeit in a range of settings which may include the ironic,48 the strength of national character images remains undiminished. Sardinian Character In the pages of the British journal Cornhill Magazine in 1883, readers found The Romance of Paulilatino, a story set in Sardinia written by William Edward Norris (London, 1847-1925).49 There was nothing                                                                   44

Ibid., 71-73. Leerssen 2007h: 19; Leerssen 2007k: 74. 46 Leerssen 2007h: 20. 47 Leerssen 2007k: 74. Ibid., 75. 48 Ibid., 74-75. 49 Cabiddu 1982: 20; on the role of the magazine in the 19th-century British literary scene, see Dongu 2003: 13-14. Dongu 2003: 21, observes that Norris, member of a well-off family and son of the Chief Justice of Ceylon, was educated at Eton College and was called to the bar in 1874. Rather than pursuing a career in law, he indulged his passion for writing, producing works of modest literary merit which, however, 45

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unusual in this, since similar stories appeared in other Englishlanguage publications, and the writing of stories set in far-off exotic lands generally met with the approval of a public eager to depart on imaginary journeys involving adventures in unknown places.50 By the same token a number of Italian writers, extraneous to Sardinian culture but inspired by the same taste for the primitive and the exotic, chose to set their novels on the island, considered in much the same way as a distant, mysterious and exotic land.51 The Romance of Paulilatino recounts the misadventures of Vincenzo, born in Sardinia and brought up on the Italian mainland. Returning to the island on the death of his guardian, he is forced to come to terms with the world from which he came, still dominated by barbaric customs such as the code of honour and the vendetta. According to Maria Grazia Dongu the story is a typical example of the late 19th-century English literary genre known as the quest romance, which usually features an English(-speaking) hero who undertakes a journey fraught with danger and obstacles to win his personal battle with evil. But it also contains signs of a change in English literature, beginning in the 1890s, which saw the appearance of female protagonists struggling to free themselves of the rigid moral restrictions of the time to fulfil their ambitions and desires.52 An exotic setting allowed authors to transfer the problem from their own societies to another spatial-temporal context and thus to observe it with ironic detachment.53 Beyond physical and geographical borders, the journey also marked a passage through a world which was closed and backward compared to a more modern and civilised one, recounted by an external narrator representing a culture considered superior.54 It thus became a narrative device for enacting the                                                                                                                                            matched the tastes in vogue at the time. Dongu notes that there is evidence that at some point Norris travelled to Sardinia: ibid. 12. 50 Myriam Cabiddu cites a similar case: a story entitled A Sardinian Vendetta, published in two episodes in the Dublin University Magazine (1873-1874), written by ‘J.P.’ (Cabiddu 1982: 20). 51 One example is provided by Piedmontese doctor and author Carlo Varese, who never set foot on the island but wrote the novel Preziosa di Sanluri, ossia i montanari sardi (1832), Paulis 2006: 102. 52 Dongu 2003: 18-25. 53 Ibid., 25. 54 Ibid., 19.

Introduction

23

encounter, or clash, between two cultures considered unequal in value.55 In Norris’ story it is Vincenzo, Count of San Benedetto di Giave, who leaves Sardinia to be brought up by his uncle Legnani in Florence and experiences the dual trauma of being uprooted first from his birthplace and then from the city in which he had gradually become integrated, learning and adopting its lifestyle. He is something of a dandy, a shallow aesthete far removed from Sardinian literary models, reminiscent of Oscar Wilde.56 Compelled to return to Sardinia by the death of his beloved uncle, Vincenzo faces a journey back to his roots and towards an encounter – more precisely, a clash – with a world he no longer feels to be his. The conflict between cultural models is rendered through the polarity of the places described in the story, which take on an iconic significance: an archaic, barbarous Sardinia is contrasted with the civilised, mannered Florence in a symbolic representation of the contradictions inherent to the idea of a unified Italy.57 Unable to communicate with his coarse, ignorant fellow-islanders, Vincenzo is condemned to solitude until he meets Teresina, whereupon romance blossoms between the two. The relationship ends in tragedy when Vincenzo kills Paolo, to whom Teresina had been promised as a wife. Having eliminated his rival, Vincenzo becomes an outlaw, but is eaten away by remorse until he takes his own life. Vincenzo’s act of desperation is proof of his inability to recover his status as a civilised Italian and truly to adapt to the Sardinian way of life. In other words it is the mark of his extraneousness to the island world.58 The story is told by an external narrator whose viewpoint is assimilable to that of 19th-century English travellers who visited Sardinia convinced of their cultural superiority. Norris is not above drawing comparisons between England and Italy, likening Sardinia to the Shetland Islands and Galway:59 the relationship between Sardinia and mainland Italy is thus made analogous to that between peripheral areas of the British Empire (Scotland and Ireland) and its politicalcultural centre (England). Though of little literary value, from this                                                                   55

Ibid. Ibid., 29. 57 Ibid., 20-21. 58 Ibid., 39. 59 Ibid., 61. 56

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standpoint the story is of great interest for an examination of the image held at that time by the English, and by Europeans in general, of Sardinia. To put it another way, it serves to identify the tropes of the Sardinian character then prevalent in literature, tropes which a few decades later would be reworked in the cinematic medium. Nobody familiar with literature devoted to Sardinia could fail to notice the manifold similarities between such writings and The Romance of Paulilatino: the code of honour and vendetta, the archaic costumes still worn on the island, the unmistakable signs of its backwardness, the ethnographic detailing of Sardinian costume and dance, the islanders’ renowned tradition of hospitality – everything Norris says about the Sardinians perfectly matches the model of the Sardinian character offered by the literature of the time. The Romance of Paulilatino thus stands as an exemplary case of a canonised model of Sardinian identity in literary discourse. The question now arises as to when the emergence of a set of characteristics definable as Sardinian character can be first found. Though not dealt with in systematic analyses of national profiles such as Johannes Zahn’s Specula physico-mathematicohistorica notabilium ac mirabilium sciendarum (Nuremberg 1696) or the Völkertafel, the Sardinian population has been identified since ancient times as a distinct entity endowed with specific characteristics and a clearly defined temperament.60 The profile of the island and its people was repeatedly reproduced in later texts, which uncritically rehearsed it by virtue of the authoritative status attributed to the classical sources. So far there has been no detailed analysis of this tradition from antiquity to medieval times, partly because of the paucity of the relevant documentation, but the text from which this study takes its cue, Sigismondo Arquer’s Sardinia brevis historia et descriptio (1550), stands as the undisputed archetype of modern descriptions of the island. Part of Sebastian Münster’s broader project of the Cosmographia universalis, Arquer’s essay, whose assessment of the Sardinians is certainly a balanced one, constitutes the first attempt to give a systematic form to the extant knowledge of Sardinia – indeed, despite the misfortunes to which the author fell victim, it became a                                                                   60

Leerssen 2007l: 68-69.

Introduction

25

model for subsequent research.61 In the 17th century it continued to be used as a reference for scholars, until travellers began to visit the island – which they are known to have done in the second half of the 18th century – and Sardinia became an alternative to the orthodox Grand Tour destinations; it is to that time that the first available accounts can be traced. Behind the ‘discovery’ of a land still considered unknown and mysterious at the turn of the 20th century lay motivations different from those of people who had undertaken journeys to Italy.62 The latter were driven to the peninsula by a nostalgic passion for classical civilisation and admiration for the ruins of the ancient world, while Sardinia, having been explored by men on military or civilian missions or for business purposes, became an attractive destination for writers, scholars and adventurers because it embodied an anti-classical, primitive and barbaric model of civilisation viewed as inferior to the world to which they belonged. This is hardly surprising, since travellers’ impressions of the Italian South were characterised by contrasting feelings.63 It is sufficient to recall the conviction that a tour south of Naples was anticipated as an adventure in a “terra incognita”,64 or Creuzé de Lesser’s uncomplimentary remarks on Naples and Sicily, to understand that a journey to the South was experienced as a foray into the unknown.65 Such a forma mentis had a decisive influence on the viewpoint from which the entire Italian South was depicted in literature. Although the focus of this research is the forms of representation of Sardinian life, the analysis must necessarily draw on the wider field of the image of the South in European culture, since thus far no specific work has been conducted on Sardinia itself. While the Grand Tour responded to a need to drink at the fount of classicism, a tour of Sardinia, as will become clear in chapter 1, was above all an opportunity for the observer to assert his superiority by describing the oddities of a land not geographically distant but far removed from his own cultural standards. A pilgrimage to the heart of the Mediterranean thus appeared as a journey backwards in time to the origins of civilisation, variously identified as the Biblical, Homeric or                                                                   61

For this work see Arquer 2007 and chapter 1. Brilli 2006: 247-249. 63 Ibid., 49; 247-261. Beller 2007c: 195. 64 Brilli 2006: 198. 65 Ibid., 197; 201. See also Petrusewicz 1998: 27-49. Moe 2001: 119-153. 62

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pre-classical ages. The ideological premise for such an enterprise was ethnocentrism, manifested in an exoticised vision which turned on the strangeness of what was different.66 This attitude to Sardinia, analogous to that held by Europeans towards their colonial possessions, was part of a conception of Europe dominated by the North-South dichotomy, one of the most powerful images in the popular imagination.67 It operated at a number of levels: at the largest scale between the North and South of Europe, in specific terms between neighbouring nations and within single nations – as shown by the topos of the Italian South, which was probably the most important symbolic representation of a unified Italy. With the advent of Romanticism the cultural supremacy of the South, based on identification with the classical world, was supplanted by the primacy of the North resting on Nordic mythology and medieval Christendom.68 The northern regions of Europe, less Romanised and therefore more faithful to their supposed original cultural identity, seemed destined for progress and development, while those of the Mediterranean basin, identified with the splendours of ancient civilisation, appeared old and bound to the past, slaves to vice and immorality and fated to inexorable decline.69 This reversal of the North-South dichotomy was the ideological framework surrounding the contradictory vision of Italy (including Sardinia) held by foreigners.70 It was accompanied in the second half of the 19th century by the establishment of the North-South conceptual dyad as the pillar of the post-unification popular imagination, by means of which the ruling class of the new Italian state was attempting to build a national collective identity.71 On the whole the image of the South in post-unification Italy corresponded to that of the Other: it was represented by tropes identifying it with the primitive, the exotic,                                                                   66

Leerssen 2007c: 323 and 2007d: 325. Riesz 2007: 304-305; Arndt 2007: 387-389. 68 Arndt 2007: 388. 69 Ibid. 70 Beller 2007c: 194-198. 71 “Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno in Liberal Italy were most often not symptoms of Italy’s failure to become a nation-state. It was rather discourses associated with the very project of nation building and modernization that produced those stereotypes in their predominant forms. The issues raised by stereotypical representations of the South in the Liberal period need to be relocated in the context of attempts to create or imagine a national culture.” (Dickie 1999: 4). 67

Introduction

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the horrible and the fantastic, so that the South was cast as the centre of the pre-modern, in contrast to the rest of Italy, which was seen as the locus of civilisation.72 The negative facets of this image merged with the positive ones, however, giving rise to an appreciation of the simplicity and authenticity considered typical of non-European premodern cultures and expressed in nostalgic and exoticised terms;73 a clear example is the pictures published in the magazine Illustrazione Italiana, in which the South is portrayed as “Italy’s Orient”.74 Extending the discussion to the theme of regionalism in Romantic culture, it should be remembered that at that time considerable literary success was enjoyed by the rustic tale, a genre which exalted the beauty, authenticity and nobility of country life in reaction to the evils brought about by development and modernisation.75 Its popularity in the 19th and 20th centuries was due to the blend of identity rediscovery and exoticism contained in it. Every idyllic portrayal of a homeland (home, village or region of origin) constituted a self-image marked by a desire to claim membership of a specific community whose uniqueness and peculiarities led to its description as strange and curious, which appealed to the taste for the exotic. The portrayal of Sardinia in post-unification literature was guided by the same strategies: urban elites saw the rustic world, presented as simple, genuine and thus noble and worthy, as a model to be preferred to a corrupt, mechanised modern society. The result was a nostalgic celebration of the simplicity and traditions of the preindustrial world of the country.76 If it is true, as John Dickie observes, that “[s]tereotypes are perhaps the most important features of ethnocentric discourse”,77 what is most striking about the construction of the Italian popular imagination is the role played by southern Italian intellectuals in the propagation of those images. In Dickie’s view the explanation of this role is to be sought in the relationship that arose between the elites and the new nation-state; in that context a southern intellectual such as                                                                   72

Dickie 1999: 5. Leerssen 2007i: 407. 74 Dickie 1999: 83-119. See also Schneider 1998. 75 Leerssen 2007j: 412. 76 Ibid. 77 Dickie 1999: 5. 73

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Niceforo constituted an extreme but not isolated case.78 A similar process of identity construction provides the key to understanding the two apparently contradictory trends which characterised the debate on Sardinia and form the background of this study. On the one hand the island’s political and cultural elites tried to enhance and promote their traditions – as in the case of Deledda, whose desire to reclaim Sardinian identity exploited the concept of primitivism and rendered it exotic – and from this viewpoint regionalism was absorbed by the vision of the nation-state;79 on the other, the island was represented in the literature of the time as an extreme case of Southern primitivism. The ‘discovery’ of Sardinia, meaning its definitive canonisation in literary discourse, thus occurred in a Europe dominated by the conceptual dichotomy between North and South and by burgeoning nationalism, a Europe which witnessed the birth of the Kingdom of Italy and of its repertoire of symbolic representations of the Italian nation. But how are Sardinians described in modern sources? What characteristics are ascribed to them, and on the basis of what tradition? How does that repertoire stand in relation to the classifications of national characters in the European imagination? These are some of the questions to which answers are sought in this study, on the basis of a broad selection of literary and cinematic sources whose characteristics will be discussed below. National Characters from Literature to Cinema Literature is the primary, though not exclusive, context in which national character images are systematically used, as demonstrated by studies which have explored the portrayal of national constructs in media such as cinema.80 The present study is intended to be an example of interdisciplinary imagological research comprising literary discourse and cinema, starting from the observation that since the very beginnings of cinema film-makers have exploited the ample stock of themes, characters and situations provided by literature, adapting and reworking them in accordance with their own potential, requirements and objectives. The discussion must necessarily start, therefore, with a                                                                   78

Ibid., 11. Leerssen 2007j: 413. 80 Degler 2007: 296-297; Bussi and Leech 2003. 79

Introduction

29

systematic description of the stock of Sardinian images in literary discourse (chapters 1 and 2), and then pass to an analysis of how they are represented on film (chapters 3-6). In addition, since cinema avails itself of intrinsic, material and technological resources different to those used in written communication, it has to be ascertained whether those specific characteristics have provided cinema with new or distinctive capacities for the representation of national characters. As observed by Rother (1998) and Giannone (2005), “an imagology of cinema must address primarily the visible and audible shape of the characters and the film setting”,81 since the primacy of pictures over words in film production goes back to the beginnings of the new medium.82 In the earliest moving pictures a character had to be recognisable by his physical appearance, in which commonplaces and clichés were frequently used.83 Among other things, this custom gave rise to the establishment of a stock of standardised recognisable images of national differences, as exemplified by the portrayal of Red Indians and other ethnic groups such as Arabs, Jews and coloured people.84 A similar process may be supposed to have taken place in the cinematic representation of Sardinian characters, resulting in the selection of a series of elements regarding the physical appearance, dress and gestures to be considered typical of their national character, whose mere presentation sufficed to evoke a clear image of Sardinia in the mind of the audience. One of the main aims of this study is to present a systematic description, starting from the models provided by literature, of the elements considered specific and salient in the depiction of the Sardinian character on screen, in its male and female versions alike. The analysis ranges from characters’ personalities and physical appearance to the most recurrent social types, and particular attention is devoted to film characters based on a specific literary model. Since the corpus in examination covers films produced from the beginnings of cinema to the present day, discussion will also focus on elements of continuity and any signs of discontinuity in the                                                                   81

Degler 2007: 295. “Because of this dominant role of the visual representation, rooted in the era of silent movies, the imagology of cinema presents an important area of research, in that it involves a direct access to the visualized ‘images’ of Others and the production process of these standardized ‘pictures’” (Degler 2007: 295). 83 Metz 1972. 84 Degler 2007: 295-296. 82

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portrayal of the typical Sardinian, and on the development of relations over time between the literary and cinematic repertoires of images. Not only does every narrative rest on the nature of the characters and their actions, it is placed in a physical setting and a social and cultural context in which the story unfolds and with which the characters interact. This dimension has greater weight on film than on the printed page, since the scene of the events is clearly defined and visible, unlike narrated places, which, no matter how detailed the description, can be evoked only by words, leaving much to the reader’s imagination. The representation of spaces is thus an essential vehicle of meaning in cinematic narration. What is the relationship between place and character in the representation of national identities? As observed by Patrick Leech and G. Elisa Bussi, in Anthony Smith’s study of ethnic myths the construction of a stock of national images turns basically on the ideas of genealogy (biological descent) and territoriality (the geographical space in which an ethnic community resides).85 Stories celebrating blood ties present a perpetuation of national character from one generation to another, while the spatial dimension contributes in various ways to the evocation of an ethnic group’s identity-fixedness.86 The geographical setting functions first of all as a physical background, an indispensable stage for events, but it is also the space framing the struggle, the conflict through which a people secures control over that given territory.87 The landscape also takes on an iconic value, since the characteristics of the people living in it are projected onto it. Lastly, the bond uniting an ethnos to its territory is celebrated in a number of rituals in a process called the “territorialisation of memory”.88 The idea of territoriality is expressed in what Smith calls “ethno-scapes” – places which not only help the audience to locate a story in a geographical space but also emanate an awareness of the moral profile of the nation living in them.89                                                                   85

Leech and Bussi 2003: 11-12; Smith 1999: 15. See also Idem 1986, 1993, 1998. Leech and Bussi 2003: 12. 87 Smith 1999: 149. 88 Smith 1999: 152. As observed by Leech and Bussi (2003: 12) the term “territorialisation of memory” (Smith 1999: 152) recalls the idea of “places of memory”: Nora 1997. See also Winter 1995, Isnenghi 1996-1997 and Losurdo 1991. 89 Smith 1999: 152. 86

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Bussi and Leech’s book Schermi della dispersione (2003) analyses a selection of films in which the ideas of genealogy and territoriality have been applied to represent the concept of national identity.90 Examples are the setting of Braveheart (Gibson 1995) in the Highlands, which become the icon of Scottish identity, the locations shown in Paisà (Rossellini 1946), which help to draw a map – moral and cultural, besides physical – of the new Italian nation rising from the ashes of Fascism, and any number of westerns, where the link between landscape and identity stands as one of the formal bases of the genre.91 Based on Smith’s concept of ethno-scape, research into landscapes is suitable for application in an analysis of films set in Sardinia. Included in this category are films telling stories which take place on the island, films that focus on the way life is lived on the island, and films which present a natural scenery which may be real or artificial but is in all events perceived as unmistakably Sardinian. What are the specific locations on the island that perform the iconic function of the Highlands in the Scottish imagination and the desolate valleys of the American epic? Why these places and not others? What is the relationship between characters and territory in these films? This study sets out to answer these questions, starting from the idea of ethno-scape and from the conviction that geographical context is not simply a background but stands as an essential strategy in the representation on screen of a given idea of the Sardinian character. Indeed, in the case of Sardinia the relationship between ethnos and territory seems to be paradigmatic, since the place in which the Sardinians’ story has unfolded corresponds to a highly specific geographical space: an island, an environment whose frontiers are therefore indisputable, but whose history is described in terms of perennial conflict between the original inhabitants of the place (the Sardinians) and the foreigners who have by turns invaded and occupied it.92 The territory of Sardinia, in other words, is perceived in the collective imagination as the natural habitat of the Sardinian nation but at the same time as the space in which that assumption has always                                                                   90

Bussi and Leech 2003. Leech 2003: 93-104; Masoni 2003: 225-228; La Polla 2003: 165-179, see also Leech and Bussi 2003: 15. 92 Lilliu 2002. 91

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been contested. Here again Smith’s concept comes into play, in that the ethno-scape acts as a background for the conflicts which he considers as constituent factors in “the creation of the myth of territoriality which lies at the root of the symbolic representation of national identity”.93 The Sardinian landscape re-created in films thus stands as the space of the struggle for and defence of a territory and in more general terms for the reclaiming of a national identity. What are the consequences of such a vision for the cinematic image of Sardinia? How has the portrayal of space communicated the state of perpetual conflict between different cultural identities, in which the Sardinian identity represents the force historically defeated and subordinate? The answers to these questions will be found both in an analysis of the selection of locations and in a reflection on how the traces of the historical past have become iconic signs of Sardinian identity. Though the third chapter provides a detailed discussion of ways of depicting the landscape – in the broadest sense of the term, from virgin territory to urban areas – it may be stated at this stage that the films considered in this study exhibit a remarkable continuity and standardisation in terms of both character types and settings, regardless of genre and period. In other words, the big screen at all times and in all circumstances shows the same image of Sardinia and the Sardinians, with astonishing insistence and consistency. Although it is easy to assume that such uniformity makes a story’s setting immediately recognisable to the audience and therefore conforms to the principle of standardisation peculiar to the cinematic imagination, it is also reasonable to suppose that the same process performs an iconic function consistent with Smith’s argument on the idea of the ethno-scape. An analysis of the background thus forms an essential component, no less than character analysis, of an imagological study of national character in cinema. Smith’s thoughts on ethno-scape are particularly relevant to an assessment of the role of ritual celebrations as significant examples of the theatricalisation of the collective feeling of national belonging.94 Various facets of Sardinian folklore, such as village festivities and traditional music and dance, have been used as unmistakable and                                                                   93 94

Leech and Bussi 2003: 14. Smith 1999: 152.

Introduction

33

indispensable signs in every narrative on the Sardinian world. What form do they take when portrayed on screen? How are they used and how do they relate to the stories being told? It is reasonable to assume that, as with landscape, elements of folklore also make an essential contribution to the creation of the cinematic imagination, not forgetting that their spectacular qualities may have made them so commonly used as to reduce them to picturesque cameos, apparently irrelevant to the story but actually useful in the re-creation of a specific image of Sardinian society. To put it another way, it may be supposed that their success on screen is to be explained in terms of the synergy between their symbolic function (as icons of Sardinian identity) and their attractions as a spectacle. It should be remembered in this regard that in cinematic language the term spectacle refers to one of the two basic components of a film – the other is the narrative – and thus requires further explanation.95 It denotes the image which, built into the mise-enscéne, is able to hold the spectator’s attention and secure his emotional involvement.96 Thus defined, a spectacle is manifested at a number of levels. It may be identified with the images produced by special effects and state-of-the-art technology, as is the case in many American blockbusters, but it may also derive from the physical appearance and personality of the characters and the actors playing them, from plot situations and from single objects which elicit an                                                                  

95 As confirmed by recent studies, the terms ‘narrative’ and ‘spectacle’ cannot be considered as irreconcilable opposites; rather they should be seen more flexibly as elements coexisting in every film. In this regard Lavik cites Patrick Keating (2006), who speaks of a “cooperation model”, “since narrative and spectacle pursue a common goal, namely to create a concentrated emotional experience” (Lavik 2009: 152). The body of literature exploring the concepts of narrative and spectacle and the relations between them is a substantial one; for an overview see Lavik 2008 and 2009. 96 The elements comprising a mise-en-scéne are setting, costume and make-up, lighting and staging, framing, camera movement and sound (for a discussion of the various definitions see Bordwell and Thompson 2010: chapter 4 and Gibbs 2002: 5354, both cited by Lewis 2012: 183-184). However, as stated by Gibbs 2002: 5 (quoted in Lewis 2012: 183), mise-en-scéne “refers to many of the major elements of communication in the cinema, and the combinations through which they operate expressively”. The communicative effectiveness of a mise-en-scéne is thus determined by the synergy of its components. The definition of spectacle used here is that proposed by Simon John Lewis in his Phd thesis: Lewis 2012: 56. King (2000: 4) defines a spectacle as “the production of images at which we might wish to stop and stare”.

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emotional reaction when exhibited on the big screen.97 Images able to produce such involvement establish a direct contact with the audience, entail a temporary suspension in the train of events and help to communicate the film’s message by revealing the standpoint from which the story is being told. It is reasonable to postulate that in Sardinian films spectacle is the most striking product of the ethnocentric standpoint, by virtue of which the island is portrayed as a remote land populated by primitive men and characterised by bizarre customs – a portrayal thus strewn with visual signs (folklore, settings, scenery, etc.) able to communicate a powerful and attractive image of the Sardinian world as an anthropological rarity. Such an exhibition of island society, the product of a mentality and sensitivity similar to those found in colonial cinema, is configured at the level of what may be defined the Sardinian ethnographic spectacle.98 Though this study concerns ways of presenting images of Sardinia and not the mechanics of the film industry, it cannot fail to recognise that the conditions and methods of film production are necessarily more complex than those surrounding a written text. A film is the product of an industry working in a capitalist system, requiring funding infinitely greater than that needed for a book. This evidently affects the choice of stories and screenplays, since production companies will be prepared to finance films judged likely to succeed at the box office.99 Olla shows that most of the fiction films                                                                   97

See King 2000 and 2002. Lavik (2008: 170), observes that a spectacle “is, by definition, impressive” and “is something solid and perceptive”; what a spectacle is, is thus distinguished from what it is not by its extraordinariness in comparison with what is perceived as ordinary. Citing King (2002: 181 and 184), Lavik (2008: 171) also observes that there is a classification of the ways in which a spectacle takes shape: from the moments of maximum visual impact, as in action films, to more moderate forms of spectacle such as the presence of a star on screen, costumes, emotional moments, etc. The exhibitionistic connotation of a spectacle is contrasted with the basically voyeuristic character of classical cinema. In the former case the cinematic image captures the attention of the spectator irrespective of the events narrated, establishing a direct relationship with the audience. 98 In a study on colonial cinema, Jacqueline Maingard (2009: 2) uses the term ethnographic spectacle to refer to one of the basic characteristics of the film The Rose of Rhodesia (1918), defined as both “a romantic fiction and ethnographic spectacle”. The term ethnographic spectacle was introduced by Fatimah Tobing Rony “to explain [...] the pervasive ‘racialization’ of indigenous peoples in both popular and traditional scientific cinema” (Tobing Rony 1996: 8, quoted by Maingard 2009: 6). 99 Viganò 2003: 63.

Introduction

35

examined here have been financed and made by Italian individuals and companies, including a limited participation of Sardinian capital, while foreign productions are few and far between.100 This would seem to imply that interest in Sardinia as a subject for films is confined to Italy, and has not given rise to any great passion further afield; the same cannot be said for, say, Sicily, which is firmly established in the popular imagination by virtue of the topos of the Mafia, as proved by the fame achieved by The Godfather.101 The marginal importance of the Sardinian character in the cinematic imagination might therefore be interpreted as evidence of the scant attractive power of the topos of Sardinia.102 Recent years, however, have seen the appearance of what has been called the Sardinian school of cinema, that is to say a number of Sardinian film-makers who have achieved some success in the production of work dealing with the island’s society.103 Terminology aside, the question arises as to whether this “Sardinian new wave” (nouvelle vague sarda)104 has brought about any change in the type of stories chosen and the ways of depicting the Sardinian character and landscape. This question in turn gives rise to queries of a more general nature: what is the viewpoint of a film and how can it be identified? Though it is true that the industry depends on the availability of large sums of money and that every film is in part the product of a compromise between artistic requirements and financial considerations, the identification of the viewpoint in the cinematic medium appears much more complex than in the case of written texts, since this new art has from the outset addressed itself to an international audience and has tended to develop a language of universally recognisable signs.105 And above all, as observed by Gilles Deleuze (1986), cinema is distinguished by an extremely potent focus on reality, resting on its ability to encapsulate a range of viewpoints in                                                                   100

Olla 2008. The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola 1972) and The Godfather II (Francis Ford Coppola 1974). 102 As noted by Olla 2008 Sardinia is considered a subject that doesn’t sell. 103 This does not entail considering these film-makers as Sardinians at all costs in a reductive or regionalistic sense. For the present purposes it simply means examining films dealing with a Sardinian subject which are addressed to a potentially international audience. 104 Olla 2008: 93. 105 Degler 2007: 295-296. 101

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an image and thereby presents a complex, nuanced and critical portrayal of events.106 Another factor of crucial significance for this study is the synergy between the literary tradition and cinema.107 Two obvious examples are Padre padrone (Taviani brothers, 1977), based on Gavino Ledda’s autobiography, and the more recent Sonetàula (Mereu, 2008), taken from Giuseppe Fiori’s novel of the same name (19621; 20002). What types of books have been chosen as models for films, and why those types as opposed to others? Is it possible to trace a development of a Sardinian imagination corresponding to the one developed by literature, on the basis of the stories selected for films? Has cinema confined itself to taking up models of representation already present in written texts or has it been able to invent and develop images which have subsequently appeared in literary fiction? The question of the relationship between written texts and films can actually be posed in broader terms, and the sources examined in this analysis go beyond the purely literary to comprise essays and scientific and academic publications. That is because the present writer is convinced that all written sources, irrespective of their genre and immediate objectives, have interacted and contributed to the propagation of national tropes, in turn generating synergies and correspondences with other forms of artistic expression and communication. One example of this is provided by another – very famous – film set in Sardinia: Banditi a Orgosolo (De Seta 1961), based on anthropological research carried out by Franco Cagnetta in a village in the island’s interior.108 But it is by no means the only case. This study thus sets out to explore the synergy between the two forms of imagination, examining a highly variegated repertoire of texts, whose specific characteristics will be discussed in the next section. Description of the Corpus This book presents the results of an analysis carried out on two types of source: films of fiction and a collection of literary fiction, academic                                                                   106

Leech and Bussi 2003: 23. On this subject see Brunetta 1976; Hutcheon 2006; Cortellazzo and Tomasi 2006; Tinazzi 2007; Bonsaver, McLaughlin and Pellegrini 2008; Bartolomeo and Polato 2004; Dusi 2003. 108 See Cagnetta 2002 and chapter 2. 107

Introduction

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texts and essays, which together stand as a broad and representative selection of the forms in which Sardinia is portrayed in cinema and in literary discourse. The films chosen are fictional stories set in Sardinia – they tell stories and create situations considered typical of the island, and are of various genres and from various periods. The research covers the whole history of cinema, though some periods are better represented than others, partly because more Sardinian-set films were made at certain times than others, and partly because of the variations in cinematic production over time – under the Fascist regime, for instance, only one film was made in a Sardinian setting.109 Italian films account for the great majority, though some films are of foreign production. And the language most used is Italian, although some films feature other languages (Sardinian, German and French). Since they are germane to the object of this research, consideration is also given to a number of films made for the small screen. A complete list of the works analysed in this volume is provided in the Filmography.110 Particularly significant among the films are those based on literary fiction or essays, since they allow a comparative analysis of forms of portraying the Sardinian character in literary discourse and in cinema. The complex relationship between literature and film is still a subject of great interest, one which early 20th-century writers were the first to explore as direct witnesses of the birth of the new art form.111 There is no doubt that from its earliest days cinema drew inspiration from the literary tradition, as witnessed by the many projects for the reworking or adaptation of written texts for the big screen. For its part, cinema made a crucial contribution to the formation of the popular imagination of the 20th century, and its relationship with literature seems to have undergone a profound change – in recent years mention is often heard of texts influenced by, or written explicitly for, cinema. It is precisely the specific nature of the interaction between text and film – and, by extension, the correspondences between their respective stocks of images – which bears out the choice made in this analysis to concentrate on fiction films rather than documentaries. Fiction films have played a predominant role in the development and propagation of                                                                   109

See Brunetta 2003a, 2003b, and 1975; Sorlin 1996. A complete description of films features is in Olla 2008. 111 Brunetta 2004. 110

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forms of representing national characters in the popular imagination by virtue of their evocative power and the popularity they have achieved. That is why the corpus does not comprise the repertoire – rich and highly interesting though it is – of Sardinian documentaries, most of which were designed for an informed but narrow audience.112 Although the 20th century was the century of cinema, it also saw the birth and blanket diffusion of television broadcasting. Television took on board almost all the genres developed by cinema113 and has played an increasingly influential role in the popular imagination. It also opened up a dialogue with highbrow culture. Adaptations of literary classics – of particular relevance to the present theme are those of Grazia Deledda’s Canne al vento (Landi 1958) and Marianna Sirca (Morandi 1965) – stand as evidence of interest in the dissemination of literary culture and the didactic vocation of certain television producers as well as the potential for cultural mediation in the visual mass media.114 It should also be remembered that in financing films for the cinema circuit, Italian state television (RAI) is a player in the film market. In recent years, then, interaction between cinema and television has become more intense, blurring the dividing line between the two media – despite this, the main focus of this research remains the repertoire of images of Sardinia expressed by cinema. Notwithstanding the success of television entertainment, after more than a hundred years of life cinema remains a powerful art form with sufficient resources to develop its own distinct language, still recognisable and attractive to a broad and increasingly globalised audience, still able to exert a significant influence on our experience of real life. With regard to the mixing of literature, television and cinema, consideration will be given here to a number of television productions based on literary texts which are relevant to the present analysis, leaving aside a thoroughgoing discussion of all television productions featuring Sardinian themes. Presented with a critical analysis in the first two chapters, the variety of modern and contemporary written sources have the common feature of dealing with situations, themes and characters                                                                   112

On this collection of works, some of which are of considerable artistic merit, see the analysis and catalogue presented by Olla 2008. 113 Degler 2007: 296. 114 Olla 2008: 349-350 and 352-353.

Introduction

39

recognisable as Sardinian. The diverse genres selected include narrative, essays and academic texts, since every text, irrespective of author, genre and intended readership, provides a representation of national characters, thus contributing to their uninterrupted dissemination in discursive form.115 A text type particularly relevant to this research is the travel literature published between the late 18th and early 20th centuries. Most of it was written by northern Europeans, though it does include writings by non-Sardinian Italians. It ranges from classics of the genre, such as Alberto Ferrero Della Marmora’s Voyage en Sardaigne, ou description statistique, physique et politique de cette île (18261; 1839-18572) and his Itinéraire de l’Ile de Sardaigne, pur faire suite au Voyage en cette contrée (1860), both the result of painstaking scientific observation carried out during the author’s long residence on the island, to D.H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia (1921). It also comprises literary works such as Elio Vittorini’s Sardegna come un’infanzia (19321; 19522), Carlo Levi’s Tutto il miele è finito (1964), Sprich gut von Sardinien (1958) by Thomas Münster and several writings by Ernst Jünger now enclosed in the Italian translation Terra sarda; the term travel literature appears rather reductive when applied to these works, but it is useful as an indication of writings deriving from the authors’ experiences in Sardinia. Another important group of texts is made up of narratives in the narrow sense, produced mostly – but not exclusively – by Sardinian authors between the mid-19th century and the present day; some of them have been adapted for cinema and are thus of particular significance for this analysis. The selection of highly diverse works in this category comprises Il muto di Gallura. Racconto storico sardo (1885), La bella di Cabras (1887) and Giovanni Tolu (1897) by Sardinian writer and intellectual Enrico Costa; a series of novels and short stories by Grazia Deledda, including Cenere (1903), L’edera (1908), Colombi e sparvieri (1912) and her posthumous autobiographical work Cosima (1937); Sardinian novels from the second half of the 20th century, such as Il disertore (1961) by Giuseppe Dessì and Gavino Ledda’s Padre padrone (1975). Some of the more recent novels in the collection bear witness to the                                                                   115

In his study, John Dickie (1999: 21) states that stereotypes are present in all types of sources, irrespective of genre.

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development of the Sardinian imagination in contemporary literary production: Procedura (1980) and Un morso di formica (1981) by Salvatore Mannuzzu and Sergio Atzeni’s Apologo del giudice bandito (1986), Il figlio di Bakunìn (1988), Il quinto passo è l’addio (1995), Passavamo sulla terra leggeri (1996), and Bellas mariposas (1996). The third, and highly heterogeneous, group of texts comprises essays – some of an academic nature – on various facets of Sardinian life. Several of these writings, mostly from the 19th and 20th centuries, have played an influential role in Sardinian cultural debate and are still considered essential for an understanding of the island and its people. The scholars and experts – Sardinian, Italian and foreign – in this category range from Jesuit priest Antonio Bresciani to sociologists Alfredo Niceforo and Paolo Orano, French geographer Maurice Le Lannou, historian Fernand Braudel, jurist Antonio Pigliaru, anthropologist Franco Cagnetta and archaeologist Giovanni Lilliu. The corpus does not include traditional poetry in the Sardinian language. A knowledge of this basically oral tradition is essential for an understanding of the island’s culture, but as it is of interest mostly to a local readership (Sardinian poetry may be said to be essentially a telling of the self) it is distinct from the literary repertoire here examined, whose unifying element is a non-Sardinian readership, or at least one which perceives itself as such in that it does not identify with the Sardinian character evoked in literary discourse.116 Some further observations are required with regard to the chronology and origin of the written sources. This analysis focuses on the forms of representation of the Sardinian character in cinema, and to do so it must follow the development of images of Sardinia from the advent of the modern printing press, when the circulation of ideas was hugely accelerated and the classification of national characters was discussed for the first time in the cultural debate. In chronological terms the written sources cover the period from 1550 to the present day, though most of the texts considered are from the 19th century onward, when interest in Sardinia began to be reflected in an increased literary output. In terms of provenance, some of the European sources examined form part of an established cultural tradition, others stand alone as almost unique cases in their own right. Provenance must also                                                                   116

An analysis of poetry in the Sardinian language is found in Paulis 2006: 253-286.

Introduction

41

take account of historical circumstances, so it should be borne in mind that some of the written texts are from countries whose identity as nation-states (and therefore, whose forms of cultural representation) was not what it is now. This means that the relationships between writers and texts from different cultural areas have to be interpreted in the light of the complexities of European history from the beginning of the modern age to the present day. German writers such as Fues, for example, were born in a still feudal 18th-century Germany. Della Marmora, a high-ranking member of the military hierarchy of the Kingdom of Sardinia, wrote mostly in French, the language of the court of Savoy, and it was precisely for this reason that his texts were well known to educated Europeans. Obviously, most of the writers and film-makers taken into consideration are men, although there are some significant feminine voices.117 First and foremost among these is Grazia Deledda, who, as will be seen below, may be considered the most influential mediator between her Sardinian world and its image in Europe. Structure of the Book The analysis of the corpus outlined above is divided into two parts, the first of which deals with the subject on the basis of written texts, and the second in terms of films. Mostly descriptive in nature and comprising the first two chapters, the former presents the tropes of the Sardinian character found in literary discourse. The second part (chapters 3 to 6) analyses how Sardinian identity is represented in cinema. The thematic and chronological procedure adopted in the analysis is the same for literary texts as for the films examined. The order of the themes discussed is as follows: the image of Sardinia in physical and symbolic terms, the repertoire of forms of portraying the Sardinian character, male and female, and the description of a number of topoi considered peculiar to Sardinian identity. The sixth chapter performs an exemplary function, presenting an analysis of a number of films in accordance with the research criteria adopted in the book as a whole. Of the long chronological period covered by the research,                                                                   117

As far as cinema is concerned, excluding the names of directors Maria Teresa Camoglio and Giuliana Berlinguer, all the films taken into consideration were conceived and made by men.

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most of the analysis focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries. The first chapter looks at written sources up to 1900, and the second analyses texts from 1900 to the present day. The analysis and classification of cinematic images also takes account of their chronological development, starting from the oldest and expanding the repertoire with those produced in subsequent periods up to the most recent times. The first chapter provides a description of the literary works published before 1900 which contributed to the formation and dissemination of a standardised image of the Sardinian national character. Particular attention is given to the collection of European texts which gave increasing credence to a specific image of the island and its people among continental readers, and contributed to the formation of a local written tradition whose main function was the promotion and enhancement of Sardinian identity and culture as part of the construction of an Italian national identity following the country’s unification. The second chapter analyses written texts published in the 20th century. A role of particular importance is played by Grazia Deledda, the most prominent Sardinian writer of the time, but attention is also devoted to the island’s other intellectual and artistic voices, and to the Italian and foreign authors whose work kept readers’ interest alive and contributed to the canonisation of Sardinian imagery. The most innovative features in the stock of images of Sardinian identity in the 20th century are to be found in the work of contemporary Sardinian authors. Though rooted in the local tradition, they have tried to blaze new thematic and stylistic trails, succeeding in making a significant impact on the present-day conception of Sardinia. In the third chapter the focus of the analysis shifts to cinema – to the film portrayal of Sardinia, its places and its landscapes – and its convergences with literary imagery. Not only is there a reflection on the physical places and landscapes re-created for the big screen, the discussion explores the symbolic significance with which those images are loaded. Of particular interest is how the idea of insularity is rendered visually in films and how the portrayal of Sardinia is effected in accordance with the canonical images of the South. First and foremost among the places standing as icons of Sardinian identity is the Barbagia, the interior mountain region repeatedly characterised as the heart of Sardinia, and the peak of the Gennargentu. Attention is turned in the fourth chapter to the portrayal of Sardinian men and women in films, exploring the physical appearance, character,

Introduction

43

mentality and social behaviour considered typical of the Sardinian people. From a comparison between the written texts and films it emerges clearly that from the very beginning cinema developed a stock of images, drawing heavily on the literary tradition, which has remained essentially intact to the present day. Alongside the resilience of this traditional repertoire, however, are the efforts of some recent film-makers who are attempting to produce new images of Sardinia. The fifth chapter examines a selected group of topoi which seem to be essential in any representation of Sardinian life on film. They include folklore (such as traditional festivities and costume), nuragic civilisation and prehistory in general, and the Sardinian language. Following the systematic and thematic discussion of forms of cinematic representation of Sardinia in the above three chapters, the sixth chapter presents a reading of a selection of films in accordance with the criteria of analysis informing the book as a whole.

 

1. Sardinian Tropes in Literature before 1900

Sardinia in European Literature before 1900 The first book entirely devoted to a description of Sardinia dates back to 1550, when the famous young scholar Sigismondo Arquer (15301571), already a graduate in civil and canon law and a doctor of theology, published his Sardiniae brevis historia et descriptio, included in Sebastian Münster’s fifth edition of the Cosmographia universalis, printed in Basle.1 Speaking of his work, written in no more than a month and a half, he recalled composing a “compendium of stories of the dark Sardinia”.2 Composed of seven parts, the essay contains all the traditional elements of a historical-geographicalanthropological analysis.3 The author is known to have hoped to return to the subject in more depth, but was prevented from doing so by a long period of imprisonment which concluded in 1571 in Toledo with his condemnation to death by the Inquisition for heresy.4 Arquer’s text drew on a wide range of classical sources, though he also gave free rein to his personal opinions.5 The repertoire of classical works cited in the Sardiniae brevis historia et descriptio was systematically drawn on by writers in the modern age and constituted a foundation stone for the development of the literary discourse on Sardinia and its people. The same may certainly be said of Arquer’s text: though the author’s name was excised from subsequent publications because of his heresy, he continued to act as a model – at times a latent one – for scholars such as the Dominican friar Leandro Alberti, himself an Inquisitor, and the Sardinian Giovanni Francesco Fara.6 It is safe to say, then, that 1

See Cocco 1987; Laneri 2007: ICIX-C. “un compendio dele historie di la tenebrosa Sardegna”: brief to Gaspar de Centellas (Bruxelles, 12 November 1549) quoted by Laneri 2007: CIV. 3 Laneri 2007: CXXII-CXLV. 4 Arquer 2007: 24; Laneri 2007: CVII; Turtas 2007: LXXV-LXXXV. 5 Laneri 2007: CXXIV. 6 Laneri 2007: CI. As a matter of fact, in 1559 Münster’s Cosmographia itself appeared in the Indice de los libros prohibidos published in Valladolid, on the 2

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in its blend of ancient sources, personal observations and original narrative structure, Arquer’s work played a crucial role, even when not explicitly acknowledged, in the development of the image of Sardinia in European culture.7 The printed word contributed to the spread of the body of information by which Sardinia and the Sardinians were usually defined. The prevalently dim view held of the islanders by Europeans is exemplified by a number of anecdotes. A feeling of profound unease pervaded a conversation held in Turin in 1728 between the philosopher Montesquieu and Baron Guglielmo Pallavicino di San Rémy, viceroy of the Kingdom of Sardinia from 1720 to 1723 and again in 1726 and 1727. When he asked about the island, Montesquieu was astonished to hear of the coarseness of the Sardinians.8 The Baron told him that if the sovereign offered him the island as a gift he would refuse it, so dismal were the conditions in which it found itself. A land with no water, blighted by unhealthy air, Sardinia was distinguished above all by its social and cultural immobility.9 A similar note was sounded by Joseph de Maistre, who remarked on the roughness of the islanders and their inability to progress beyond the uncivilised conditions in which they lived.10 Outside the Grand Tour circuit in the 16th and 17th centuries, Sardinia began to appear in travel literature in the 18th century and texts devoted to the island multiplied in the 19th. As they were written by authors of widely varying professions, intentions and literary aspirations, they cannot really be termed a category, but they do grounds of its heretical character. It thus served Arquer’s enemies as further evidence against him in his trial (Turtas 2007: 23-24 and Laneri 2007: CVIII). Giovanni Francesco Fara (1543-1591) was a Sardinian historian, geographer and clergyman. He is the author of De rebus Sardois libri quatuor (the first book was published in 1580, the other books in 1835) and In Sardiniae chorografia libri duo, written between 1580-1585 but unpublished until the 19th century. About him see Dizionario Bibliografico degli Italiani, vol. 44 (1994). 7 Arquer was certainly known to 19th-century travellers. Valery (1837: 203) speaks of him in his book on prominent figures of Cagliari, referring to him as the “first national historian of Sardinia” who had written “a sort of statistical-political essay, strange for its time”. Arquer is also mentioned by Mimaut 1825: 657 and Tyndale 1849: I, XI. 8 Cited by Antonello Mattone, the account of the meeting is taken up by Marci 2006: 107. 9 Paulis 2006: 92. Montesquieu noted that the Sardinians did not cut grass to feed their livestock in the winter, because their fathers had never done so; likewise they planted not a single tree (ibid.). 10 Brigaglia 1983: 76. Mattone 1982: 1. See chapter 4, note 9.

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express a common view of Sardinia and its inhabitants. In addition, the quotations the authors make from each others’ works add up to a network of references and a body of information from which we may extrapolate a repertoire of images that has remained virtually unchanged in the European literary tradition. The unifying thread running through every narrative is the topos of a wild, primitive and mysterious island awaiting discovery.11 A journey in Sardinia is anticipated as an experience of dislocation in space and above all in time, in virgin territory with all its oddities intact before the careful assessing gaze of the observer. Each account is thus the record of a narrator belonging to the civilised world who plunges into an uncivilised, primitive and archaic reality able at once to arouse opposed feelings such as wonder and contempt. The sensations aroused by Sardinia recall in narrators’ minds journeys of exploration in exotic locations such as Patagonia and the Pacific islands, or invite comparison with areas on the edge of the civilised world like Ireland and Scotland.12 The surprise is all the greater, of course, when it is remembered that the island is in the heart of the Mediterranean, so “how can we understand barbarity in the breast of civilisation, how can we explain Sardinia?”.13 To understand such a state of affairs a thorough knowledge of the island’s history is required, since its primitive inhabitants have never been able to form a single people because of its constant subjection to foreigners, and the island “remains barbaric, has absorbed nothing from its dominators but their vices”.14 Another feature common to every interpretation of Sardinia is the topos of the island’s fertility, a factor noted by even the most reliable and scientific of authors, who invariably add the accusation that the islanders are idle and primitive, no different from any other southern people. In the multiplicity of 18th- and 19th-century accounts which contributed to making the island known in Europe, Sardinia seems to be characterised by the gulf between the image of a 11

Leerssen 2007i: 406-408. Bechi 1997: 37. Tyndale 1849: I, XVI; 2002: 47. Forester 1858: 365; Edwardes 1889: 5; Tennant 1885: 219-220. Poggi 2002: 69. 13 “On comprend une oasis dans le desert; mais comment comprendre la barbarie au sein de la civilisation, comment explicar la Sardaigne” (Jourdan 1861: 1). See also the partial Italian translation of the same work L’isola di Sardegna in Boscolo 1973: 195224. 14 Jourdan 1861: 2. 12

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flourishing area depicted in ancient sources and its actual condition as experienced by travellers on their adventurous explorations. How can the decadence of the Sardinian people be judged when their land has been so generously endowed by nature? The responsibility can only lie at the door of its inhabitants, who are thus given the blame for their material and moral poverty. Though the accounts of foreign narrators – most of them British, French and German – are in some cases sympathetic to and genuinely interested in matters Sardinian, they betray an Orientalist slant typical of those who look down on other peoples and cultures. Their descriptions evince an image of Sardinia identifiable with the topos of the South, not only in terms of geography and climate but as a socially marginal area on the periphery of the civilised world.15 To this is added the conviction that Sardinia, like any land to be explored, is populated by primitive people. The character of the natives is partly a result of the climate: like all southerners, Sardinians are lazy and indolent but at the same time animated by uncontrollable violent impulses.16 Similar impressions emerge from writers belonging to the Savoy ruling class, such as General Alberto Ferrero Della Marmora and Father Bresciani, and leading figures in the Kingdom of Italy like Paolo Mantegazza and Francesco Pais Serra, who considered the new Italian state duty-bound to foster progress on the island. In writings published in the period following Italian unification, the analysis of the situation in Sardinia was placed within the debate on the Southern question, an ideological context turning on the stereotyping of the differences characterising the concepts of North and South as applied to Italy as a whole.17 In a century dominated by the idea of the nation and the recovery of the national memory, Sardinia’s position in European culture seemed marginal in the extreme. The island was the victim of a long series of foreign dominations down the centuries, a condition which had prevented any development of an organic Sardinian political project.18 It was also held in very low esteem in the literary tradition and in composing their qualitative racial hierarchy, social and 15

Leerssen 2007a: 278-281. Bechi (1997: 158) called the Sardinians “sinister-looking hairy troglodytes”. Ibid., 197-198. 17 See Dickie 1999: 1-23; 83-119. 18 On this interpretation see Cardia 1999. 16

Sardinian Tropes in Literature before 1900

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anthropological researchers had placed Sardinians among the primitive peoples occupying the lowest ranks of human development.19 These factors persuaded Sardinian intellectuals in the early 19th century to undertake a campaign designed to enhance the value of historical memory which would earn Sardinia a position of prestige.20 The campaign, which took on the features of a claim for national identity,21 was supported by a range of prominent figures, some of whom belonged to the Savoy establishment. It started with a systematic revisiting of Sardinian history by intellectuals such as Giuseppe Manno (1786-1868), Pasquale Tola (1800-1874) and Pietro Martini (1800-1866), and was then extended into the political debate by Giorgio Asproni (1807-1876) and Giovanni Tuveri (1815-1887).22 The desire to ennoble and enhance Sardinian history induced some scholars to go so far as to invent a glorious past by assembling a collection of forged texts known as the Carte d’Arborea, designed to make good the serious lack of historical sources for much of the medieval period and bear witness to the existence of a Sardinian literary culture which pre-dated Italian literature.23 The forgers were unmasked following an analysis by experts at the Berlin Academy led by Theodor Mommsen in 1870, but the damage had already been done. Many writers, including a number of the travellers discussed here, took the papers at face value and used them as sources for their accounts. Their falsity aside, the Carte d’Arborea contributed to fuelling a strong interest in Sardinian national history. Alongside the historians, in the mid-19th century there began to appear a number of writers whose work was certainly mediocre in 19

Paulis 2006: 91-92. Marci 2006: 202-203. 21 Ibid., 197. 22 Giuseppe Manno, Storia di Sardegna [1825-1827], edited by Antonello Mattone, 3 vols. (Nuoro: Ilisso, 1996). Idem, Storia moderna della Sardegna dall’anno 1773 al 1799 [1842], edited by Antonello Mattone (Nuoro: Ilisso, 1998). Pasquale Tola, Dizionario biografico degli uomini illustri di Sardegna (Cagliari: Edizioni della Zattera, 1954). Pietro Martini, Storia di Sardegna dall’anno 1799 al 1816 [1852], edited by Aldo Accardo (Nuoro: Ilisso, 1999). Giorgio Asproni, Diario politico, with introduction by Carlino Sole and Tito Orrù, 7 vols. (Milano: Giuffrè, 1974-1991). Giovanni Battista Tuveri, Tutte le opere/1. Il Veggente. Del dritto dell’uomo alla distruzione dei cattivi governi, edited by Aldo Accardo, Luciano Carta, Sebastiano Mosso (Sassari: Delfino, 1990). 23 On the question of the Carte d’Arborea see Marrocu 1997 and 2009 and Rudas 2004: 67-78. Marci 2006: 197. The documents were ‘discovered’ in the period 18491862; they were published in 1863 and 1865 (Marrocu 2009: 23-24). 20

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literary terms but significant in its representation of the historicalcultural climate in which it was produced and the role it played in creating the concept of Sardinian identity.24 These writers were most keenly aware of the need to give expression to the Sardinian people as a nation rather than simply piecing together the political history of those who had ruled over the island at various times. The most influential among them was Enrico Costa (1841-1909), by profession not a writer but a tireless promoter of cultural research and initiatives who may be defined as a Sardinian Walter Scott.25 In his novels, such as La bella di Cabras (1887) and Giovanni Tolu (1897), he himself stated that the narrative took second place to ideological considerations and was deliberately harnessed to the enhancement of the collective memory of the Sardinian people.26 The recovery of tradition as a means of asserting Sardinian identity reached its apotheosis in the work of Grazia Deledda (18711936), who in 1894 proudly declared herself as a “disciple, admirer and follower” of Enrico Costa.27 At a very early age she devoted herself to the study of folklore and some of her research work, such as Tradizioni popolari di Nuoro (1894-1895), was published in the Rivista delle tradizioni popolari italiane edited by Angelo De Gubernatis (1840-1913).28 Appealing to the demand for culture in an environment typified by her native province of Nuoro, Deledda made an enormous contribution to spreading an image of Sardinia which matched the representation of a wild, exotic land inhabited by people with atavistic customs but genuine feelings and a down-to-earth manner. Her work rode the wave of the primitive vogue current at the 24

Marci 2006: 215-231. Marci 2007: XIII-XV. 26 Marci 2006: 231-237. “My purpose in writing la Bella di Cabras was the same as that behind Paolina, il Muto di Gallura, Da Sassari a Cagliari, la Grotta di Alghero, le Rovine di Trèquiddo, l’Albero del riposo, Maggiorana and the other stories I have published: to tell of our Sardinia, trying to describe (on some sort of historical pretext) the landscapes, usages and customs of the various regions of which it is composed, from Gallura to Monteacuto, from Goceano to Planargia, from the Barbagia to Ogliastra, from Campidano to Gerrei, from Marmilla to Sulcis. Today – more than in the past – I feel the need to say this because I would not like to be accused of certain digressions which may seem harmful to the narrative balance”: Enrico Costa, dedication in Agli amici oristanesi della Bella di Cabras, quoted in Paulis 2006: 109. 27 Deledda 2007: 72; cfr. Paulis 2006: 109. 28 This work has been republished: Deledda 1995 and Idem 2011d: 65-169. See also Delitala 1992. Angelo De Gubernatis was a prominent orientalist and publicist. 25

Sardinian Tropes in Literature before 1900

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time but also transformed Sardinia’s outlandish barbarity into a value.29 What distinguished Deledda – and her 19th-century predecessors as well as her contemporaries – was a desire to use the idea of Sardinian identity projected into a mythical past so as to claim a dignified position for the island in the new Italian state and at the same time preserve the specificity of Sardinia’s traditions.30 Such was her international success, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded in 1926, that by the early 20th century – as we shall see more clearly in the next chapter – the real Sardinia and Deledda’s version of it were essentially one and the same in the popular European imagination. Aside from the differences between individual writings and the various genres in literary discourse, the dialogue between inside and outside voices produced a single vision of Sardinia, assisted by the continual flow of information and images from one text to another. This factor informs the decision made here to compile an analysis of the main publications on Sardinia up to 1900. Since the first films set in Sardinia were shot in the early 20th century, its beginning has been chosen as the end of this literary discussion. The next chapter will deal with writings produced after that date, in parallel with the development of the cinematic image of Sardinia. The contribution of Deledda’s writings will be analysed in greater depth in that chapter because although her work straddles both centuries, she achieved her greatest success in the early decades of the 20th. The analysis of the texts in this chapter is divided into five parts. The first part concerns representations of Sardinia, the second and third one deal with the portrayal of the physical and moral characteristics of Sardinians, the fourth concerns images of Sardinian women and the fifth covers the topoi bound up with the islanders’ customs and lifestyles. The analysis will first be preceded by a brief review of the main writings on Sardinia up to 1900. The first text known to have been written in modern times by a traveller about his stay in Sardinia dates back to 1780, when Lutheran pastor Joseph Fues (1739-1805) published Nachrichten aus Sardinien von der gegenwärtigen Verfassung dieser Insel in Leipzig after

29 30

Paulis 2006: 36. See also Cerina 1992. Ibid., 79-80.

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spending some considerable time (1773-1776) on the island.31 Written in epistular form and devoted for the most part to religious themes, Fues’ book remained unknown in Italy for many years – it was translated into Italian in 1899 by Pasquale Gastaldi Millelire.32 By that time Sardinia had already featured in a large number of accounts by European travellers, and by virtue of Deledda’s works it was arousing a great deal of public interest.33 Particularly striking in Fues’ book is his criticism of the Sardinian clergy, which recalls observations made by Arquer centuries earlier in his Sardiniae brevis historia et descriptio.34 Later travellers were of a similar opinion, laying the blame for the lack of progress of southern populations at the door of Catholicism and its practices. Fues’ strictures concerning the islanders, however, was in line with the position adopted by the Piedmontese ruling class towards a land considered bountiful but made inexplicably backward by the indolence of its inhabitants. It comes as no surprise that in the book’s dedication, quoting the words of British Consul Taverner, he states, that if he was to tell in the London Stock Exchange what he had seen and heard in Sardinia, he should be taken for the mightiest liar.35 The period from 1780 to 1812 saw the publication of the first writings by British visitors Arthur Young (1741-1820), John Carr (1772–1832) and John Galt (1779-1839), none of whose works, however, were quoted by subsequent travellers.36 Galt’s observations on Sardinia anticipated a number of elements found in later writings, including the contrast between past glories and the present decadence 31 Joseph Fues, Nachrichten aus Sardinien von der gegenwärtigen Verfassung dieser Insel (Leipzig: Sigfried Lebrecht Crusius, 1780). Translation of this work into Italian: Fuos 2000. In this work the author’s name is Fuos, although probably the real name was Fuoß (Fuos 2000: 27). 32 La Sardegna nel 1773-1776 descritta da un contemporaneo, translation by Pasquale Gastaldi Millelire (Cagliari: La Piccola Rivista, 1899). 33 Boscolo 1973: 9-11. 34 Angioni 2000: 18. 35 Fues 1780: 5. 36 Arthur Young, Travels in France and Italy during the Years 1787-88-89 (London and Toronto: J. Dent and Sons Ltd; New York E.P. Dutton & Co, 1792). John Carr, Descriptive Travels in the Southern and Eastern Parts of Spain, the Balearic Isles and Sardinia in 1809 (London: Sherwood Neely and Jones, 1811). John Galt, Voyages and Travels in the Years 1809/1810 and 1811, Containing Statistical, Commercial and Miscellaneous Observations on Gibraltar, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Serigo and Turkey (1812). New edition published by British Library, Historical Print Editions, 2011. Artizzu 2000: 21; cfr. Cabiddu 1982: 9; 35-45. See also Benson 1825.

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and the Sardinians’ lack of any entrepreneurial spirit.37 Particularly interesting is his comparison of Sardinia with Scotland, which reveals his adherence to the prevalent English view of the highlanders as uncouth and inferior, to be dragged into modernity by uncompromising British government policy.38 In 1825 the two-volumed Histoire de Sardaigne, ou la Sardaigne ancienne et moderne was published by Jean-François Mimaut (1774-1837), a former French Consul in Sardinia, whose literary efforts did not meet with the unanimous approval of his contemporaries on the grounds of his inadequate knowledge of the island.39 Indeed the first in-depth research on Sardinia in the early 19th century was conducted by military and scientific figures who benefited from repeated sojourns there. An indelible mark was left on the Sardinian literary tradition by Piedmontese officer Alberto Ferrero Della Marmora (1789-1863).40 In 1826 he published the first edition of Voyage en Sardaigne, which was later expanded and enriched with information gathered during various periods spent on the island.41 Della Marmora harboured a deep and lasting interest in Sardinia, so much so that it was the object of most of his intellectual energy. This was witnessed in 1860 by the publication in Turin, following the completion of his Voyage work in 1857, of a substantial new essay entitled Itinéraire de l’île de Sardaigne.42 Widely known and appreciated by the European reading public, his writings aroused the interest of figures far removed from literary circles, especially by virtue of his geological analysis of the island, which was highly valued by mineral prospectors.43 Sardinia also enjoyed the attention of a particularly authoritative admirer in the form of British flag officer Horatio 37

Poggi 2002: 69-71. Ibid., 69. 39 Brigaglia 1998: 10-11. 40 On his life see Della Marmora 1997: 25-29. 41 Alberto Della Marmora, Voyage en Sardaigne de 1819 à 1825: ou description statistique, physique et politique de cette île, avec des recherches sur ses productions naturelles et ses antiquités (Paris: Delaforest, 1826). See Longhi 1997: I, 26. 42 Alberto Della Marmora, Voyage en Sardaigne, ou description statistique, physique et politique de cette île, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Paris: Bertrand; Turin: Fréres Bocca, 18391857). Idem, L’itinéraire de l’île de Sardaigne, pour faire suite au voyage en cette contrée, tome I-II (Turin: Fréres Bocca, 1860). See also Della Marmora 1997 in three volumes. 43 Boscolo 1973: 14-15. 38

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Nelson.44 In a letter to Secretary of State for War and the Colonies Lord Hobart, in 1804 Nelson urged him to begin negotiations with the House of Savoy for the acquisition of the island, which he considered the “summum bonum” of the Mediterranean, for the sum of £500,000.45 The keen interest in Sardinia shown by the British in the early 19th century suggests that they saw it as a land to be exploited, a potential addition to their colonies. This led to its inclusion in the itinerary of travellers such as Royal Navy officer William Henry Smyth (1788-1865), whose Sketch of the present of the island of Sardinia (1828) is the first thoroughgoing essay on Sardinia in the English language.46 Availing himself of the assistance provided by Della Marmora, who showed him the research material for his Voyage, Smyth combined the writing of his account with the drafting of a nautical chart.47 He openly admitted to having no literary pretensions in his research, which followed on two missions he had carried out in Sardinia during the Napoleonic Wars. It was not long before other accounts of travels in Sardinia were published, in Germany and then in France: the anonymous Der Deutsche Sergeant unter den Sarden (Leipzig, 1831), clearly influenced by Joseph Fues’ book, and Voyage en Corse, à l’île d’Elbe et de Sardaigne (1835) by Antoine Claude Pasquin (1789-1847), a Versailles librarian known by the pseudonym of Valery.48 Published in Italian in Milan as early as 1842-1843, Valery’s book distinguished itself from its predecessors by its sharp focus on Sardinia’s social life and structure.49 In the same period Alphonse de Lamartine (17901869) wrote of Sardinia when recounting his fortuitous landfall in the 44

Cabiddu 1982: 23-33. Dated March 17th 1804, the letter was written by Nelson on HMS Victory, anchored off the Maddalena archipelago. Nelson was based in Sardinian waters from November 1st 1803 to January 1805 (Artizzu 2000: 16). See Tyndale 1849: I, 339; Tennant 1885: 25-26. 46 William Henry Smyth, Sketch of the present state of the Island of Sardinia (London: John Murray, 1828); published in Italian under the title Relazione sull’isola di Sardegna, edited by Manlio Brigaglia (Nuoro: Ilisso, 1998). As Brigaglia (1998: 12-13) observes, in some ways Smyth’s work anticipated the travel guides published from 1836 onwards by Murray, the house which published Smyth’s essay. 47 Boscolo 1973: 15. 48 Anonymous, Der Deutsche Sergeant unter den Sarden (Leipzig: In der Röhlerschen Buchhandlung, 1831). Angioni 2000: 10. In this research reference was made to Valery’s work Voyages en Corse, a l’Ile d’Elbe, et en Sardaigne, tome second (Paris: Librairie de L. Bourgeois-Maze, Éditeur, 1837). On his life see Valery 1999: 23. 49 On the various Italian translations see Longhi 1996: 23. 45

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Gulf of Palmas in 1832, and in 1838 Honoré de Balzac wrote about the island in a letter full of wild exaggerations to his friend Evelina Hanska, a Polish noblewoman.50 Under the pseudonym of Carl Follemberg, the German writer Johann Daniel Ferdinand Neigebaur published Die Insel Sardinien (Leipzig/Turin, 1855), the latest in a long series of travel accounts.51 Interest in Sardinia continued to grow in Britain. In London in 1846 George Burdett published Traits of Corsican and Sardinian Character, the first part in the January edition and the second in the February edition of the New Monthly Magazine and Humorist.52 His account drew heavily on Della Marmora’s Voyage.53 A particularly prominent position was attained by John Warre Tyndale (1811-1897) with his The island of Sardinia including pictures of the manners and customs of the Sardinians and notes on the antiquities and modern objects (1849).54 A London lawyer who had studied at Eton and Oxford, Tyndale is thought to have gone to Sardinia to further the economic interests of the British government, and on his return home composed a scientific essay which won considerable acclaim.55 He too relied heavily on previous writings, including those of Della Marmora and Smyth, whom he declares to quote verbatim in his geological analysis.56 In praising this work the British press took the opportunity of highlighting the defects common to the Sardinians, Irish and Italians, but was appreciative of the Sardinian tradition of the vendetta, which, given its origin in the noble principle of honour, was not to be confused with common crimes.57 Thomas Forester, making no secret of his ambition to exploit every travel opportunity to increase his knowledge of humankind, wrote Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia (1858).58 Though drawing widely on previous 50

Boullier 1865: 357-358. Boscolo 1973: 16-17. Johan Daniel Ferdinand Neigebaur, Die Insel Sardinien (Leipzig/Turin: Verlag der Dyk’schen Buchhandlung, 1855). See Boscolo 1973: 19-20. 52 George Burdett, ‘Traits of Corsican and Sardinian Character’, The New Monthly Magazine and Humorist (London) jan. 1845 (I): 81-91; feb. 1845 (II): 223- 232. 53 Cabiddu 1982: 67; 71. 54 Tyndale 2002: I, 36-38. 55 Boscolo 1973: 19. 56 Tyndale 1849: II, 139. 57 Cabiddu 1982: 92-93. 58 Thomas Forester, Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858). About him see Cabiddu 1982: 19 and 95. 51

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sources, his book is a fine example of travel writing on Sardinia and represents the Romantic spirit of its time.59 To the same period belong two pieces written by Mary Davey, although her Icnusa, or Pleasant Reminiscences of a two Years’ Residence in the Island of Sardinia (1860) and Sardinia (1874) do not display the same clear and penetrating gaze possessed by other travel writers.60 Great interest and controversy were aroused by the work of Jesuit priest Antonio Bresciani (1798-1862), Dei costumi dell’isola di Sardegna comparati con gli antichissimi popoli orientali (Naples 1850).61 His description starts along original lines, focusing on the agricultural progress achieved by the Savoy regime, thus revealing his aim of extolling its virtues as the only government able to foster the island’s development.62 His presentation, which is similar in some ways to the first field-based ethnographic studies carried out in the 18th and 19th centuries, depicts Sardinia as the victim of a primitive population unable to manage the resources that a modern, efficient people would exploit. Bresciani had an intimate knowledge of classical culture, but his view was vitiated by a clearly illiberal and reactionary attitude. This attribute was not lost on Antonio Gramsci, who devoted a number of pages in his Prison Notebooks to fierce criticism of the author and those he condemned as “Father Bresciani’s grandchildren”.63 In the second half of the 19th century interest in Sardinia increased considerably. The prominent works of this period include Six semaines dans l’île de Sardaigne (1855) by Édouard Delessert (1828-1898), which is preceded by a collection of forty photographic ‘views’ compiled by the author.64 Animated by a somewhat contemptuous spirit is Gustave Jourdan’s essay L’île de Sardaigne, published in Paris in 1861 when it was rumoured that Sardinia might be ceded to France.65 Such speculation had faded by the time Auguste 59

Cabiddu 1982: 108. Ibid., 123. 61 In this research use was made of the new edition: Bresciani 2001. 62 Caltagirone 2001: 30, note 17. 63 Gramsci 2001: III, 2198. 64 Édouard Delessert, Six semaines dans l’île de Sardaigne (Paris: Libraire Novelle, 1855). Delessert was a French painter, photographer and archaeologist. Delessert’s photographs have recently been published in Miraglia 2008: 52-69. Boscolo 1973: 2324. 65 Boscolo 1973: 23-24. 60

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Boullier published two works dealing with the island’s archaic culture: L’île de Sardaigne, dialecte et les chants populaires, published in 1864, followed a year later by L’île de Sardaigne. Description, histoire, statistique, moeurs, état social.66 Boullier’s painstaking precision of research was witnessed by the revision and reprinting of the former work to remove all references to the Carte d’Arborea, which had been proved to be a forgery after publication of the original.67 Having written various books on locations such as Texas and Mexico, Emmanuel Domenech (1825-1903) presented a record of his travels in Sardinia in Bergers et bandits. Souvenirs d’un voyage en Sardaigne (Paris 1867).68 His two visits to the island had made him aware of the changes it was undergoing, and in a desire to put on record what was in danger of disappearing he relied on sources which provided a fictitious popular version of its culture. Despite the inaccuracies and fantasy folklore contained in his book, Domenech did capture the profound changes overtaking Sardinia, highlighting innovations in trade and industry, especially mining.69 One particularly successful work of the period was Baron Heinrich von Maltzan’s Reise auf der Insel Sardinien, nebst einem Anhang über die phönicischen Inschriften Sardiniens (1869), translated into Italian in 1886 by Giuseppe Prunas Tola, captain in an artillery regiment.70 Though his adventurous life had taken him as far afield as the Orient and North Africa and he had committed many of his experiences to paper, Maltzan (1826-1874) declared a particular attraction for Sardinia, which had struck him as soon as he had landed there.71 Though his book’s thoroughgoing analysis of the island’s 66

This work by Boullier is the subject of a number of articles published in Sardinia: Il dialetto e le canzoni popolari della Sardegna per Augusto Boullier. Articoli estratti dal Corriere di Sardegna n. 49, 50, 53, 54 e 55, 1864 (Cagliari: Tip. Corriere di Sardegna, 1866). 67 Boscolo 1973: 24. 68 Emmanuel Domenech, Bergers et bandits. Souvenirs d’un voyage en Sardaigne (Paris: E. Dentu, Libraire-Èditeur, 1867). 69 Boscolo 1973: 26. 70 Heinrich Freiherrn von Maltzan, Reise auf der Insel Sardinien, nebst einem Anhang über die phönicischen Inschriften Sardiniens (Leipzig: Dnt’sche Buchhandlung, 1869). Il capitano di Maltzan in Sardegna con un’appendice sulle iscrizioni fenicie dell’isola. Traduzione dal tedesco con note del cavaliere Prunas Tola Giuseppe capitano di artiglieria (Milan: Alfredo Brigola & C. Editori, 1886). Baron von Maltzan spent most of his life travelling and is the author of several books. 71 Boscolo 1973: 27-28.

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archaeological heritage is enriched by illustrations and sketches, it takes the Carte d’Arborea at face value and is thus historically flawed. His observations on Sardinian customs are highly interesting nonetheless.72 A number of writings exemplify foreigners’ economic interest in Sardinia, especially in its mining industry, such as Notice sur les mines de l’île de Sardaigne pour l’explication de la collection des minerais envoyés à l’Exposition universelle de Paris pour 1867, by Leon Goüin, and Notice sur de l’île de Sardaigne (1870), by Charles Joseph Grandfils, who identified the lack of Sardinian capital as the main cause of the island’s underdevelopment.73 1876 saw the publication of La Corse et la Sardaigne: étude de voyage et de climatologie, by Dr. James Henry Bennet, taken from his book Winter and spring on the shores of the Mediterranean (1870).74 Though the book is imbued with the Romanticism and exoticism fashionable at the time, it provides a substantial body of social and economic information.75 Baron Eugène Roissard de Bellet’s La Sardaigne à vol d’oiseau (1884) mixes folklore with more practical information, but the main focus is on the island’s economy.76 Substantial material on employment and production is also to be found in Robert Tennant’s essay Sardinia and its resources (1884).77 Although the author went to Sardinia on a commercial mission, he decided to write a book and to embellish his report with information regarding the population’s rituals and customs, including mouflon and boar hunting expeditions.78 72

Ibid. Leon Goüin, Notice sur les mines de l’île de Sardaigne pour l’explication de la collection des minerais envoyés à l’Exposition universelle de Paris pour 1867 (Cagliari: Impr. de A. Timon, 1867). Boscolo 1973: 27. Grandfils 1870. See F.O. 1971: XIII (73): 12. See Boscolo 1973: 26-27. 74 James Henry Bennet, La Corse et la Sardaigne: étude de voyage et de climatologie (Paris: P. Asselin, 1876) taken from his book Winter and spring on the shores of the Mediterranean (London: J. & A. Churchill; New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1870). On his life see Boscolo 1973: 30 and Cabiddu 1982: 125-130. 75 Cabiddu 1982: 125. 76 Eugène Roissard de Bellet, La Sardaigne à vol d’oiseau en 1882. Paris: E. Plon, Norrit et Cie, Imprimeurs-Éditors, 1884. Roissard de Bellet (1836-1918) was a French politician. 77 Robert Tennant, Sardinia and its resources. Rome: Libreria Spithöven; London: Stanford, 1884. 78 Boscolo 1973: 31-32. 73

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Among the last travellers of the century was Charles Edwardes, who visited the island in 1888 and published Sardinia and the Sardes in the following year.79 He declared his debt to the major experts on Sardinia, to classical figures of Sardinian literature such as Giuseppe Manno and to the work of his fellow-countrymen Smyth and Tyndale. In 1889 Deputy Lieutenant for the county of Essex Edward North Buxton (1840-1924) published the article Sardinia and its Wild Sheep, in which he dwelt at length on his hunting experiences on the island.80 The picture of 19th-century travellers is completed by landscape artist and designer Gaston Charles Vuillier (1847-1915), who visited the Balearic Islands, Corsica and Sardinia in 1891 on behalf of the journal he worked for. His observations were published in the same year by the Paris magazine Le Tour du Monde and his work was remarked upon in various articles in the Cagliari daily newspaper L’Unione Sarda.81 He recounted his journey in the book Les îles oubliees – Les Baléares, la Corse et la Sardaigne – Impressions de voyage, published in 1893 in Paris and translated into English three years later.82 Alongside the publication of travel writings, the last years of the century saw an increase in visits by politicians and scholars from mainland Italy, all impelled by a desire to understand what made Sardinia different. The various types of work they produced include an essay by Bolognese scholar Francesco Aventi written in the form of fourteen letters to Francesco Luigi Botter, published in the Giornale d’agricoltura del regno d’Italia, and the official report on the mining industry in Sardinia, written by Quintino Sella as a 79

Charles Edwardes, Sardinia and the Sardes, by Charles Edwardes, author of Letters from Crete, Rides and Studies in the Canary Islands (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1889), now published by British Library Historical Print Editions in the General Historical collection that includes books from this Library digitised by Microsoft; the Italian translation is entitled La Sardegna e i Sardi, edited by Lucio Artizzu (Nuoro: Ilisso, 2000). Very little is known about Edwardes’ life, beyond the fact that he translated Leopardi’s prose works and wrote children’s books; see Cabiddu 1982: 151. 80 Cabiddu 1892: 139. The article is the first in Edward North Buxton’s miscellaneous volume Short Stalks – Or Hunting Camps North, South, East, and West, published in 1892: 1-35 and reprinted by Read Books in 2009: 1-35. 81 Romagnino 2002: 31. 82 Gaston Charles Vuillier, Les îles oubliees – Les Baléares, la Corse et la Sardaigne – Impressions de voyage (Paris: Hachette, 1893). Idem, The Forgotten Isles: Impression of travel in the Balearic Isles, Corsica and Sardinia. Rendered into English by Frederic Breton (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896). See Maulu 2002: 32.

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member of the Commission of Enquiry headed by Agostino Depretis.83 Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1901), who was a member of the same Commission of Enquiry, subsequently wrote a highly successful book, Profili e paesaggi della Sardegna (1869), which drew attention to malaria as a cause of inertia and backwardness on the island.84 In 1877 Carlo Corbetta published Sardegna e Corsica, an account whose commercial success was done no harm by its scientific observations.85 Particularly prominent was the detailed Relazione sullo stato della Sardegna by Francesco Pais Serra (1837-1924), published in 1896, the result of a mission to the island conducted at the behest of the Italian government.86 Besides the economy, Pais Serra dealt at some length with public safety at a time when crime in Sardinia was a major concern. The official intention was to eradicate banditry, which appeared to be the cause rather than the consequence of the Sardinians’ economic and moral backwardness. Those years also saw a number of works attributable to the school of positivist criminology.87 L’uomo delinquente by Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) had suggested that the tendency to criminal behaviour was genetically based and thus hereditary, a contention subsequently confirmed by research conducted by Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936) and Enrico Ferri (1856-1929).88 In 1896 Paolo Orano (1875-1945) published his book Psicologia della Sardegna, whose analysis of the Sardinian race attempted to capture its essential moral 83 Francesco Aventi, Viaggio insolito nell’isola di Sardegna, with introduction by Paolo Lisca (Sassari: Doramarkus, 2004). Original edition Due mesi in Sardegna. Escursione agraria fatta nella primavera del 1869 dal conte Francesco Aventi Lettere 14 (1869). Boscolo 1973: 28-29. Quintino Sella, Sulle condizioni dell’industria mineraria nell’isola di Sardegna, Relazione alla Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta per Quintino Sella (Firenze: Tipografia Eredi Botta, 1871). New edition edited by Manconi: see Sella 1999. 84 Paolo Mantegazza, Profili e paesaggi della Sardegna (Milano: G. Brigola, 1869), new edition Mantegazza 2004. A partial publication is in Boscolo 1973: 293-319. Mantegazza was a prominent Italian scientist and supporter of Darwinism in anthropology. He founded the first Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Italy. He was for several years a member of the Italian Parliament. 85 Carlo Corbetta, Sardegna e Corsica (Milan: Libreria Editrice G. Brigola, 1877). Boscolo 1973: 29-30. 86 Francesco Pais Serra, Relazione dell’inchiesta sulle condizioni economiche e della sicurezza pubblica in Sardegna promossa con D.M. 12-12-1894 (Rome: Tipografia della Camera dei Deputati, 1896). Now published in Sorgia 1973: 165-210. 87 See Gibson 1998. 88 Lombroso 1876; Sergi 1900; Ferri 1884 and 1901.

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characteristics and habits.89 The following year saw the publication of La delinquenza in Sardegna. Note di sociologia criminale (1897), the first of a series of books by Alfredo Niceforo (1876-1960), in which the crime problem was explained in terms of the Sardinians’ Mediterranean characteristics.90 The author was also the first to advance the notion of a “Delinquent Zone” (Zona delinquente) located in a clearly-defined area comprising the “Nuoro district and the nearby mountain villages making up the central and eastern part of the island, which are different from the other parts of the island in the customs, needs, nature and character of the inhabitants”,91 basing his assertions on statistical information. Niceforo subsequently developed his ideas in L’Italia barbara contemporanea (1898) and Italiani del Nord e Italiani del Sud (1901), exploring the hereditary nature of criminal characteristics and broadening his statistical base to include the whole country, region by region. Controversy at the end of the century was further fuelled by the publication of the account of a singular journey in Sardinia – that of Florentine lieutenant Giulio Bechi, sent to the island in 1899 to help stamp out banditry.92 Entitled Caccia grossa, his book immediately provoked a furious reaction in the Sardinian press, especially in the democratically-minded Sassari daily La Nuova Sardegna, on the grounds of the colonialist mentality it was felt to express. The Italian government’s attempt to civilise Sardinia, the argument ran, took the form of a hunting expedition, with Sardinians as the big game. The furore aroused by the book lasted long enough for Antonio Gramsci to write in his Prison Notebooks that it was “essentially a politician’s book and one of the worst imaginable”.93 Despite the book’s critical approach, a result of the “anthropological and political shock”

89

Paolo Orano was a journalist and politician. He started his political career in the Socialist Party, later he became a leading figure within the National Fascist Party. Deledda (2007: 312) was of the opinion that Orano’s work presented a “miserable” image of the island, that it contained “bloody truths” but a great many exaggerations. She also thought, however, that in parts it was “really good, evocative – especially with regard to landscapes and the psychology of Sardinian dance music”. 90 Alfredo Niceforo was an influential scientist and academic. About him see Dizionario Bibliografico degli Italiani, vol. 78 (2013). 91 Niceforo 1897: 23. 92 For a summary of the debate provoked by the publication of Bechi’s book see Brigaglia 1997: 13-20. 93 Gramsci 2001: III, 2248-2249.

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suffered by the author on his arrival in Sardinia, it does contain a series of telling analyses of the poverty that beset the island.94 In spite of constant reference to the mystery shrouding it, by the end of the century Sardinia had managed to carve out a space for itself in European literature and culture. Those who visited it left a record of their passing in numerous writings, all sharing the same spirit of observation whereby the island and its people were specimens to be studied as one studies an oddity of nature. The repertoire of images consolidated in literary discourse was a result of the mentality and a mode of thought typical of the age, but stood above all as an inexhaustible source of ideas and images upon which the nascent film industry, as we shall see, was able to draw with both hands. Tropes of Land Sardinian Fertility As observed above, the image of Sardinia in 18th- and 19th-century literature was developed through a repertoire of representations which remained virtually unchanged over time. Its starting point may be seen as Sardiniae brevis historia et descriptio, which itself makes reference to a range of classical sources containing descriptions of the island’s physical features and the moral characteristics of its inhabitants. Arquer considers Sardinia a sunny, fertile land characterised by a pleasant climate – with the exception of some coastal areas where the air is unhealthy – and blessed with sufficient supplies of water. Its main productive activities, the scholar states, are agriculture and animal husbandry. Since ancient times it has been renowned for the abundance of its crops, flocks and herds; together with hunting, animal husbandry provides Sardinians with plentiful supplies of meat, cheese and hides, some of which produce is exported. The island’s fertility, if only its population knew it, would enable it to outstrip Sicily. Despite such favourable conditions, shipping and fishing play no significant economic role and the same may be said of the substantial but unexploited mineral resources. The overall picture is of a land which would be fortunate if it were not for an innate laziness in its inhabitants preventing them from developing and growing rich.

94

Brigaglia 1997: 21.

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Repeated references to the fecklessness of the Sardinians confirm the human responsibility for the island’s lack of development.95 The picture outlined by Arquer became a full-blown leitmotiv in subsequent literature, especially with the proliferation of descriptions of Sardinia by visitors from mainland Italy and other parts of Europe. The cultural context in which these works should be seen is one in which two opposed concepts of identity had come to the fore: the Northern European one, medieval and Protestant, and that of the South – Catholic, Mediterranean and heir to classical civilisation. A contribution to this had been made by Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois (1748), whose cultural relativism assumed a direct correlation between climate and types of national character.96 On this theoretical basis, Sardinia and its inhabitants were considered the expression of a Southern cultural identity, as evinced by the earliest example of relevant travel literature, written in the late 18th century by Joseph Fues. This traveller’s standpoint is that of northerner, an evolved individual and a Lutheran, looking contemptuously down on a region which should be enjoying a high standard of living but is extremely backward.97 He dwells on its abundance of resources, its fertile soil, its strategic position, its flourishing past and its potential for economic growth, but registers above all the shortcomings of an island “in which idleness and laziness have, so to speak, raised their throne”.98 Though it is true that the landscape is one of the finest gifts the Lord has given mankind, nature’s beauty is not founded solely on the characteristics of a territory, it must always be accompanied by human industry to express itself to the full, Fues states. In the light of this consideration, he is unable to fully appreciate the Sardinian landscape because it is marked by broad tracts of half-abandoned countryside, just as he is surprised by the lack of proper exploitation of the harbours and coastal 95

Arquer 2007: 4-14. Among the principle sources on 17th-century Sardinian history, see Jorge Aleo, Historia cronológica de todos los sucesos y casos particulares sucedidos en la Isla de Sardeña del año 1637 al año 1672, conserved in the Biblioteca Comunale di Studi sardi in Cagliari, mss. Sanjust 16, published in Italian under the title Storia cronologica del Regno di Sardegna dal 1637 al 1672, edited by Francesco Manconi (Nuoro: Ilisso, 1998). Speaking of the island’s fertile terrain and its plentiful production of legumes, cheese, meat and fruit exported to Spain, Italy and elsewhere, Aleo (1998: 57) concluded that Sardinia would be a place second to none if it were more populated and properly cultivated. 96 Leerssen 2007b: 286; Arndt 2007: 388. 97 Fues 1780: 286-287. 98 Ibid., 286.

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areas.99 The main cause of the Sardinians’ backwardness is to be sought in their national character, otherwise there would be no explanation for their opposition to the spread of new industries, such as silkworm-breeding and olive-growing, which could provide wealth and progress.100 In conclusion, in Sardinia the traveller encounters a geographical entity and a landscape of great potential which is largely wasted by the vices of its inhabitants. In a treatise on agronomy (1792) Englishman Arthur Young, never having set foot in Sardinia but using information supplied by one colonel Ross, records that on the island “[t]he soil is wonderfully rich and fertile, but vast plains that would produce anything are uncultivated. He has past one line of fifty miles by thirty, all plain and the land good, yet without one house and mostly a neglect desert”.101 Similar observations are made by Mimaut, in Der Deutsche Sergeant unter den Sarden, and in Valery’s Voyage.102 The latter work contains a number of highly evocative descriptions: “compared with the peaks of Corsica and the mighty Etna, Sardinia appears on the horizon as a broad plateau thrown down in the middle of the Mediterranean”.103 In their reference to Sardinia’s fortunate geographical location, his words recall its place in a civilisation rooted in classical antiquity, for which Valery had a profound admiration. At times, Valery notices, its coasts and mountain areas combine in sparkling visions, such as the superb “gulf of Palmas, the finest and the best in Sardinia, with its smooth, shimmering waves and its amphitheatre of mountains”.104 As remarked by Fues, however, admiration for the landscape is always accompanied by an awareness of the need for human effort. The verdant splendour of the land around Aritzo, a village in the province of Nuoro, thus remains an unrealised potential because its trees are badly cultivated and their fruit fails to ripen.105 By contrast, as an example of man harnessing nature he gives the “orange-tree forest” of 99

Ibid., 288. Ibid., 209-210. 101 Cabiddu 1982: 9-10. 102 Mimaut 1825: I, VII. Anonymous 1831: 64. 103 “La Sardaigne, à coté des pies de la Corse ou de l’immense Etna, apparait à l’horizon comme un large plateau d’azur jeté au milieu de la Meéditerranée”: Valery 1837: 31. 104 “Le golfe de Palmas, le plus beau et le meilleur de Sardaigne, avec ses flots unis, resplendissants, et son amphithéatre de montagnes, présente un superbe aspect”: Valery 1837: 279. 105 Valery 1837: 293. 100

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Milis, in the province of Oristano, in which Valery counts 500,000 trees whose presence is announced by a scented breeze. So astonishing are the “balmy fields of Milis” that the librarian thinks it is worth making a trip to the island just to see them.106 The picture of these orange groves – one of the few exceptions in a landscape dominated by neglect and by primitive agriculture – is a constant in 19th-century descriptions of the island, being mentioned by (among others) Della Marmora, Mimaut, Forester, Tyndale, Jourdan, Domenech, Mantegazza, Tennant and Baron von Maltzan, who describes them as a luxuriant oasis of citruses.107 According to Valery, the island’s beauty and its potential contrast starkly with the nature of its inhabitants, as witnessed by their overblown feasts and barbaric customs.108 To this is added their lack of economic enterprise, exemplified in the scarcity of fisherman even in the richest areas such as the gulf of Alghero, where sardine and coral fishing is in the hands of outsiders.109 His hope is that enlightened individuals, with the appropriate investments, will support economic growth so that this “backward, languishing island may see a return of its ancient prosperity, of the times when Polybius extolled Sardinia for its innumerable population and the abundance of its produce, calling it a happy land”.110 The hope expressed by the Versailles librarian was realised in the improvements effected in the area around Pula, where the proper maintenance of a new fountain had made the place much more salubrious as well as promoting the 106

Ibid., 110-111. Della Marmora 1860: II, 117-119. Mimaut 1825: II, 460. Forester 1858: 408. Tyndale 1849: II, 307-311. Jourdan 1861: 26. Domenech 1867: 47-48. Mantegazza 1869: 61-62. Tennant 1885: 89. Maltzan 1869: 245-250; 246. 108 “Le banquetes des héros d’Homère, la chère de la chevalerie, les fastes gastronomiques de la Bretagne, de l’Auvergne ou de la Bresse, ne présentent point de festin qui approche de l’énorme repas sarde donné à l’occasion de la première messe du docteur Antioco Marcello, recteur de Mamoiada” (Valery 1837: 121). “Une chère et une boisson aussi prodigieuses tinnent à un degree peu avancé de civilization. Plus les societies tendent à l’état intellectual, plus cette chère et cette boisson diminuent” (Valery 1837: 122). “Par un sage barbare dont le souvenir existe encore à Bosa, et qui, dit-on, n’a cessé que vers le milieu du dernier siècle, de vieilles matrons, dites en sardes accabadura, achevaient par pitié les moribonds à coups d’un baton court et noueux” (Valery 1837: 96-97). 109 Valery 1837: 97-98. 110 “... et cette ile arriérée, languissante, verra renaitre les jours de son antique prospérité, alors que Polybe, vantait son innombrable population, l’abondance de ses fruits, et l’appelait une terra heureuse” (Valery 1837: 241). 107

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cultivation of orange- and lemon-trees. This stood as confirmation of the fact that Sardinians could defeat intemperie, the evil which traditionally gripped the island, with the force of progress.111 In some instances travellers rendered highly imaginative – though not thereby less significant – accounts of Sardinia which reveal a great deal about the observer’s point of view. Probably animated by deep resentment following a failed attempt to make money on the island, Honoré de Balzac speaks of Sardinia in jaundiced terms, highlighting on the one hand its desolation and deserted appearance and on the other its distinctive forests, still virgin and virtually trackless.112 Despite everything, he too is struck above all by the contrast between its extreme fertility and the “really savage” condition of its people.113 The dichotomy between the island’s fertility and the idleness of its inhabitants is taken up by John Warre Tyndale.114 His accolade for beauty goes to Sardinia rather than Sicily, he echoes the idea of its fortunate geographical position and its wealth of mineral resources and he quotes classical sources which define the island as Rome’s granary to remind readers of its fertility, but has no hesitation in attributing its poverty to the idleness of its population.115 He also makes specific reference to an illustrious witness to Sardinia’s condition in the person of Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson. While sailing the island’s coasts in the early 1800s he had written a number of letters expressing his admiration for a highly fertile land rich in cattle and sheep, with enormous potential for the production of wheat, wine and olive oil, blessed with fine harbours and above all a remarkable geographical position.116 In Dei costumi dell’isola di Sardegna, Antonio Bresciani cites the “island’s fecundity, and the thousand other gifts, graces and riches of sky, sea and land which outstrip many other Mediterranean islands and are second to none. Because if we turn to

111

Valery 1837: 242. Boscolo 1973: 18. 113 Boscolo 1973: 125-126. 114 Tyndale 1849: II, 108. 115 Tyndale 1849: II, 1; Idem 1849: I, 61 and 205; Idem 1849: II, 102-105. “The general complaint of the Sardes, and of which they avail themselves as an excuse for their idleness, is the ‘mancanza di braccia’, or want of hands; but among the various remedies, a proper administration of the laws, with a system of justice on which people might rely, would bring back a large portion of the fuorusciti; and the formation of roads would be of much benefit” (Idem 1849: II, 315). 116 Tyndale 1849: I, 335-341; see Forester 1858: 262. Tyndale 1849: I, 337. 112

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its sea, it is perhaps more full of fish than any other”.117 Besides its fertility, manifested in the production of grain, grapes and olives, he records the wild character of the island, covered with strong, dark virgin forests, partly cleared by its primitive inhabitants, who were shepherds and need grazing land, but at the time more extensive than those in any other Mediterranean area.118 The image of a fertile Sardinia populated by lazy people, unable to make use of the resources available to them,119 is reasserted with unusual vigour in L’île de Sardaigne, by Gustave Jourdan. Since the Sardinians have done nothing to exploit the wealth of resources with which nature has blessed their island, he observes, their laziness – along with malaria – has kept it as a desert.120 Besides the mistakes made by the Savoy government, Jourdan blames the Sardinians’ vices – superstition, ignorance and idleness – for their island’s miserably poor condition.121 In the late 19th century the theme of fertility was still an important topos. It is discussed in Robert Tennant’s Sardinia and its resources and Psicologia della Sardegna by Paolo Orano, who speaks of the island in terms of beauty and “abundance of natural produce” unknown in other Italian regions.122 Recalling the land’s fertility and the nectar of its wines, Giulio Bechi points to the Sardinians’ atavistic indolence, allied to their contempt for any manual or intellectual work, as a fundamental reason for its backwardness.123 The South Apart from observations regarding its fertility, the Sardinian landscape has the features generally associated with the South, such as broad stretches of neglected land where the soil is made arid by the absence of rain and cracked by a relentless sun. To this is added the unpredictability of the weather and the persistent winds which sweep the island all the year round:124 the irresistible force of the Maestro, blowing from the north-west, bends all the trees in its path on the 117

Bresciani 2001: 120. Ibid., 126; 116-117. 119 See also Mantegazza 1969: 16; 62; 192; 199-200. 120 Jourdan 1861: 19. 121 Ibid., 31. 122 Tennant 1885: 93; Orano 1896: 29. 123 Bechi 1997: 151. 124 Mimaut 1825: II, 294-295; Fues 1780: 324-325. 118

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Campidano plain.125 The heat, unbearable in the long summers, has a direct influence on the population’s physiology126 and, together with the island’s murky water – as observed by agronomist Arthur Young – constitutes one of the main causes of malaria.127 This lay behind the bad reputation Sardinia had carried with it since antiquity, when it was considered pestilential, as described by Cicero,128 and deadly for unknowing travellers who had no defence against the vapours which poisoned the air.129 This reputation was still intact at the end of the 19th century, and Sardinia was the object of coerced repopulation as the government tried to do something about the scarce local population.130 Baron von Maltzan had no hesitation in describing it as one of the unhealthiest places on earth.131 Although others expressed more nuanced views – Robert Tennant pointed out that malaria was also to be found in other Mediterranean areas and that Sardinia’s situation was less tragic than commonly thought – the island’s insalubrious character was a particularly persistent leitmotiv in the literary tradition.132 Sardinian Wilderness Another common viewpoint emerges from the sources cited thus far that gives an idea of the weight of certain prejudices in the representation of the Sardinian landscape. The depth of this viewpoint is exemplified by a detailed description provided by Alfredo Niceforo in La delinquenza in Sardegna. In this passage he depicts the island’s nature “expanding, free and wild, in a riot of colour under the dazzling sun”,133 and then focuses on the mountain terrain, dominated by the ancient majestic strength of the rocks blending with the variety of shrubs, giving rise to images of primordial vitality and a sensual quality that seems to spring from the page in living, tangible form.

125

Maltzan 1869: 247-248. Tyndale 1849: III, 71-72. 127 Cabiddu 1982: 9. 128 Quoted in Boscolo 1973: 199, note 1. 129 Anonymous 1831: 64; Smyth 1828: 81-82; Forester 1858: 313-314. 130 Edwardes 1889: 58. 131 Maltzan 1869: 268; 271-272. 132 See Mantegazza 1869: 192-196. Tennant 1885: 35-38; 283-284. 133 Niceforo 1897: 112. 126

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On the horizon dark basalt mountains chase each other fantastically in a turmoil of strange profiles, jagged curves and bold peaks soaring into the blue; then they fall away in rugged slopes towards the plains, their sides split by abysses, by enormous cracks that open like a monster’s maw. And the green of the bushes clings tenaciously to the gigantic rocks, abandoning itself to all the exultation of free fertilisation, fastening itself with the inebriation of passionate embraces to the immense soaring crags. It is the triumph of greenery and rock, penetrating each other like the wild coupling of animals on heat, tangling themselves into strange and mysterious knots. The steam-train runs, emitting its shout like a proud salute, a vehicle into the rough nature that erupts from the heart of the rock in luxuriant bursts of green. That nature is an untouched virgin whose enraptured sense of desire has never been torn by the plough. The wind sweeps and mightily shakes that tangle of grasses clinging to the rock, that sturdy scrub passionately fastened to the stones, and all that immense seething of low branches quivers as if the mountain were shaking the vast wildness of its body and letting the waves of its hair fall free. From time to time blocks of granite speed by in marvellous visions, giants of stone prostrate on the ground amid the green, monuments to free nature.134

Niceforo displays similar vigour in describing lowland areas, where a lack of cultivation results in vistas dominated by tree-trunks, yellowed like disinterred corpses, and free-growing couch grass.135 This 134

Niceforo 1897: 112: “All’orizzonte, montagne cupe di basalti si rincorrono fantasticamente, con una ridda di profili strani, di curve spezzate, di picchi arditissimi che si lanciano nell’azzurro; poi digradano in pendii aspri verso le pianure, coi fianchi squarciati da abissi, da immani spaccature, che s’aprono come gole di mostri. – E il verde dei cespugli si abbarbica tenacemente ai massi giganteschi, abbandonandosi a tutta l’esultanza della fecondazione libera, allacciandosi con ebrezze (sic) di abbracci appassionati alle immani roccie (sic) che s’alzano. È il trionfo del verde e della pietra che si compenetrano come allaccio selvaggio di fiere in amore, che si aggrovigliano in nodi strani e misteriosi; la vaporiera corre, lanciando come fiero saluto il suo grido, un mezzo alla natura incolta che prorompe dal seno della roccia in rigogliose efflorescenze di verde. Quella natura è una vergine intatta cui l’aratro mai squarciò il senso ebbro di desideri. Il vento passa e scuote poderosamente quell’intreccio d’erbe abbarbicate al sasso, quei ciuffi robusti allacciati con passione alle pietre, e tutto quell’immenso brulichio di rami bassi freme come se la montagna – corpo immenso di selvaggio – si agitasse e facesse liberamente ondeggiare i capelli sciolti. Di tanto in tanto passano rapidi, in visione meravigliosa, blocchi di granito, giganti di pietra prostrati al suolo tra il verde, monumenti della libera natura”. 135 Niceforo 1897: 113: “La pianura ci si stende dinanzi a perdita d’occhio; i fumi violacei dei fuochi perduti nelle nebbie si innalzano, nelle lontananze, in spire tenui e

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depiction of the landscape is steeped in the sensation of the wildness of life in its primordial state. The feelings aroused by the contemplation of nature converge with those provoked by reflection on the Sardinian race: the same horror and wonder that assail anyone confronted with a world considered not merely different but evidently opposite to that with which the observer – and therefore the reader – identifies himself. Besides the terrain and the flora, the fauna makes its contribution to the picture of the island’s geographical strangeness. Although ancient and modern sources alike agree on the absence of ferocious or dangerous species,136 all express wonder at some animals considered typically Sardinian such as the mouflon, boar and horses.137 And then there is one that certainly does not belong to the sottili, le erbe secche, giallastre, danno una uniformità sconfortante di tinte livide. Qualche cavallo, liberamente abbandonato nella radura, fugge all’avvicinarsi della ferrovia, la criniera al vento, mentre tutto il largo terreno si stende a perdita d’occhio, chiazzato da larghe bavature nerastre, striato da file di cespugli spinosi, da macchie di contorti alberelli. A quando a quando una gobba di terra spelata. Quei tronchi giallastri, bassi, tisici, contorti da un interno malore – in quella grande desolazione che grava d’intorno, hanno l’aspetto di cadaveri dissotterrati; le foglie corrose si contorcono orribilmente, i tronchi rachitici si allacciano in abbracci pieni di spasimo, come momenti che, pur volendo morire in una ebbrezza d’amore, non ne abbiamo la forza. Di tanto in tanto, una nera processione di frassini, un acquitrino cupo ove le cose – con mille iridiscenze – si riflettono, qualche arruffio bagnato di vegetazione bassa. Non c’è coltivazione. La gramigna cresce liberamente in mezzo alle pozzanghere d’acqua sudicia, e si accoppia e si moltiplica, come povera e laida famiglia di pezzenti che si abbandoni alla foga della riproduzione”. (“The plain stretches before us as far as the eye can see. The purplish smoke of fires lost in the haze rises in the distance in thin, faint coils; the dry yellowish grasses bestow an uneasy uniformity of wan hues. The odd horse, left free on the open land, flees at the train’s approach, its mane flowing in the wind, as all the broad land spreads as far as the eye can see, blotched by wide blackish patches, striped by rows of thorny bushes and thickets of twisted trees. From time to time a hump of bare earth. In the great desolation that looms all around, those yellowish trees – low, consumptive, contorted by an inner swooning – have the appearance of disinterred corpses. Their corroded leaves are horribly twisted, the rickety trunks cleave to each other in longing embraces, as in moments when, wishing to die in an inebriation of love, we lack the strength to do so. From time to time, a black procession of ash-trees, a sullen swamp where things are reflected with a plethora of iridescence, the odd muddle of stunted vegetation. There is no cultivation. Couch grass grows freely among puddles of filthy water, and it couples and multiplies like a poor and depraved family of wretches abandoning itself to the ardour of reproduction.”). 136 Arquer 2007: 8; Fues 1780: 316; Bresciani 2001: 123-124; Boullier 1865: 18. 137 See Mantegazza 1869: 66-67.

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category of exotic species but captures travellers’ attention nonetheless: the Sardinian donkey, called molenti; it is used, among other functions, to turn corn millstones and is every peasant’s faithful workmate. Bresciani provides a colourful description, telling us that it belongs to “a particular stock of donkeys or asses so tiny that they barely surpass the size of a good Molossian hound. They are that big: and so hairy and paunchy that they are a horrible sight. But these ugly little beasts are happy to provide the greatest service possible”.138 Other authors pause to observe these animals – useful, exploited, badly mistreated by their owners and decidedly unattractive.139 With its ridiculous appearance, its small size and above all its ubiquity, the donkey became an essential identifying feature of the island environment and was duly exploited to this effect by cinema: one of the first films was a reworking of the Pinocchio story featuring a Sardinian and his donkey, entitled Tontolini e l’asino (Negroni 1911).140 The Barbagia Among the places considered most representative of the Sardinian landscape, the role of literary topos was assigned to the mountain area of the Barbagia, in the province of Nuoro, with its majestic peaks, accessible only after long, strenuous journeys on horseback above terrifying precipices.141 In the Barbagia absolute pride of place went to the Gennargentu, known as the Ianua argenti (Silver Gate) by virtue, according to some, of a pass leading to a mining area in Ogliastra which contained silver deposits,142 recognisable by the luminous reflection of its snow-covered summit143 and variously called the

138

Bresciani 2001: 129; 335. Della Marmora 1860: II, 343-345. Valery 1837: 67-68; Smyth 1828: 100-101; Mantegazza 1869: 23; Edwardes 1889: 163-164; Maltzan 1869: 258; 339-340; Tennant 1885: 85; Vuillier 1893: 378; Bechi 1997: 62. 140 The film Tontolini e l’asino has been studied by Line Hauge Støyva, Le avventure di Pinocchio nel cinema muto di Antamoro, Masteropgave 2005, Universiteit I Bergen Det Historisk-Filosofiske Fakulteit Romansk Instituut Seksjon For Fransk og Italiensk, in http: //www.ub.uib.no/elpub/2005/h/528002/Masteroppgave.pdf. 141 Bresciani 2001: 166-167. 142 Della Marmora 1860: I, 429; Tennant 1885: 31. According to majority of linguists it is far more likely that Gennargentu has something to do with “gennargiu” which is a Nuorese form for the month of January (Mauro Scorretti p.c.). 143 Tyndale 1849: II, 249; Vuillier 1893: 447. 139

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“giant”, the “colossus”, “sovereign of the island”144 and “the Mont Blanc of Sardinia”.145 Della Marmora wrote intense passages recounting his many excursions on the Gennargentu. Despite the terminological precision he uses to fix the scene before him as in a snapshot, this careful observer is unable to remain unmoved by the fascination of those peaks, the first to be struck by the rays of the sun and the last to rid themselves of their mantle of snow. Faced with such majestic beauty, he decides that nothing can equal the grandiose sight of the slopes of the Gennargentu covered by a forest that “has conserved its characteristic of a wild and original nature”.146 It is no coincidence that the two adjectives used here emerge as fundamental in the literary discourse to connote the island’s most impenetrable areas, closed to the rest of the world by a lack of adequate infrastructure, and in a metaphorical sense the whole of Sardinia.147 The sense of the sublime aroused by the fearsome sight of the Barbagia landscape is also clearly evoked by the words used by Paolo Orano to describe the nature he observed on a train journey into the heart of Nuoro province: “Split by abysses which induce trembling when glimpsed and exhale their humid sylvan breath, pregnant with wild and mysterious smells, the mountains surround us on all sides”.148 He goes on: “Titanic peaks, gigantic seats, monstrous crags rise to enormous heights right above my head. The chasms now take on an unrepeatable horridness. All of it is inexpressible for anyone who sees and smells. The air breathed here is majestic. It is the air of the eagle and the granite peak”.149 In this picture, too, the adjectives feature the ideas of wild and mysterious;150 to this is added the evocative power of smells, recalling the sensory experience closest to the animal state. The idea that the Nuoro region was “the really wild 144

Della Marmora 1860: I, 376; Corbetta 1877: 22, 410; Wagner 1908a: XCIII, 16: 105. Wagner 2001: 65. 145 Tyndale 1849: II, 249. 146 Della Marmora 1860: I, 377. 147 Ibid., 29. 148 Orano 1896: 45. 149 Ibid., 46. 150 It should not be forgotten that literary references to the wonderful and wild places in Sardinia are legion, confirmation that this adjectival pairing had become an unmistakable trademark for the island. The Ogliastra countryside, for example, was described by Tyndale (1849: II, 254) as having a wonderfully wild and beautiful appearance: “The country is magnificently wild and beautiful, the greater part of the mountains being covered with forests”.

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part of the island” became stronger towards the end of the 19th century, when the “abnormal state” in which the area found itself was substantiated by ‘scientific’ research.151 Besides the studies conducted by positivist criminologists, Deledda’s earliest works,152 all set in her native Nuoro province, contributed to making Italian and then European readers aware of this forgotten corner of the world, and it is no coincidence that she showed a clear predilection for the adjective ‘wild’.153 Travellers agreed in assigning the Gennargentu a primary position in the island’s iconography, and the scientific picture previously outlined by Della Marmora bulked increasingly large in the literature in the second half of the 19th century. In Valery’s writings the interior mountain area, never conquered by any of the occupiers who had taken control of the island, had already appeared as a topos of the Sardinians’ indomitable spirit.154 Forester remarks that “the mountaineers of Barbagia have been distinguished from the earliest times for their indomitable courage and spirit of independence”,155 indeed the “Barbaricini (the Barbari of the Romans, whence Barbagia) exhibited their hereditary warlike spirit in resisting the invasions of the Moors” and resisted subsequent invaders, too.156 In Edwardes’ view Sardinia is identified with the mountains of its interior, because “[t]hese mountains hold the veritable Sardes of Sardinia”.157 From an orographic standpoint, too, the “inaccessible cliffs” of Nuoro province are very different from the “outer fringe of hills”, some rounded, some sharp-peaked, that can be admired in the Cagliari region.158 Vuillier states that the real Sardinia, as is the case with the Balearics and Corsica, can only be known by going far into it, into the mountains, and that it has many a surprise in store for those who have the courage

151

Niceforo 1897: 23. Deledda scored her first successes around the turn of the century. La via del male (1896) was favourably reviewed by Luigi Capuana. In 1899 she published Il vecchio della montagna, marking the beginning of her collaboration with the “Nuova Antologia”. In 1900 she published her first great novel Elias Portolu in episodes in a magazine, then in book form (1903). 153 Paulis 2006: 173. 154 Valery 1837: 296. 155 Forester 1858: 354. 156 Ibid., 355. 157 Edwardes 1889: 47. 158 Ibid. 152

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to venture into it.159 The secret of the Barbagia, as already noted by Della Marmora and Vuillier, lies in its remoteness.160 The area is inhabited by a little-known race, strong and severe whose customs have been kept intact.161 The harsh landscape serves as a safeguard for outlaws, who can find refuge in it and survive for years without running the risk of discovery. This impenetrable environment is the realm of the eagle, the mouflon and the boar, a world unknown even to its own inhabitants.162 The uniqueness of the Barbagia forms part of a dualistic and contrastive interpretation of the Sardinian landscape that at the end of the century was substantiated by ‘scientific’ studies. Orano held that there was a clear division between two opposite parts of Sardinia: the coastal and low-lying areas on the one hand and the mountain areas on the other.163 That was to be explained by the difference in altitude, which produced an “environmental liquid” peculiar to each area.164 That of the mountain community was thought to render its inhabitants insensitive to development and civilisation.165 Niceforo’s studies also focused on the central importance of the Barbagia, presented here as a “Delinquent Zone” – the territory with the highest incidence of the crimes typical of the island, such as armed robbery, theft and unlawful damage resulting from vendettas.166 The region’s criminal character was considered to be closely linked to the wild terrain – harsh, covered with impenetrable forest, the domain of animals such as the boar. Combined with the typical southern climate, these environmental features167 constituted the basis of the Sardinian 159

Vuillier 1893: 445-446: “Mais la vraie Sardaigne, celle qui conserve depuis les aurores nébuleuses de son histoire le caractère, les moeurs, les costumes, nous ne l’avons pas rencontrée sur notre route. En Sardaigne, de meme qu’aux Baléares et en Corse, il faut s’enfoncer au loin dans la montagne pour la retrouver, mais aussi que de surprises pour celui qui s’y aventure.” 160 Della Marmora 1860: I, 389. Vuillier 1893: 445-446; ibid., 446: “Mais ce n’est que sur le ravage marin, le bas des vallées et dans les paines que les elements étrangers ont incessamment renouvelé le Sarde primitive, et ce que furent les montagnars dans le lointain des premiers ages, ils le sont encore aujourd’hui, sous nos yeux.”. 161 Vuillier 1893: 164. 162 Edwardes 1889: 212-213. 163 Orano 1896: 10-11. 164 Ibid., 11. 165 Ibid., 11. 166 Niceforo 1897: 23; 29. 167 Ibid., 126.

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character.168 The island is described as “one of the most primitive lands in Europe; whole areas have come to a complete halt on the path to civilisation and have remained, especially in Nuoro province, with the moral ideas of societies which are still primitive and – to put it frankly – barbarous. […] In Nuoro province, the really wild part of the island – which, together with upper Ogliastra I have elsewhere called the Delinquent Zone – there generally prevails the brutal concept of morals which primitive tribes had”.169 The landscape’s harshness and the wild state of the nature and the people populating the area induce Niceforo to observe that this “part of Sardinia floats – rebellious – on the great ocean of modern civilisation that has not touched it, like the vestige of a world disappeared”.170 It is interesting to note that in support of his theory he makes reference to a literary excerpt in which Deledda describes a group of children as “innocuous little savages” forgotten “by a distant and selfish civilisation which had passed beyond the mountains, which had never seen them and would never want to”.171 Literary fiction and scientific discourse thus operate synergetically in the construction of Sardinian imagery. In Niceforo’s reasoning, Sardinia is seen in the context of an analysis based on dichotomies: on the one hand the opposition between the Italian North and South, and on the other the division between low-lying and mountain areas – a dichotomy he observes in all regions of Italy. With regard to the North-South divide, Niceforo assumes the existence of “two Italies, dissimilar in their customs, culture and race”, a “nation with two societies marked by wholly different types of culture”.172 Such dualism is not peculiar to Italy – similar situations are also to be found in Germany, Austria and with respect to Ireland in the United Kingdom.173 Climate plays an essential role in the psychological make-up of Northern and Southern Italians, indeed “the different climates tend to exaggerate in their respective populations the psychological characteristics we have already seen to be fixed by race”.174 The South in general constitutes “the barbarous 168

“In the face of that wild immensity a man, alone and armed, feels a rebel, feels stronger and more free” (Niceforo 1897: 83). 169 Niceforo 1901: 584-585. 170 Niceforo 1897: 49. 171 Ibid., 50. 172 Niceforo 1901: 8. 173 Ibid., 6. 174 Ibid., 126 and 132; author’s italics.

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modern Italy”,175 within which Sardinia is the most serious case176 and the Barbagia the most extreme example in Sardinia. Since this state of affairs is the result of a series of unchangeable factors such as the environment, climate and race, man can do nothing about it. In his analysis Niceforo makes use of an interpretative approach typical of European literature, that is based on pairs of opposites – in this case the concepts of North and South.177 The idea of the North as a locus of civilisation contrasting with the South, topos of incivility and primitivism, is applied on several levels at the same time. Though Sardinia is the quintessence of barbarism compared to northern Italy and northern Europe, within it a gradation of the two opposites is recognised: according to Maltzan the further north one travels in the island, the more its civilisation is developed. The north of Sardinia, since the medieval period, in which it had trade relations with Genoa, seems to have been more accessible to general European culture, while the south, with the sole exception of the city of Cagliari, is still dominated by all the island’s primitive national originality.178

Town and Rural Areas Another example of dualism is the image of towns as opposed to rural areas, and the prejudices which shaped relations between the island’s inhabitants. Literary sources bear witness to the prejudices that townspeople and country-dwellers harboured against each other in accordance with the model of the urbanitas and rusticitas dichotomy:179 “[t]hroughout the island the cittadini hold the contadini in utter contempt, a feeling as warmly returned by the rustics”.180 Jourdan, not inclined to indulgence towards Sardinians, acknowledged that the differences between the inhabitants of the island’s interior and its urban dwellers, especially in Cagliari, were very great. There one might have the impression of being on the mainland, providing he did not stay too long.181 Though towns are 175

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 583. 177 Arndt 2007: 388. 178 Maltzan 1869: 274. 179 Leerssen 2007a: 280. 180 Smyth 1828: 168. 181 Jourdan 1861: 23. 176

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considered more modern and civilised than villages, they are places where the Sardinian identity has been fatally compromised by a cultural syncretism produced by a succession of foreign occupations. Though Edwardes regarded Cagliari, the island’s historical capital, as lively and pleasant, he considered it unrepresentative; it was the mountains that held the real Sardinians and only in the villages of the interior was there any continuation of the habits which might appear odd to people from Cagliari or to travellers but were the mark of the authentic Sardinia.182 The same concept of urbanitas was attached to Sassari, an agreeable, civilised town in the north of the island,183 where a visitor might imagine himself to be anywhere on the Italian mainland because the spirit of the Continent had prevailed over Sardinian customs184 and there was no trace of that “barbarous national element” typical of most of the island.185 Despite their similarities, the two towns were divided by centuries of mutual loathing;186 “the Calaritani and Sassarese (sic) bear so cordial a hatred towards each other, that as ‘furbo’ [sly] as a Sassarese, is a frequent expression in the metropolis”.187 In Cagliari it was more frequent to see “island and Sardinian features with reflections of Africa”188 and the Spanish cultural heritage was perceptible, as was the proximity of Africa. According to Boullier, while Cagliari represented the island’s Southern characteristics, as a torrid place recalling Africa in the poverty of its people and the heat of the sun, Sassari and its hinterland resembled Provence.189 The distance separating the towns was captured above all by the feelings of the inhabitants of Sassari, who did not even call themselves Sardinians – an epithet they reserved for people from the interior and from Cagliari, whom they considered barbaric and primitive.190 The contrast between the inhabitants of the island’s two main towns is thus also in line with the dichotomy between Northerners and Southerners in Europe. 182

Edwardes 1889: 47. Vuillier 1893: 367-368; ibid., 368: “Sassari, la charmante, sorte de deuxième capitale de la Sardaigne, est une ville agréable et policée, dans une situation ravissante. [...] l’urbanité de ses habitants est proverbiale.” 184 Edwardes 1889: 326; Corbetta 1877: 212; 216. 185 Maltzan 1869: 331. About Cagliari and Sassardi see also Mantegazza 1869: 17-18. 186 Edwardes 1889: 327. 187 Smyth 1828: 168. 188 Corbetta 1877: 212. 189 Boullier 1865: 33; 21. 190 Maltzan 1869: 332; see also Vuillier 1893: 368. 183

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Primitivism The many references to the wild character of the Sardinian landscape are accompanied in the literature by constant complaints about the inaccessibility of the territory, the absence of any comfort or mark of progress.191 Anybody crossing the Tyrrhenian Sea to Sardinia knows that he will find no café with pavement tables to sit in the Mediterranean sun.192 The journey to the edge of the civilised world is anticipated as an extreme experience, fraught with difficulty and danger, in virgin territory which provides no safe havens, as in the adventure stories popular at the time. The image of the exotic land is constantly evoked, comparing Sardinia to the most remote islands in far-off oceans. The tour of Sardinia takes on the form of a full-scale geographical exploration. This is particularly apparent in writings highlighting the ‘scientific’ analysis of the places visited. It is to this category that the two major works of Alberto Della Marmora, Voyage and l’Itinérarie, may be said to belong, and they were widely cited by subsequent authors for their scrupulous research and thoroughgoing information. The methodology behind them was substantiated by the research he carried out during his sojourns on the island and is laid bare in his tireless work of classification and naming of wildlife species and collection of geographical data.193 Nor did Della Marmora fail to inform his readers of his discoveries in Sardinia – including a new species of nightingale and several other ornithological species – or the “fine mishaps” he had to endure while carrying out the trigonometrical surveys required to map the island.194 Between the lines, Sardinia is presented to the traveller as a place made fascinating and exotic by the mystery in which it is still shrouded, an unknown land awaiting discovery, with its varied landscape and a wealth of flora and fauna – the ideal destination for a tenacious and curious explorer. Despite the scientific approach, however, the impression is of an outsider who uses his calculations and exploration to place himself above the object being studied. This attitude is revealed in the control 191

Della Marmora 1860: I, 389; Tyndale 1849: I, 190; Bresciani 2001: 166-168; Maltzan 1869: 138-139. 192 Edwardes 1889: 4. 193 Longhi 1997: 9. 194 Della Marmora 1860: I, 317-318; ibid., 170 and 162-163. The efforts made by Della Marmora in his surveys of the Gennargentu had gained considerable renown, as rhetorically observed by Paolo Orano (1896: 47).

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function employed by the mind of the scientist who in his writings analyses, classifies and re-orders a vast quantity of data, documents and eye-witness accounts subsequently to be used in the production of the map that will bear his name.195 Although Della Marmora displays an undeniable interest in Sardinia, the object of his study never achieves the status of an active, aware subject – it remains the object of external value judgements made by someone with a solid opinion of his own class and a precise view of the world. As has been observed, although they contain some reflections on the Sardinian people, Della Marmora’s writings basically focus on the island as a silent geographical entity, a resource awaiting those who – like him, a typical spokesman of the conservative positivism then in vogue – will know how to make the best use of it.196 As animated by awareness of itself and its role as in Della Marmora’s work, the scientific gaze returns in the description of Sardinia provided by Royal Navy officer William Henry Smyth. Inspired by the opportunist spirit that drove British subjects to seek out and explore lands in the interests of the British crown, his writings betray an even greater detachment between the observer and the object observed. His explicit criticism of the customs of the Sardinians is much harsher than anything Della Marmora had to say. No less scathing are his strictures on Catholicism, which he held directly responsible for the islanders’ state of ignorance. His geographical analysis, like others, starts by referring to the fertility of the island – the old imperial granary – and its abundant mineral and fishing resources, while he goes on to explain its state of decay in moralistic terms. Smyth thus echoes the dichotomy between the idea of a terra felix and the Sardinians’ direct responsibility for their poverty.197 In addition to his reference to classical sources, then, his words resound with the judgements pronounced by the travellers who had preceded him: Fues, Valery and above all Della Marmora. Though Arquer’s observations were not devoid of criticism, his assumptions were not so radical as to set his own culture on a superior level to others, as was the case with subsequent writers.198 In the 18th and 19th centuries the island’s otherness was expressed in terms that 195

Longhi 1997: 10 Ibid. 197 Smyth 1828: 65. 198 Laneri 2007: CI. 196

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reiterated its inferiority to a European model which was ‘Northern’, civilised and modern – the model carried by all the travellers. Despite its geographical proximity to the European continent – much closer than many other territories explored in the 19th century and indeed located in the heart of the Mediterranean, the cradle of civilisation199 – Sardinia appears to be separated from Europe by an unbridgeable divide. So much so that as late as the end of the century Giulio Bechi, speaking of the “island of sorrow”, wondered “Is it Italy? Is this Europe?”.200 Stretching towards the shores of Africa, Sardinia was part of the physical and above all imaginary world manifested in the concept of the South. The ancient Ichnusa or Sandaliotis, called Sardinia after Sardo, son or nephew of Hercules, seemed to have been plunged into oblivion for centuries, millennia, losing all contact with the rest of the civilised world.201 Arquer himself had defined the island “tenebrous”,202 more than three centuries later Robert Tennant called it an “unknown land” and the last 19th-century traveller, Gaston Vuillier, echoed the same idea when he recorded that he knew nothing about “poor abandoned Sardinia, lost in deep obscurity”.203 Awoken from a long silence by the accounts of modern travellers, Sardinia revealed itself to newcomers as a world suspended in the past, the fossilised remains of a condition no longer to be found beyond its coasts. This reflects one of the most important form of representation in the description of exotic lands and one which has characterised narrations of Sardinia to the present day: the idea that entry into a primitive and exotic land entails the loss of temporal coordinates so that the past seems perpetual and unchanging, to the extent that it annuls the physical laws governing the universe.204 199

Jourdan 1861: 1. Bechi 1997: 58 and 35. 201 The island’s ancient names, derived from its shape, respectively recalling a human foot and the sole of a sandal (Arquer 2007: 14). 202 See note 1. 203 Tennant 1885: 3. Vuillier 1893: 6 (“Au lecteur”). 204 Vuillier 1893: 6 (“Au lecteur”): “La Sardaigne fu tune vision éblouissante; dans cette terre inconnue des Italiens eux-mêmes, où les costumes d’autrefois ont conserve leur originale beauté, je coudoyai familièrement le pourpoint de velours, et le moyen âge passa chaque jour à mes côtés come si le monde n’avait pas tourne depuis quatre ou cinque siècles.” (“Sardinia was a blinding vision. In this land unknown even to the Italians, where the costumes of times past have retained their original beauty, I met and became familiar with the velvet doublet, and the Middle Ages elapsed every day by my side, as if the world had not turned for four or five centuries”). The 200

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Mysterious and Unknown Land Another image recurring in the literature is closely linked to the concept of a land stuck in the past – the idea that Sardinia continues to be a mystery for the rest of Europe. Although William Henry Smyth could claim to have been the first to write a complete study of the island in English, as time went by the conviction that Sardinia was unknown to Europe progressively lost its substance. Valery recorded his impression when he first set eyes on the islanders, “a population less well known than some savage tribes in America”.205 As late as the end of the 19th century Charles Edwardes explained his interest in this strange land precisely in terms of the scarcity of information about it, despite the fact that a number of travellers had preceded him and that many of his observations were perfectly consistent with the literary tradition developed down the centuries. He wanted to capture the reader’s attention by dwelling on the strangeness of what he saw and on the veil of mystery in which the island was still shrouded. Seen from a distance on Mediterranean travels, it provided incontrovertible proof of its proximity when the British visitor was overwhelmed by the enchanting scent of sweet herbs and the smell of salt water.206 Along with the first landscapes he admired when landing on the island, those scents reminded him of Ireland, to which he makes repeated reference in the text.207 Comparisons between the two islands recur in the writings of other British travellers, which is not surprising if it is borne in mind that Ireland fundamentally represented for Britain what the South was for the North of Italy: a region socially and politically peripheral, considered primitive and fascinating in its barbaric otherness, a land to be exploited like a distant colony, an exotic destination but one located just around the corner. This reasoning was a process of “domestic Orientalisation” ascribed to Britain, but also applicable to Sardinia, and the South as a whole, in the Italian context.208 Introduction of the English version of this work differs a little from the French edition: “To visit Sardinia is to turn back the pages of history. Here the Middle Ages are revived; the costumes of other days have preserved their pristine beauty, and the black coat of nineteenth century brushes familiarly against the velvet doublet of the fifteenth.” (Vuillier 1896: VI). 205 Valery 1837: 18. 206 Edwardes 1889: 4-5. 207 Ibid., 5. 208 Schneider 1998.

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It is curious to note that Vuillier, the last traveller-narrator of the 19th century, took up the image of Sardinia as a mysterious and unknown land at a time when the number of foreigners present on it, above all fortune-seeking entrepreneurs, was increasing exponentially.209 To this “special envoy” Sardinia was a distant entity, completely detached from the civilised world.210 He describes his travel experiences in oneiric tones.211 This projection of Sardinia into the realm of dream and mirage seriously undermines the eye-witness value of his travel accounts. The report on a journey in Sardinia is transformed in the imagination into an encounter with a distant and inaccessible place, knowable only in the world of dreams – or rather nightmares: Vuillier was obsessed with Sardinia as “a kind of cursed country, emanating fearsome fevers, inhabited by ugly-looking people”.212 The idea of the journey as a dream makes another appearance at the end of the book: “What I have conserved of its remote hills, its neglected villages, is like the memory of a strange and wonderful dream”.213 A few years later, trying to describe village festivals in Orgosolo in the heart of the island, Giulio Bechi confessed that it was impossible to express in words “the classical and wild, rustic and poetic flavour of this magnificent old Sardinia”.214 He recommended dreaming as the only way of approaching reality: dream of one of those landscapes, never seen, imagined in adolescence – pieces of old tapestries and exotic screens, of Moorish stories and Oriental fables, gathered in a vision of stupendous harmony. Dream, and you will be close to the truth.215

209

Vuillier 1893: 363: “Elle est inconnue de l’Europe, peu conne de l’Italie même. Ne dirait-on pas que les voyageurs l’ont toujours évitée! En traversant la Méditerranée, on a pu, parfois, l’apercevoir, étalant les lignes infinies de ses mornes côtes et les ondulations graves de ses monts”; See also Maltzan 1869: 159-260. 210 Vuillier 1893: 6 (“Au lecteur”). 211 Ibid., 6: “these mysterious islands – distant, vague, glimpsed like a shimmering mirage – never left my imaginings”. 212 Ibid., 363. 213 Ibid., 497. 214 Bechi 1997: 87. 215 Ibid. A journey in Sardinia likened to a dream also appeared in Sardinian writings. Pietro Nurra wrote Impressioni di viaggio dalla Barbagia settentrionale (Sassari: Prem. Stab. Tip. G. Dessì, 1896) after visiting the area to carry out research on the popular traditions connected to the Sacre Rappresentazioni (Nurra 1896: 6). After leaving the “wild Nuoro country” Nurra spoke of his experience in the hills as a

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Readers were thus regaled with a world which lived essentially as a creation of fantasy, where anything was possible and everything was far removed from the drab everyday reality of civilised Europe. At the dawn of the 20th century literature offered the collective imagination, not knowledge of a real island, in all its beauty and with all its problems, but an escape route to both a horrible and wonderful fantasy-land upon which to project its prejudices and its nightmares. People Physical Appearance and National Character As with descriptions of the island, on the subject of the Sardinian national character, starting from Sardiniae brevis historia et descriptio, published writings provided a repertoire of images which retained their influence. Arquer described the islanders as sunbrowned, thin and simple, not suited to intellectual activity but expert hunters, used to hardship, frugal and polite but lazy. Had they worked harder, they could have produced plentiful quantities of grain and other commodities, so he deplored the negligence of farmers and invoked greater industriousness on the part of peasants.216 Two centuries later travellers basically confirmed this view, but devoted more attention to attributes such as laziness, conceit, lust and above all thirst for vendetta. Laziness was considered to be the Sardinians’ national characteristic.217 Their greatest sin was lust, accompanied by extreme jealousy;218 the blindness widespread in the island was considered to be the result of this acute lasciviousness.219 What was confused dream; his memories were a jumble of faces and smiles, everything crowded his mind like an unceasing phantasmagoria (ibid., 88-89). 216 Arquer 2007: 38; Idem 6: “Incusatur hic colonorum negligentia desideraturque in rusticis maioris industria”. 217 Fues 1780: 336-337; Anonymous 1831: 47 and 64; Tyndale 1849: II, 318 (“Their predominant passions are revenge and jealousy; their prevailing faults, listlessness and idleness; and from these proceed an inconceivable ignorance, a bigoted adherence to their prejudices and superstitions, and an inheritance of thoughts, habits, and customs, of such a primitive nature as can scarcely be met with elsewhere in Europe. The dawn of civilisation is only just breaking upon them, and it has been said, with a certain degree of truth, that the island and the natives are the intermediate link between the termination of mythology and the commencement of civilisation”). Corbetta 1877: 68; 103-104; Tennant 1885: 307; Orano 1896: 95. 218 Fues 1780: 338; Tennant 1885: 217; Vuillier 1893: 471-472. 219 Fues 1780: 338; Anonymous 1831: 47 and 64.

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defined as jealousy was actually, according to Della Marmora, an over-developed sense of honour, since the Sardinians were extremely proud, indomitable and stubborn.220 They liked to render their own summary justice and when they did so their vendetta was certain and ferocious;221 in addition, they could take offence at the slightest thing, and any perceived offender ran the risk of being stabbed in the back without warning.222 No European country could provide better cover for a vendetta than Sardinia, indeed the islanders felt obliged to avenge any wrong suffered and would sometimes not be content with killing their enemies, proceeding to mutilate their bodies.223 In all the sources vendetta features as a defining characteristic of the Sardinian nature, as exemplified by the recurrent use of the term ‘vengeful’ in describing the islanders, such as the fierce, irascible inhabitants of Bonorva in northern Sardinia, the rebellious, vengeful people of Aggius and the rebellious, savage and vengeful population of Goceano.224 In addition to their vices, Sardinians had distinctive qualities, indeed every people is to be seen as a “nation of contrasts”.225 The sources are consistent in indicating hospitality and politeness as the islanders’ most prominent qualities.226 They aroused wonder with their thick beards, dark clothes, tanned faces, flowing hair and picturesque armour but their fearsome appearance was in complete contrast to the gentleness of character encountered by Valery in a chance meeting with peasant – bearded, hooded, armed to the teeth – who greeted him politely before wishing him a pleasant journey.227 Smyth confirmed the courtesy and hospitality of the Sardinians, and the frank simplicity 220

Della Marmora 1839: I, 157. Mantegazza 1869: 95, 97-98. 222 Vuillier 1893: 471-472. 223 Fues 1780: 340. According to Roissard de Bellet (1884: 92), Sardinians were constant in their passions and deadly serious about family solidarity. This attitude recalled the patriarchal system of primitive times, but had the practice of the vendetta as its fatal obverse. Its cruelty could be observed in customs such as relatives of the victims of revenge killings smearing their faces with blood from the corpse, a practice extant in some localities: Vuillier 1893: 393. 224 Valery 1837: 92. Tyndale 1849: I, 313. Idem 1849: II, 69. See also Mantegazza 1869: 95-98. 225 Leerssen 2007g: 344. 226 Cabiddu 1982: 39-40; Della Marmora 1939: I, 191, 194; Corbetta 1877: 68; Roissard de Bellet 1884: 379; Tennant 1885: 217-218; Vuillier 1893: 386; 390. 227 Valery 1837: 18-19. 221

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of their speech, but accused them of being extremely jealous, indolent, crafty and deceitful and above all of harbouring an insatiable desire for vengeance – all vices which were conducive to family feuds and lay behind a multitude of murders.228 In Bresciani’s view the Sardinians’ vices were balanced by notable virtues, indeed the Sardinian was “by nature kind, wise, religious, loyal, quick-witted, of subtle and discreet intelligence, sound and sturdy of mind, of fervid and impassioned imagination, patient, docile and reverent in spirit, composed and strict in manner, serious and frank indeed, of few words, ready and direct”.229 Though the sources dwelt at great length on the mix of elements that go to make up the national character, Sardinian customs appeared as unmistakable signs of the perpetuation of ancient usages typical of the Orient, on the strength of which another powerful image was developed, that of Sardinian cultural archaism.230 Bresciani argued that it was unfair to attribute the vices of some individuals to an entire people,231 but like all primitive populations the Sardinians excelled in the greatness of their virtues and vices alike, that “the fire of their imagination, their passionate spirit and their vigorous strength rendered them excessive for good and for ill. And they loved beyond measure, and proudly hated”.232 The prevalently critical judgements on the Sardinians were thus readily comprehensible, since grimlooking men, almost always armed, could arouse great astonishment and give rise to the strangest rumours.233 Behind the persistence of the “most ancient Sardinian customs” were a range of factors such as climate, the surrounding environment and the weight of tradition on national traits.234 According to John Galt “the inhabitants of Sardinia are yet scarcely above the negative point of civilization; perhaps it 228

Smyth 1828: 141-142; Tennant 1885: 217: “The Sardes in general may be described as honorable and intelligent, generous and hospitable, and as having most of the characteristics of a primitive and unsophisticated people. They are, however, as strong in their hatred as in their affections, but the members of the same family seldom quarrel amongst themselves; they concentrate all their feelings of animosity against those, who have wronged any friend or connection, and warmly espouse his cause, whether right or wrong, altogether irrespective of its merits”. 229 Bresciani 2001: 142; see Corbetta 1877: 66-67. 230 Bresciani 2001; Domenech 1867: 7. 231 Bresciani 2001: 142. 232 Ibid., 138. 233 Ibid., 140. 234 Ibid., 158.

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would be more correct to say that they appear to have sunk a certain way back into barbarism”.235 Even Sardinian hospitality, one of their most admirable virtues, was the same as that found in semi-barbarous races.236 Jourdan observed that the Sardinians were “rebels against progress”,237 as witnessed by the pre-historic agricultural implements they used.238 Ancient customs were also perpetuated by their fanatical attachment to tradition and an ignorance equalled only by their aversion to innovation.239 The astonishment aroused by contact with the island’s everyday life led to the conclusion that the Sardinians had not yet entered history, were completely bewitched by superstition and other ills typical of primitive peoples, to the extent that “the island and the natives are the intermediate link between the termination of mythology and the commencement of civilisation”.240 In Sardinia it was clearly possible to come across situations and characters redolent of the most distant past, such as the peasant encountered by Baron von Maltzan, carrying a lamb on each shoulder exactly as depicted in an ancient idol in the Cagliari museum.241 All the sources are unanimous in identifying the Sardinians’ physical appearance with the features typical of southerners. They were observed to be predominantly short, thin and strong with a sallow complexion; their attire was bizarre, to say the least.242 Their 235

Cabiddu 1982: 37. Forester 1858: 283. 237 Jourdan 1861: 21. 238 Ibid., 26. 239 Tyndale 1849: II, 113. 240 Ibid., 318. 241 Maltzan 1869: 313. The sources make much of the obvious similarities between the island customs and those of the peoples celebrated in Homer and the Bible stories (Bresciani 2001: 141; Domenech 1867: 104; 197). Valery observes that in Sardinia a roast is prepared as it was by Homer’s heroes (1837: 22), bread is made exclusively by women, as in the Odyssey (ibid., 100), and Sardinian donkeys have all the nobility of the primitive donkey celebrated in the Bible and that Homer compared to the intrepid Ajax (ibid., 68). The vendetta is also held to have ancient origins, being traced to the earliest eastern patriarchal law (Maltzan 1869: 328-329). According to Forester (1858: 277) “the usages of the Sardes afford, in a variety of instances, a living commentary, perhaps the best still existing, on the modes of life and thought recorded in Homer and the Bible”; see ibid., Preface VIII and 336. 242 Fues 1780: 347; Anonymous 1831: 46 (“Das männliche Geschlecht der Sarden ist meistens klein und untersetzt und hat eine gelbbraune Gesichtsfarbe. Die Bewohner des innern Landes haben ein wild fürchterliches Ansehen, vorzüglich die, welche den 236

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thick hair and long beards contributed to a forbidding appearance, as was observed particularly in the men in the mountain areas of Gallura and the Barbagia.243 Alongside these general characteristics, the sources note a variety of types of Sardinians corresponding to areas of residence, observing in particular a difference between the island’s southerners and northerners.244 According to Della Marmora the former had rounder faces, prominent cheekbones and darker skin, while the people in the Sassari area had longer faces and a more aquiline type of nose.245 Smyth thought that people in the north showed features of Celtic origin.246 Tyndale put the short stature, sturdiness and dark skin of people in Cagliari and in the south of the island down to the effects of the sweltering, “southern and sultry sun”.247 He observed that their character was more indolent and slovenly than elsewhere, and that their low level of intelligence could be attributed to the climate and the African and Spanish blood in them.248 To get a clear idea of the Bart tragen. Ihre Kleidung ist ein grünes oder rothes Netz, oder eine tuchene Kapuze auf dem Kopfe, in welche zugleich die Haare eingebunden werden; eine lange rothe, braune oder gelbe Jacke; ein breiter Gürtel umschließt die Lenden, in welchen vorne ein großes Messer steckt: weite Hosen an den Knien gebunden und Kamaschen mit Schuhen. Ein Aermel an der Jacke eines wohlhabenden Bauern ist mit silbernen Knöpfen besetzt und vorne herunter findet man sie ebenfalls reichlich. Viele tragen auch ein Fell eines Thieres aus dem Rücken. Die Kleidung der Frauen und Mädchen ist reicher und bunter, als die der Männer, und in jeder Provinz anders.”). Della Marmora 1839: I, 152; Corbetta 1877: 60; Cabiddu 1982: 128. 243 Smyth 1828: 161. 244 Cfr. Mantegazza 1869: 80-86; Tennant 1885: 220. 245 Della Marmora 1839: I, 186. 246 “The Sards are of a middle stature and well shaped, with dark eyes and coarse black hair; except in the mountains, where fresh complexions and blue eyes are also met with. In the Campidano they are more swarthy than in the Capo di Sopra, whilst a large mouth and thick lips give them a more Celtic appearance” (Smyth 1828: 141). 247 Tyndale 1849: III, 71-72; see Tennant 1885: 220: “Physically the Sardes are a fine race; and though rather under than over the middle height, they are remarkable for their beauty of form, well proportioned shape, and straight limbs, combined with great strength and activity. They have bronzed complexions, black eyes, and black hair; a ‘blond’ – either man or woman – is seldom seen in the Island, and a fat or corpulent person of either sex is almost as great a rarity. The women are also rather under the middle height, but of elegant figure, graceful carriage, large black eyes, dark hair and brunette complexions, and, though they attain to maturity at the age of 14, yet they preserve their figure and freshness to a ‘green old age’”. 248 “The inactive listless disposition of the people, – even more remarkable than in the other provinces, – with a less degree of sharpness and animation, may be accounted for by the climate and the graft of African and Spanish blood; and there are no

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physical differences Orano recommended a train journey, on which a traveller could admire a remarkable variety of original types: the pureblooded Sardinian shepherd with his fierce expression, bristly beard as thick as the bushes in his native mountains, and eyes reflecting changing colours like a tiger’s; or the serious-looking Campidanese, with a wrinkled, clean-shaven face.249 Father Bresciani followed the same rationale, whereby certain characteristics (skin and eye colour, facial features) tended to change and soften as one travelled from south (Campidano, Trexenta) to north (Logudoro, Gallura, Nurra, Ogliastra): The Sardinians of the Capo calaritano are small in person, slim and muscular; but in Logodoro they are first tall and solid, and well fortified; the biggest are those of Gallura, and Nurra, who lead a skilful and prosperous life and have a greatness in their semblance such that their long hair and thick beards wave about heads fit to set before the brushes of Leonardo and Michelangelo. Fine grace of faces! Which, seen on horseback when hooded and looking down on a passer-by, are composed of such dignity as to engender trust and respect. The Sardinians have thick jet-black hair, which some of them plait and others let fall upon their shoulders with side-locks hanging over the temples. Their skin colour is brown, darker in the south and by degrees gentler and subtler towards the north, until it turns to white and vermilion as seen on the cheeks of the people of Fonni and Gallura. Their eyes are black, alive and penetrating, but of gentle and calm regard; the arch of the brows is marked, and reveals the features of the face with a certain boldness that makes them at once masculine and tender: so that the Sardinian is handsome in his appearance; while from Tregenta to Campidano they have the sharp and marked profile of the Egyptian portraits left to us by the Pharaohs in their tomb paintings, from Oleastra and the Marghine northwards they are broader in shape, with vigorous and resolute features.250 manufactures or trades of any kind, beyond the mere necessaries of life”: Tyndale 1849: III, 71. 249 Orano 1896: 35-36. 250 Bresciani 2001: 144-145. “I Sardi del Capo calaritano [i.e. the southern half of Sardinia] son piccoletti della persona, asciutti e muscolosi; ma nel Logodoro sono innanzi alti, e massicci, e ben incastellati, massime quelli della Gallura, e della Nurra, i quali portan la vita sì destra e prosperosa, e hanno una grandezza ne’ loro sembianti, che i lunghi capelli e le folte barbe gli arieggiano per teste da porgere al pennello di Leonardo e di Michelangelo. Bella grazia di volti! I quali veduti a cavallo chiusi nel

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Though the formulations varied, all the sources cited a common reference model that coincided with the canonical literary classification of national characteristics according to which the peoples of Europe were divided into two large groups: northerners and southerners.251 The principle was applied simultaneously at more than one level. Despite the presence, noted by Smyth, of both Celtic and Mediterranean elements in the Sardinians, their national characteristics essentially matched the southern model.252 Fues had already observed that their defects resembled those of their “neighbours”,253 that is to say the races of the South.254 Belief in a direct relation between climate and national character was given fresh impulse in Italy by the research of positivist scholars including Alfredo Niceforo who, making specific reference to Montesquieu and Herder, emphasised the crucial influence of climate in determining the psychology of a race.255 Starting from theoretical considerations advanced by Giuseppe Sergi, he identified two distinct races in the Italian population: the “Aryan” northern race and the “Mediterranean” southern one.256 The latter, recognisable by a cappuccio e miranti dall’alto il passeggero, son composti a tanta dignità che ingenera fidanza e rispetto. I Sardi hanno capelli nerissimi e folti, ed altri gli intrecciano, ed altri gli lascian cadere sulle spalle, e pioverne le ciocche da lato per le tempie. Il color della pelle è bruno, ma più fosco al capo australe, e digrada a mano a mano con dolce sfumatura verso aquilone, sinché si volge in bianco e vermiglio come si vede nelle gote de’ Fonnesi e dei Gallurani. Hanno gli occhi neri, vivi, pungenti, ma di lento e riposato riguardo: l’arcatura delle ciglia è risentita, e rileva le fattezze del viso con una certa baldanza che le rende in un maschie, ed amorevoli: ché il Sardo è bello di suo sembiante; e se dalla Tregenta al Campidano ha il profilo netto e spiccato dei ritratti egiziani che ci lasciarono i Faraoni nelle dipinture de’ loro sepolcri, dall’Oleastra e dalle Marghine in su piglia contorni più larghi, e tratti vigorosi, e ricisi.” 251 Leerssen 2007b: 286; Beller 2007b: 301; Arndt 2007: 387-389. 252 Smyth 1828: 141. 253 Fues 1780: 336. 254 Roissard de Bellet 1884: 92. See Tennant 1885: 307: “The apathetic temperament of the Sardes has been assigned by others as the reason for the back-ward condition of the country, and this no doubt has to some extent been an obstacle, but this cannot be the true, nor even the main, cause, nor is it quite just to the people. It must had admitted that the Sardes are not as a race either laborious or energetie (sic), and the fatal Sarde saying ‘what God has given that we will take’ is far too often exemplified, but they are not more listless and apathetic than the Sicilians and southern Italians generally, and as, the same causes produce the same effects, the reason is not altogether sound”. 255 Niceforo 1897: 90; Idem 1901: 126-127. 256 Ibid., 90-93.

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particular cranial conformation,257 was considered less developed than its northern counterpart, and the eastern and African elements present in the Mediterranean race were held responsible for its bellicose, proud nature, which was the main cause of crime in the South.258 In psychological terms the essential characteristic of dark Mediterraneans was the “enormous excitability of their ego”, which caused a marked tendency to movement and physical and psychological agitation, inattentiveness, excessive trivial emotions and impulsiveness.259 Southerners were also talkative, cheerful, lively, expansive and quick-witted but were unable to concentrate for any length of time and therefore failed to excel in the arts or any enterprise requiring perseverance and discipline.260 Lastly, to quote Nietzsche, they suffered from “the disease of the will: they are incapable of willing”, with which he implied they were lazy.261 In literary sources the Sardinian character indeed coincided with the profile outlined for the Mediterranean race peculiar to the “barbaric contemporary Italy”, that is to southern Italians.262 This was exemplified in the extreme excitability of the ego as expressed by the Sardinians’ violent and vengeful nature, and the lack of will manifest in their “passiveness”, their inability to react to anything.263 Niceforo went as far as to say that Sardinia held the dubious distinction of being the place lagging the farthest behind on the path to civilisation since it contained the most evident anthropological features of the Mediterranean race.264 Within the island the highest degree of backwardness was manifested by the inhabitants of the mountain area, in line with a commonly-held view that mountain people were generally at a lower level of development than lowlanders.265 Shepherds and Bandits Among the various anthropological profiles the quintessential embodiment of the Sardinian national character was the shepherd, 257

Niceforo 1901: 16-17. See also Mantegazza 1869: 81. Niceforo 1897: 96. 259 Niceforo 1901: 116 and 133; Tennant 1885: 219. 260 Niceforo 1901: 133 and 116-119. 261 Ibid., 118-119. 262 Niceforo 1901: 577-578. 263 Orano 1896: 95. 264 Niceforo 1901: 583-584; Idem 1897: 18. 265 Niceforo 1901: 545. 258

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who combined the island mentality and the customs associated with the nomadic pastoral life;266 the feeling claimed by shepherds for working independence actually spilled over into laziness, one of the islanders’ most serious vices.267 A complete aversion to the sea, and great skill in the use of firearms – inculcated by adults in boys – which facilitated recourse to bloody vendettas, were further elements specific to a socio-cultural context dominated by the life of the herdsman.268 Its pernicious role in Sardinian society is clear if it is borne in mind that shepherds constituted the most numerous and litigious part of the population; they were engaged in continual thieving from each other and their “wild migratory life” often induced them to commit murder, sometimes to order.269 Indeed many Sardinian bandits were not common criminals, rather their misfortunes began when they enacted the law of the vendetta,270 and further misdeeds were necessitated by the requirements of survival as outlaws.271 Banditry was therefore not a choice but an “obligatory career”.272 Since “the violences of the fuoriusciti are, it is well understood, mingled and tempered with a strong sense of honour”,273 they were not considered as criminals by the population.274 The anthropological profile of the shepherd was thus a fusion of the worst and the best features of the Sardinian national character, and it was upon this character that the Sardinian identity was projected.275 Despite such strictures as those mentioned above, in a pastoral land like Sardinia a shepherd was considered a man of some standing, by virtue of the exertion involved in his work, the long days spent in the burning sun or bitter cold, the unpredictability of the weather and 266

Smyth 1828: 107. Tyndale 1849: II, 112-113. See also Mantegazza 1869: 88; 199. 268 Smyth 1828: 107 and 142; Tennant 1885: 73. 269 Tyndale 1849: II, 243. 270 Maltzan 1869: 245. 271 Forester 1858: 283. 272 Domenech 1867: 212. 273 Ibid. 274 Pais Serra 1973: 168. 275 The importance of the figure of the shepherd-bandit in the imagination of the time is borne out in a letter from Grazia Deledda to Angelo De Gubernatis, where she notes that “thinking of Sardinia, one thinks of brigands!” (2007: 183). Yet at the same time she admits that she has never met one, and the same goes for the many “mainlanders and British who come here to hunt, leave full of praise for Sardinian hospitality, if nothing else, and then flatly deny that there are any brigands here” (ibid., 184). 267

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the harshness of the terrain.276 All this made him worthier of respect and admiration than a well-dressed mediocre town-dweller who could not bear the heat of the sun and sheltered from the rain under an umbrella.277 In the popular imagination the shepherd thus came to coincide with the balente, the man of worth and valour (balentia), who could rely on nothing but his courage and resilience. These were the only relevant considerations in any value judgement on the man of the Barbagia.278 The concentration of shepherds was greatest in the interior mountain areas, what Niceforo called the Delinquent Zone,279 where there was a higher incidence than elsewhere of highway robbery, theft and murder – all crimes bound up with vendettas and local customs. Quoting Bresciani, Niceforo recalled that the Barbagia shepherds were “wild and crude men”280 who lived by thieving and spurned any form of law or external control, and were therefore the maximum embodiment of the proud, aggressive nature of Southerners.281 According to Orano “the nomad shepherd has neither the blush of shame nor the sorrow of regret”, a characteristic generally attributed to the Sardinian bandit.282 This was taken as evidence of a close connection between the two figures. The true nature of the shepherd was to be seen in his highway robberies, conducted like full-blown military operations.283 A potential bandit in mentality and lifestyle, he displayed the savage warlike spirit typical of Barbagian people such as the inhabitants of Fonni, brigands by nature, having kept in their blood the violence and ferocity of their race, or Orgosolo, savage and cruel men who lived by thieving and refused to be subject to any outside law.284 His bellicose nature was a throwback to his past as a hunter, was attached to his primitive identity and lent itself to comparisons with similar instances found in cultural contexts considered inferior, such as tribal Africa, Scotland, or the Arab world:285 “the mountain 276

Edwardes 1889: 232. Ibid. 278 Della Marmora 1839: I, 195. 279 Niceforo 1897: 29-30. 280 Ibid., 50. 281 Ibid., 96. 282 Orano 1896: 145. 283 Niceforo 1897: 45; Pais Serra 1973: 174. 284 Vuillier 1893: 460. Bresciani 2001: 344. 285 Niceforo 1897: 43; 46; 65. 277

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men rush to attack a stagecoach with the same fierce joy as that with which a normal man hunts a boar; they organise an armed expedition against a village with the same enthusiasm as that with which primitive tribes deployed under their totems waged war upon each other”.286 Though taking account of the qualities and faults of shepherdhunter-bandits, a number of commentators on things Sardinian held their attachment to their violent traditions to be primarily responsible for the island’s lack of development. In actual fact the accusations made against this figure, a relic of an epoch pushed into the past by modern civilisation, became an opportunity to develop a discourse on the Sardinian people as a savage and primitive nation. According to Mantegazza the Sardinian shepherd is not that of the Idylls of Theocritus and Gessner; he is a proud, resolute man, he always has a rifle over his shoulder and is only too willing to use it. Bronzed by the sun, inured to hunger and thirst, he is a true Arab who often acts like a Bedouin; he has no clear idea of the property of others, often opens hedges with his knife to let his sheep through and defends his outrage with rifle fire.287

He went on to say that “the wandering shepherd, a fine specimen for the anthropologist and the novelist, is the ruin of Sardinia; he is often a synonym for a thief” and concluded that the island could become one of the most moral countries in the world if it got rid of them.288 Although voices were raised against the criminal culture of the Barbagia, its bandits enjoyed great appeal in the public imagination. Not only were gullible minds fascinated by these characters,289 poets 286 Ibid., 43. According to Guglielmo Ferrero the raids conducted by Abyssinian shepherds were still a “social institution in the mountains of Nuoro province” (Niceforo 1901: 588). See also note 534. 287 Mantegazza 1869: 90: “Il pastore della Sardegna non è quello degli Idilli di Teocrito e di Gessner, è un uomo risoluto, fiero, che ha sempre sulle spalle un fucile e che lo adopera troppo volentieri. Abbronzito dal sole, indurito alla fame, alla sete, è un vero arabo che spesso fa da beduino; non ha della proprietà altrui idee molto precise, spesso apre le siepi col coltello per farvi entrare le sue pecore; e difende il sopruso a fucilate.” 288 “Il pastore errante, bellissimo tipo per l’antropologo e per il romanziere, è la rovina della Sardegna; spesso è sinonimo di ladro” (Mantegazza 1869: 90). 289 Pais Serra 1973: 168-169.

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described their escapades like the deeds of ancient heroes,290 whereby misdeeds were transformed into soldierly actions and much was made of their courage and skill. In Sardinia, having a bandit as a relative was like having a minister or an ambassador in the family.291 This stemmed from the persistence of an image of them which was sweetened by literature and the arts;292 it was held that they fought not for personal gain but to oppose the authoritarian power of the state or for reasons of honour, which put them on the level of unfortunate heroes driven outside the law in defence of their honour rather than proper criminals. Derived from the Levantine and Mediterranean bandit of Romantic literature, this model appealed not only to the impressionable minds of boys – as a child Antonio Gramsci would rather listen to his teacher tell brigand stories than study the deeds of historical figures such as Eleonora d’Arborea – but to European culture as a whole.293 The prototype of the Sardinian bandit, renowned for his boldness and chivalrous generosity as embodied by the brigands of Byron and Schiller, had inspired writers of the standing of Pasquale Tola, Vittorio Angius and Enrico Costa, who awarded him the title of man of honour.294 Indeed the prose and poetry of the time left us some unforgettable portraits, such as the one contained in Sebastiano Satta’s epic poem Sardinia barbara,295 where the description of a nocturnal gathering of bandits and the rallying cries of their leader before an attack was so striking as to inspire admiration.296 Travellers, too, felt the fascination exerted by these characters, whose sense of honour was the product of an explosive mixture of violence and religion, courage and cruelty.297 Their writings began to chronicle the derring290

Niceforo 1897: 46-47. Ibid., 45. 292 Pais Serra 1973: 169. 293 Leerssen 2007e: 334. Gramsci 1965: 431-432. Eleonora (1340-1404), regent of a Sardinian kingdom known as the Giudicato d’Arborea, is considered to be the most important woman in the island’s history. Her reign saw the promulgation of the Carta de Logu, an innovative legal code which remained in force in the Kingdom of Sardinia until 1827. 294 Costa 1897: 47-48; 52-53. 295 Among other things this famous Sardinian writer published the collection of poems Canti barbaricini (1910), in which he lays bare the rough side of Barbagian culture but is sympathetic to its outlaws (Paulis 2006: 322); new edition Satta 1996. 296 Nurra 1896: 84. 297 Smyth 1828: 144. 291

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do of remarkable bandit figures such as Nuoro’s Serra Sanna brothers, whose band featured the “ferocious” Pau and Lo Vicu, the “Herculean” Virdis and the proud Corbeddu;298 Peppe Bonu, no less chivalrous than the noblest hidalgos of Castile, forced into hiding by a false accusation and ready to kill himself rather than fall into his enemies’ hands;299 and the legendary brigand Mulas, resplendent in the scarlet costume of his native village of Oliena, renowned for his unerring aim with a rifle held in one outstretched arm at full gallop on horseback.300 Such men were credited with a chivalrous code of conduct according to which they would not attack an enemy who was travelling with his wife and children, considered sacred and untouchable,301 would refrain from fighting units of soldiers whom they outnumbered, and displayed staunch devotion to the person of the king;302 they were thus depicted as being imbued with great “gallantry”.303 Although a number of authors pointed out that the problem of the vendetta and banditry was receding and Sardinia’s fame as a land of outlaws no longer held true,304 by the end of the 19th century the exploits of these “super-bandits”305 were filling the national newspapers. In line with the public’s morbid interest in dark tales of adventure, such reports accentuated the primitive, savage and ferocious dimension in the interests of sensationalism. The power of the mass media and the consequences of the spread of news regarding their dealings with the law was not lost on the outlaws themselves. Tired of the falsehoods being spread about them, in 1894 three bandits, Derosas, Delogu and Angius, decided to contact two publicists from the Sassari journal Isola – Gastone Chiesi and Sebastiano Satta (mentioned above) – in order to give an interview in which they could tell their version of the truth.306 The record of the 298

Bechi 1997: 97; 174. Domenech 1867: 205; Tyndale 1849: I, 94. 300 Bechi 1997: 137. 301 Roissard de Bellet 1884: 93-94; Domenech 1867: 205; Tyndale 1849: I, 260. 302 Della Marmora 1839: I, 195, note 1; Bresciani 2001: 69. 303 Smyth 1828: 145. 304 Edwardes 1889: 33; Tennant 1885: 271; Roissard de Bellet 1884: 92-93. 305 Loi 2001: 94. 306 The interview first appeared in two numbers of Isola in 1894 and was then published in the booklet Tre banditi intervistati da due pubblicisti: un’intervista coi banditi Derosas, Delogu e Angius (Sassari: Tipografia Gallizzi, 1894); the booklet was subsequently re-published: Tre banditi: Derosas Angius e Delogu – intervistati 299

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interview, rich in food for thought, gives a clear idea of the way Sardinian banditry was viewed and how this viewpoint indiscriminately dominated the various forms of writing – literary fiction, essays and journalism alike. The first striking feature of the interview conducted by Chiesi and Satta is the basic contradiction which underpins it. On the one hand they confirm the image of the Sardinian bandit while on the other they provide a number of details that undermine it. One example is the discrepancy between the physical appearance of the three bandits and their clothes.307 Derosas, head of the band, is a “finelooking young man” – tall and sturdy, with dark skin and a black moustache. He wears his coat draped over his shoulders, a velvet jacket, boots and a watch. Delogu is shorter, thin, hooded and palefaced, while Angius is fat, sports a black beard and has sparkling, expressive eyes.308 Though different from each other, all three match the southern, Mediterranean type, but strangely none of them wears national costume, generally considered typical bandit apparel, and one of them even has a watch,309 a mark of modernity contrasting with the “primitive” and “troglodyte” labels for which Sardinians were renowned at the time.310 Yet their character description stands as a quintessence of the topos of the bandit in the collective imagination. The journalists regret that they lack the proper knowledge of psychology required to be able to classify “with scientific accuracy the type, the genre, the species of the abnormality predominant in each of them”,311 but attempt nonetheless to render it with language very similar to that used at the time by positivist anthropologists. Derosas is a splendid example of a criminal of passion, incapable of fully understanding the gravity of his misdeeds. His way of speaking and the pleasure he takes in recounting some of his crimes betray the absence of any feeling remotely connected to remorse, on the contrary

da due pubblicisti: Gastone Chiesi e Sebastiano Satta, preface by Vincenzo Soro (Cagliari: Edizioni della Fondazione Il Nuraghe, 1925). The latter edition was used in this research. For background details see ibid., 23. This interview has been analysed by Loi 2001: 94-98. 307 Loi 2001: 94. 308 Tre banditi 1925: 25-26. 309 Ibid., 37; 45. 310 Bechi 1997: 158. 311 Tre banditi 1925: 48, author’s italics.

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they give an idea of the “scapegrace and human beast” within him.312 Contrasting with this pride is his tenderness for his family and devotion to his friends; he looks upon his deeds not as crimes but as acts of true justice which, according to the two journalists, he describes as a “great hunting adventure”.313 Derosas may be considered better than a common murderer because his crimes are not common but bound to the code of the vendetta, though he remains “of abnormal character, that of a criminal, a human beast”.314 The representation of this figure evidently combines two tropes: the Romantic bandit driven outside the law in defence of his honour, and the Sardinian “born delinquent” produced by late 19th-century criminal sociology.315 The figure of the gentleman bandit also distinguishes one of the most successful works of the period, featuring Giovanni Tolu. Weary of the untrue stories told about his career as an outlaw,316 he followed the example of his three ‘colleagues’ and approached Enrico Costa, the foremost intellectual of the time, asking him to write his biography. The result was a phenomenally successful book about a bandit from another time, a man of honour, chivalrous and worthy of respect, a victim of injustice rather than a real evil-doer: Who is Giovanni Tolu? The son of humble Florinese farmers,317 full of intelligence and common sense but brought up in the way allowed by his time and his environment; a fugitive in the country after trying to take revenge on a bully who he thought had mistreated and derided him; wandering for thirty years from cliff to crag without a friend, without compassionate advice, without a word of comfort; living in solitude like a savage, or in the company of scoundrels from whom he could draw nothing but incitement to crime; hated by his enemies, surrounded by informers, pursued by the Carabinieri; caressed by the weak and the arrogant out of need or fear; madly glorified by common people; at times the target of excited curiosity, fatally corrupting; a mixture, then, of goodness and sadness, of generosity and ferocity, of faith and superstition, of wonderful wisdom and haughty intolerance,

312

Ibid. Ibid., 34. 314 Ibid., 49. 315 Orano 1896: 17; Niceforo 1897: 102-103. 316 Costa 1897: 6. 317 Florinas is a village in the province of Sassari. 313

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with no notion of the harm he did to himself and to others. italics)

318

(my

The presentation of Tolu contains a number of elements of the Romantic bandit representation and echoes characteristics of the portrait of Derosas, particularly in the description of the character, a mixture of contrasting vices and virtues, and the defence of honour as the trigger for the vendetta carried out to right real or alleged wrongs. Vendetta also lies at the origin of a wild and wandering life, lived without the comfort of a family and in utter diffidence towards other people. Costa presents an unfortunate anti-hero alone against the world, not a common criminal, and his book sets out to throw new light which will enable the reader to understand “the factors which drag a soul born good into perdition”.319 Marked by the rhythms of nature and the seasons, the shepherd’s life – and that of the outlaw – was characterised by long months of solitude. But the isolation and the need for independence intrinsic to the existence of the mountain nomad exerted a strong fascination on the collective imagination.320 Indeed an independent spirit was considered an essential feature in the nature of ancient Barbagians by virtue of their fierce resistance to any foreign yoke – they were renowned for having made the mountainous island centre their realm of freedom. Speaking of Aritzo and the Barbagia, Valery noted that “this heart of Sardinia has never been conquered, it is the island’s Massif Central. Neither the eagles of Rome nor Numidian chargers ever crossed these mountains, the ancient refuge of Sardinian 318

“Chi è Giovanni Tolu? Un figlio di umili agricoltori florinesi, pieno d’intelligenza e di buon senso, ma educato nei modi che i tempi e l’ambiente consentivano; datosi giovanissimo alla campagna, dopo aver tentato di vendicarsi di un prepotente, da cui si credette maltrattato e deriso; punto nell’amor proprio di marito; deluso negli affetti di famiglia; errante per trent’anni di balza in balza, senz’amici, senza un consiglio pietoso, senza una parola di conforto; vivente nella solitudine come un selvaggio, oppure in compagnia di malandrini, dai quali non poteva attingere che eccitamenti a delinquere; odiato dai nemici, circondato da spie, perseguitato dai carabinieri; carezzato da deboli e da prepotenti per bisogno o per paura; glorificato insanamente dal volgo; fatto segno talora ad una curiosità entusiastica, fatalmente corruttrice; un misto, insomma, di bontà e di tristizia, di generosità e di ferocia, di fede e di superstizione, di saggezza maravigliosa e d’intolleranza superba, senza neppure la coscienza del male che faceva agli altri ed a sè stesso.” (Costa 1897: 9). See also Vuillier 1893: 397. 319 Costa 1897: 10. 320 Valery 1837: 317-318.

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freedom”.321 Commentators agree in attributing moral superiority to the mountain people on the basis of their constant struggle in defence of freedom;322 despite formal union with Rome, the Sardinians had indeed stubbornly continued to rebel and fight the Roman armies.323 This innate propensity to rebellion was also to be seen in the outlaws: “the independence predicted by the oracle of Delphi to the race of Iolaus, preserved for untold centuries and through all political changes, has been maintained to the last by their direct descendants, the fuorusciti of Barbagia”.324 According to Pais Serra brigands conserved the atavistic trait of delinquency and descended, socially if not biologically, from the ancient Barbagians and nomadic shepherds.325 Positive scientists went further, discerning an unbroken thread which genetically linked the ancient Barbagian freedom fighters to contemporary shepherd(-bandit)s, their direct descendants by birthright. Mantegazza claimed to prove this by an analysis of the human types present on the island: the Barbagians were held to constitute one of the purest and most singular types, one in which the indigenous element had survived intact.326 The Barbagian shepherds thus represented the quintessence of original Sardinian identity, in its archaic and primitive nature, as displayed in their specific physical characteristics and their dress: “Those of the Gallura and Barbagia permit their hair to hang down loose over their shoulders, which, with their bushy beards, gives them a very ferocious aspect”.327 Wearing their long-wool fleeces (mastruca), the shepherds resembled ancient Barbarians,328 but their barbaric nature was confirmed by their actions: “[w]ith their long hair saturated and shining with lard, never washed themselves but on the 321

Valery 1837: 296 (“Ce coeur de la Sardaigne n’a jamais été conquis: c’est l’Auvergne de l’ile, et ni les aigles romaines ni les coursiers numides n’ont franchi ces montagnes, antique refuge de la liberté sarde”). 322 Tyndale 1849: II, 210; 321-322. 323 “Vain was it for the Romans to change their method of suppression. They hunted the Sardes, as if they were wild beasts. Yet though they deported them to Rome by the thousand and tens of thousands, they never succeeded in wholly enthralling the island. The mountaineers were then as independent as they were, strange to say, fifteen hundred years afterwards”: Edwardes 1889: 53-54. 324 Forester 1858: 356. 325 Pais Serra 1973: 171-172. 326 Mantegazza 1869: 78-79. 327 Smyth 1828: 161-162. 328 Vuillier 1893: 447.

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occasions of returning home for a festa; and if their ablutions were not made in one of their favourite streams, they would put their face and hands into the holy water of the village church, and after desecrating it with their filth, would drink it, imagining that it would be as beneficial in spiritual as in corporeal cleansing”.329 So exceptional were these men that when encountered in a group they might inspire a Spanish painter, the Dutch painter Van Dijck or Walter Scott;330 the fame enjoyed by some, defined as “wild beasts in human form” was frightening.331 Looking at the photographs in a collection of wanted criminals, Giulio Bechi noted “goatish beards, dishevelled manes framing faces ferocious and brutish, dullwitted and sinister, whose sullen eyes flashed with crime”.332 Those men were the descendants of a stock marked by genetic inferiority, “the sad flower of degeneration blooming on primitive barbarity, fertilised in the manure of poverty; all the vehemence of their race and their instinctive passions, fermented unto paroxysm, passed across those faces in grins of lust, scowls of hatred, glares of vendetta”,333 even though “here and there stood out a splendid specimen of the Sardinian race. The proud head of a man in his fifties – scored with wrinkles, bushy eyebrows surmounting shining eyes, a flowing beard, berrita falling picturesquely over his ear – offered one of those superb models that our artists seek in vain in the dreams of fantasy”.334 The stories told by the travellers were full of astonishment, but the drawings and etchings that often accompanied them may easily be imagined to have excited even more wonder. The portrait of two old men in the village of Sorso and some male types from Fonni are striking cases in point.335 But nothing brought the primitivist perspective to life like the portrait of a shepherd decked out in his mastruca, boots, white trousers and, of course, his rifle.336 The individual in question is seen from behind, to display the details of his outlandish clothes, and shows a hirsute, almost animal-like creature in a crouching position. The view of Sardinian shepherds as inferior 329

Tyndale 1849: II, 268. Jourdan 1861: 18. Tyndale 1849: I, 98. Ibid., 99. 331 Bechi 1997: 189. 332 Ibid., 100. 333 Ibid. 334 Bechi 1997: 100-101. 335 Vuillier 1893: 390 and 461. 336 Vuillier 1893: 445. 330

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beings is best captured in descriptions featuring comparisons with the animal kingdom, in which bandits become steel-hocked cork-shod beasts able to leap on to rocks like mouflons or can, in the case of Lo Vicu, “give a tiger’s spring”.337 The army expedition to round them up was a “big game hunt” and the “beasts” surprised in their sleep “show their wild staring faces”.338 The beastly, primitive character of the Sardinians is also revealed in their amusements, as in the description of a group of men playing Morra (a game played with the hands, not unlike stone-paper-scissors): “a strange scene, wild even; these roughlooking, furrow-browed, bright-eyed men, wearing animal skins, shouted hoarsely like savages, moving and gesticulating tensely in thick smoke where some of them half-appeared and the others, barely visible, jerked about like fantastic shadows”.339 Lastly, the conviction that the inferiority of the Barbagians was genetically ingrained found confirmation in psycho-physical conditions such as timoria, a nervous trembling and state of panic afflicting “Barbaricini flesh” caused by bad weather, shivers, fever and any other disease which struck a constitution already weak.340 Despite all the negative associations, the image of the wild and barbaric race found its counterpoint in the topos of primitivism understood as a value. From this viewpoint Sardinians – simple but authentic and vigorous, with their own ethos – embodied an ideal of nobility deriving from the state of nature, free of all affectation and thus radically different from that of modern European man. Developed in Europe on the model of the ‘noble savage’ attributed to Rousseau, this attitude basically stood as the ‘kind’ face of imperialism.341 The duplicity of the position is analysed in these observations on Sardinian primitiveness: They’re primitive, what can you do? They are primitive and they are poor – is it their fault? Shut in by the “wild sea”, amid these forests and this tragic solitude where there comes no echo of the distant 337

Bechi 1997: 180 and 182. Ibid., 182. 339 Vuillier 1893: 472. 340 Tyndale 1849: II, 246; Tennant 1885: 188: “a violent panic or nervous trembling, with utter prostration of strength and spirits, no doubt arising from intemperie or malarious fever”. Della Marmora (1860: I, 433) observed cases of cretinism in the island’s mountain areas, attributing them to the drinking of melt water from the winter snows. 341 Leerssen 2007i: 407; Idem 2007d: 325. 338

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world; driven by that proud ideal that forever sings in their souls; brought up to that One and Triune bond: horse, woman, rifle – which means movement, love, strength – what do you expect them to be? What do you expect them to become? For them history stopped in the Middle Ages: all that religion of the oath and hatred, that hospitality come what may, that fanatical superstition, that cult of the woman, that thirst for adventure, those blood feuds... is a chivalry that through its romantic veil turns murderers into heroes, robbery into military exploits and tournament jousts, just as it turned a fish-seller into Don Quixote’s Dulcinea del Toboso.342

The primitive-modern contrast thus fed on nostalgia for a natural state which had remained genuine, untouched by the affectation typical of modern times, whereby approval was expressed for “these picturesque long-hairs, proud-muscled and hot-blooded” and contempt for “the contrived little souls and the spinelessness of our ‘intellectuals’”.343 A return to those origins was thus even considered desirable: “All that may be barbaric, but once in a while it does us good to be a bit barbaric again!”.344 It should be remembered, though, that the revaluation of the primitive Sardinian character was also promoted by Sardinian intellectuals, who resorted to the tropes of primitivism and exoticism to ennoble the island’s cultural identity, as in the following passage from Grazia Deledda’s novel Elias Portolu: We’re men, we are, not fresh cheese babies like the mainlanders! What are they? Men made of fresh cheese! Try and get them to lasso an unbroken colt, or catch a bull, or fire a blunderbuss! They’ll die of fright first. [...] My sheep are braver than them, so help me God.345

As these pages have attempted to show, the literary representation of the Sardinian character involved the synergetic combination of various stimuli deriving from images well known in European culture. Essentially identified with the sheep-rearing people from the island’s mountainous centre, Sardinians appeared in the popular imagination as a striking example of a primitive, wild nation in keeping with the ‘exotic’ tribes that explorers had progressively brought to the attention of the western world. The shepherd-bandit was also considered to be 342

Bechi 1997: 167-168. Ibid., 169. 344 Ibid., 88. 345 Deledda 1971d: 14; quoted by Paulis 2006: 318. 343

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the most powerful embodiment of Sardinian identity, in which at least three cultural models were combined: the classically-derived representation of the shepherd as a simple, pure creature living at one with nature; that of the romantic bandit, with his explosive mixture of honour, vendetta and grand passion; the topos of the Sardinian delinquent after Niceforo’s model, the descendant of genetically inferior stock. Nineteenth-century literature gave the new century a paradigm of attributes considered fixed and unchangeable in the Sardinian people, whose force was soon to be unleashed on the screen. It was above all the shepherd-bandit who would lend himself as the emblem of an alleged Sardinian identity no longer just narrated but powerfully re-created by the visions of the new art. Women Physical Appearance and National Character In literature observations on Sardinian women are concentrated essentially on their physical appearance, how they dress, their morals and their everyday customs. The characteristics observed in them are often contrasting and they are judged, as may be expected, in what today might be considered male chauvinist terms. There is no lack of appreciative notes made by travellers, almost all male, and lengthy descriptions of women in their cheerfulness, beauty and grace, but also discomposure, captured as they are in various moments of their daily lives – engaged in domestic chores or intervals of relaxation.346 Upon his arrival on the island to study its birdlife, Della Marmora was happy to record that the women in Cagliari seemed to him like turtledoves perched on the wrought iron balconies in the town centre.347 Aside from the predominantly male standards of judgement, the depictions of Sardinian women betray the taste for the primitive and exotic characteristic of 19th-century European culture. In addition to listing the virtues of the island’s women, travellers’ descriptions make frequent mention of their defects and of everyday behaviour patterns showing signs of their belonging to an archaic and savage culture. Some writers acknowledged their charm, often exalted by sumptuous 346

Smyth 1828: 169; Anonymous 1831: 43; Della Marmora 1839: I, 186; 196-197; Idem 1860: II, 41; Roissard de Bellet 1884: 75; Edwardes 1889: 123; 203-204; Vuillier 1893: 382; 393-394; Bechi 1997: 114. 347 Della Marmora 1860, I, 3-4. See also Mantegazza 1869: 21.

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clothing and displaying rather too much to male eyes, which sat oddly with a demure character, while others saw their explicit speech and dress as unmistakable signs of lack of innocence.348 Travellers’ writings thus rendered an image of Sardinian beauty at once demure and provocative. Distinguished among female islanders were the women of Cabras, who were celebrated for their exceptional beauty and full bosoms349 – with which some 19th-century travel accounts were utterly obsessed – whose charms recall the Mediterranean model of women.350 In accordance with the Southern trope, this Mediterranean characteristic is more marked precisely in women in the island’s south, who were observed to display a greater “voluptuous fullness of development”.351 Observing class differences between Sardinian women, at the end of the century Tennant penned a portrait of those belonging to the upper classes which reflects opinions repeatedly expressed in previous literature: Of the Sardinian ladies it is impossible to speak in terms of too high praise; their unaffected simplicity, their continual desire to please, and their genial liveliness and cheerfulness, combined with a most contented domesticity, and above all, their extreme kindness and attention on all occasions – and especially in times of sorrow and sickness – endear them by ties far more affectionate and enduring than those of mere beauty or accomplishments; though these latter attributes are seldom wanting. Their elegant form and graceful carriage, with dark brown complexions, glossy raven hair, and deep sparkling black eyes, glancing from behind coquettish fans, combine to render them irresistibly charming.352 348

Bresciani 2001: 160; Vuillier 1893: 382. Smyth 1828: 169; Valery 1837: 295; Tyndale 1849: II, 272. 349 See Valery 1837: 135-137; Costa 2007: 5-7; Della Marmora 1860: I, 388 and 563. See also Mantegazza 1869: 87. Though interpreted critically, the renowned beauty of the women of Cabras provides the starting point for Enrico Costa’s novel La Bella di Cabras (2007: 5-11). On Sardinian women’s breasts see the same author: Costa carried out an analysis of the tradition of studies on the origin of Sardinian costume in his Album di costumi sardi (Cagliari: Editore Ditta G. Dessì, 1897), reprinted by the same publisher in 1913 under the title Costumi sardi. The quotations are from the latter version (1913: 19-27). 350 Valery 1837: 135-137. 351 Tennant 1885: 221. 352 Ibid., 225. See also how Anonymous (1831: 45) describes the behaviour of Sardinian ladies.

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He also admitted, however, that the accusations of immorality levelled at lower-class women were well grounded, since they often lived as concubines.353 A contribution to this unsavoury reputation had been made by none other than Dante, who in a controversial passage of the Divine Comedy made explicit mention of the women of the Barbagia and their alleged habit of exposing their breasts.354 Some interpreted this as the author’s wish to emphasise their lack of modesty; Valery was of this opinion and Tyndale, though acknowledging the difference between Dante’s time and his own, stated that the women he saw were no paragons of virtue because of the persistence of concubinage.355 Arming himself with more common sense, Della Marmora imputed a different meaning to the passage: the women in question ought to cover themselves up better since they lived in a cold mountain area.356 Corbetta considered Dante’s judgement to be defamatory, and at the end of the century Edwardes noted that Sardinian women had been criticised since antiquity for their customs and the impropriety of their clothing, but admitted that the brazenness of feminine garments such as the bodice could astonish a British observer.357 The strictures recorded by writers since ancient times, however, were not present in Arquer’s work. Rather than mentioning any lack of modesty on the part of Sardinian women, he noted a clear difference between the highly chaste dress of country women, who eschewed any showiness, and that of their urban counterparts, who misused their great wealth for the sake of ostentation.358

353

“The accounts of the morality of the women in the lower classes are conflicting, but there is little doubt that many live in a state of concubinage till they can afford to marry, and no notice is taken of this condition, unless the woman is deserted by her lover, when the relations not only wreak their vengeance on him, but she is herself looked upon as a degraded person. In all cases, the men are extremely jealous, but very unnecessarily so, for, whether mistresses or wives, the women are seldom faithless” (Tennant 1885: 226). 354 “Che la Barbagia di Sardegna assai / Nelle femmine sue è più pudica / Che la Barbagia dov’io la lasciai”: Dante, Divina Commedia, Purgatorio, canto XXIII, v. 94. 355 Valery 1837: 295. Tyndale 1849: II, 273-274. 356 Della Marmora 1860, I, 388-391 and 30. 357 Corbetta 1877: 409. Edwardes 1889: 12. 358 Arquer 2007: 40: “Foeminae rusticorum valde honestae sunt in vestitu omnem excludentes pompam; at urbanae divitiis abundantes abutuntur illis in magnam superbiam.” (“The women of country folk are extremely modest in their dress, since they fight shy of any showiness; in towns, by contrast, women who are well off abuse their wealth out of pure ostentation”).

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One factor which contributed to the perception of feminine charm was the richness and variety of the national costume,359 which inspired Mantegazza to observe that “almost every Sardinian village dresses its women differently and the world’s most Titianesque palette would barely suffice to render pictures so rich in colour and fantastic combinations”.360 In the village of Sennori, province of Sassari, Vuillier was stunned by the spectacle of a group of traditionallydressed women leaving church after Sunday Mass. Fetching widows with sad, gentle eyes, in black pleated dresses folded up over their heads in the island manner were followed by a gaggle of women and girls extravagantly decked out in an array of bright colours.361 Their chaste gaze contrasted starkly with the flimsy camisoles covering their bosoms, which gave them “a beauty pure and disturbing”.362 Not content with a written account of that surprise encounter, Vuillier recorded it in a drawing showing a group of women walking down the church steps. Almost completely covered by traditional costume, of those women all that remains on view is their faces and folded arms; only the widow in the foreground casts a languid gaze towards the observer, while the others in the group seem surprised at the sight of the stranger. He brought his account to a wistful conclusion: “This surge of bright colours and young faces disappeared all too soon, like the charming evocation of a time that is no more”.363 The description of Sardinian women thus became an opportunity to reiterate the image of a different and ancient world: in the splendour of their traditional costumes those figures were the personification of an outdated civilisation. Observation of the island’s lifestyles also produced reflections which helped to form an archaic and Orientalised – that is to say exotic – image of its women and thus reinforced a range of tropes. Foreign observers were struck by the peculiar habit of treating women in Sardinia as though they were slaves.364 Among other things, they did not usually take part in banquets to which guests were invited, and although this was a custom found in Oriental societies it

359

See Anonymous 1831: 47. Mantegazza 1869: 104-105. 361 Vuillier 1893: 382. 362 Ibid. 363 Ibid. 364 Smyth 1828: 169; cfr. Norris 2003: 117. 360

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was not considered grounds for hasty critical conclusions.365 Despite the criminal appearance of many Sardinians, Buxton considered them to be civilised, although he could not fail to note certain features which were inconsistent with the idea of advanced development, such as the fact that “women seem to be kept in almost Oriental seclusion”.366 Determinist scholars thought that such practices were clear signs of backwardness: “women are considered as they were by ancient tribes, and are forced to carry out the most menial tasks even when they are well-off. This custom of keeping women down is characteristic of primitive times”.367 However, customs must have evolved over time, since Della Marmora and Mantegazza observed that previously women would hide when a stranger arrived, whereas “now they have become more human and perhaps the men have made themselves less jealous”.368 Nonetheless, Sardinian women continued to be subjected to excessive segregation by their men369 and according to Corbetta they “are not shown at all or talked about, even though I know there are wives and daughters. A usage not new to me, it always seems odd”.370 Not knowing the reason, he speculated as to the explanation: it might be the women’s extremely reserved nature, a belief in their inferiority, the extreme jealousy of their men or perhaps their lower level of education, but the fact was that Sardinian women had simple, homely habits.371 Literary sources generally posited a direct link between women’s reservedness, taken to the extent of living confined to the home and never exposing themselves to any gaze, especially a male one, and the Sardinian custom of avenging any offence with blood, including the slightest attempt to win the attention or even just the smile of a woman spoken for, or even still unengaged. The sources depict the Sardinians’ extreme jealousy and relations between the sexes obsessively dominated by rigid codes of behaviour designed to 365

Smyth 1828: 169. Cabiddu 1982: 142-143; ibid., 142. 367 Niceforo 1901: 598. Smyth, however, did not think that a people which kept its women segregated could be defined as primitive (1828: 169). Other travellers found evidence to the contrary. Maltzan (1869: 266), for one, considered Sardinian women’s habituation to hard work a female virtue typical of savage peoples. 368 Della Marmora 1839: I, 192, 197. Mantegazza 1869: 106-107. 369 Ibid. 370 Corbetta 1877: 451; cfr. Jourdan 1861: 16. 371 Corbetta 1877: 102-103. 366

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safeguard women’s honour and therefore that of their families by the hand of the men whose protection they were subjected to – be they husband, father or brothers.372 Such a model of jealousy frequently led to a vendetta, as witnessed by the bandit Giovanni Tolu; in his autobiography written by Enrico Costa, he dwells at length on his behaviour as a man of honour towards the girls at the festivity of N.S. di Bonuighinu at Mara, but also on his conflicts with his wife, stemming from behaviour considered dishonourable in a woman.373 However, the most important facet of the representation of women in the sources is their appointment as custodians of the Sardinian people’s memory, resting on the conviction that there are basic affinities between Sardinian customs and those of ancient populations. A crucial reference for the literature of the time was the work of Bresciani, whose influence is perceptible even in Sardinian literary production in the second half of the 19th century. His research set out to demonstrate the similarities between the island’s customs and those of the most ancient peoples, emphasising the archaic, Homeric character of Sardinian society. In this regulated world an essential role was played by the figure of the mother, who, in a role comparable to that of women in Genesis and the Odyssey, was the keeper of the house;374 her realm was the kitchen, the physical and symbolic place in which she expressed her ability as a housewife, performing ancient but essential acts such as making bread and weaving.375 Above all, as a mother it was she who passed on the values and traditions of the community to the next generations and was thus the repository and the guarantor of national identity.376 Mention should also be made of how women were represented in the studies produced by determinist anthropologists. They presented the Sardinian woman as the mirror-image of her male counterpart, and as such she was a concentration of a series of defects resulting from the genetic configuration of the island race. Wherever the men were 372

Smyth 1828: 170; cfr. Della Marmora 1839: I, 192; Norris 2003: 132. Murder to avenge an offence in matters of the heart was a fundamental trope in the representation of Mediterranean society, as exemplified in Verga’s story Cavalleria rusticana, subsequently reworked in Mascagni’s book of the same name and in Bizet’s Carmen. This type of vendetta, however, was more widespread in Sicily than in Sardinia. Costa 1897: 68; 116-123; 198-199. 374 Bresciani 2001: 170. 375 Della Marmora 1839: I, 197. 376 Bresciani 2001: 169-171. 373

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less civilised, their women, too, manifested the signs of extreme moral and genetic corruption. Discussing morals in Sardinia, a subject he considered difficult to understand and explain, Orano noted that there were villages “where women give themselves with the utmost wild abandon, knowing nothing of what is evil, with no idea of any morality. There are villages where there is a sanctity of the family which would astonish the visitor with the strictest scruples in terms of morality and decency”.377 It was the women of certain villages in the Barbagia, such as Orgosolo, Fonni and Mamoiada – all of which fell in what Niceforo called the Delinquent Zone – which came in for the sharpest disapproval. The looseness of these women was not only a result of environmental conditions, the climate and custom – race was probably the most decisive factor of all.378 Thus, if it was the case that “where women are more beautiful, the lower they are on the moral scale”,379 the conclusion was that in Sardinia “there is a laxity of behaviour beyond imagination. In the province of Nuoro, as I said, is its maximum. Its minimum is in Gallura and some parts of the Campidano near Cagliari”.380 Women provided further ‘proof’ of the theory which identified the Sardinian race as genetically inferior and morally deplorable. One of the most interesting analyses of the Sardinian female character is provided by an exceptional representative of the category itself: Grazia Deledda. As already observed, the portrayal of the family and heroines in her works expresses a complex, problematic vision of social and cultural reality which goes far beyond a generic characterisation of Sardinia as a primitive and archaic world.381 The plots of her best novels reveal the island in a state of crisis, and thus at a time of transformation for traditional roles such as that of women. The conflict between traditional culture (su connottu) and modernity is exemplified by the often painful decisions made by the female protagonists, the strong and purposeful characters who enliven the best pages of Deledda’s narratives. Yet in her religious vision redemption is possible only through adherence to a lifestyle as morally upright as the traditional one. This tension between custom and the advent of the new in the characterisation of the female profile may be 377

Orano 1896: 60. Ibid., 61. 379 Ibid. 380 Ibid., 63. 381 Paulis 2006: 287-311. 378

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found in writings committed to paper before she became famous, such as her correspondence with Angelo De Gubernatis. In a letter written in 1892 she announced her intention to write an article on the Sardinian woman, who in her opinion had not changed since the time of Eleonora d’Arborea.382 She said that she wanted to keep to what she knew best, that is, modern women, “real Sardinian women, those of the central area, of the mountains, the women of the fur-clad Sardinians immortalised by Cicero’s condemnation” (my italics).383 In line with this intent, in her essay La donna in Sardegna (1893) she analyses the figure of the common woman and her role in Sardinian society, attributing to her sister-islanders “a material and spiritual physiognomy different from that of the rest of Italian women”.384 Her argument is based on two assumptions essential to the discourse on Sardinian character: the diversity of the Sardinian people compared to other ethnic groups and the identification of the most authentic Sardinian identity with the pastoral world of the mountains, therefore of the Barbagia. In this she falls into a clear contradiction in taking her model as Eleonora d’Arborea, who came from the fertile Oristano plain, not the mountainous interior. Yet Deledda’s passionate identification with Eleonora, to whom she devoted a number of her writings, was part of what had become an established cultural tradition which perceived her as the personification of the Sardinian people and their ambitions for self-government and nationhood. In her analysis of the lower-class Sardinian woman, Deledda describes her as “ignorant and relatively unintelligent”, but recognises in her a character which mirrors that of males in terms of intensity of feeling, including hatred and fierce enmity:385 she “conserves noble and delicate instincts, harbours thoughts of supreme kindness and in the unending darkness of her wretched existence loves and hates like no other woman on earth”.386 The fact that she is devoutly religious does not prevent her from being open, cheerful and carefree, and she often breaks into song to express the joy of love and grief at the loss 382

Deledda 2007: 13. The article was published on March 15th 1893 in Natura ed arte (8): 750-762 (Deledda 2007: 16), now reprinted in Deledda 2011a: 250-263. 383 Ibid. 384 Deledda wrote that Sardinian women, above all those in the island’s interior, had conserved “through the centuries the character, the physique and the psychological passions of antiquity” (Deledda 2011b: 251). 385 Deledda 2011b: 250; 252. 386 Ibid., 251.

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of loved ones.387 Deledda’s model was consistent, as has been observed, with that of the traditional woman whose role is confined chiefly to the home, but it also chimed with contemporary theories which placed song and poetry among the most potent manifestations of the spirit of primitive peoples. This view was developed in depth not long afterwards by Paolo Orano in his controversial work Psicologia della Sardegna, where traditional dance and song were identified as a peculiar expression of Sardinian atavism.388 However, popular poetry and its relationship with the landscape and the Sardinian character were also discussed at length by intellectuals such as Max Leopold Wagner, whose admiration for Deledda’s work led him to state that he identified the poetic imagination that she recreated with Sardinia as a whole, as we will see in the next chapter. Another factor prominent in Deledda’s portrait is Sardinian women’s maternal vocation, as manifested in their boundless love for their children, but the private sphere of the affections is in all events merged with the mother’s social and cultural role, since she has the task of preserving Sardinian traditions and passing them down to the new generations.389 Although the traditional profile was still predominant among the young women of her day, Deledda observed in them the ominous signs of an incipient corruption, caused by the change and progress being brought to the island – she perceived these as a disease which could jeopardise the morality of the common woman.390 Even those belonging to the middle class and the nobility, though conserving the “atavism of the imagination and psyche typical of the ancient Sardinian woman”, were being civilised and modernised, and Deledda hoped that such changes would not endanger their ancient honesty and pride.391 In addition to the general characteristics common to all Sardinians, Deledda illustrates some of the differences between them, in particular highlighting how various types of landscapes are reflected in the female character:392 “each of them reflects the environment in which she lives, the costume she wears, the landscape

387

Ibid., 252; 260-262. See in this chapter, the section Charachter: A People in “Perpetual Celebration”. 389 Ibid., 251; 256-257. 390 Ibid., 258-259. 391 Ibid., 262; 263. 392 Ibid., 252-256. 388

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that surrounds her”.393 The range of female profiles identified by Deledda, comprising facets of the Sardinian character as well as local characteristics, is part of the tradition of thought which connected anthropology to geography and climatology.394 From that tradition came the perspective with which Deledda’s ‘inner gaze’ habitually interpreted her island world. In physical terms the Sardinian woman is characterised as typically dark – a fact put down to the various phases of foreign domination, mostly coming from the south;395 fair skin and blond hair are a rarity.396 The result is a “bizarre mixture of Latin profiles and Arab complexion, and Andalusian eyes and hair”.397 This aesthetic type may be traced to the southern and eastern Mediterranean model, which recalls instinctive, passionate and violent races. Not by chance does Deledda observe that certain remarkable Sardinian beauties “with eastern eyes” were at the centre of ferocious hatreds and vendettas.398 Passing from the general to the particular, in her correspondence with De Gubernatis she penned a self-portrait. Though declaring that she bore no resemblance to other Barbagian girls because she considered herself entirely modern and did not live in accordance with the ideals typical of her environment,399 she did ascribe to herself certain characteristics considered peculiar to the Sardinians. She admitted to conserving something “wild and characteristic”,400 and in other letters described herself as “small and wild”,401 not “wicked, but as with all the individuals in [her] race, still half-wild”.402 She saw in herself a “basis of pride”403 which prevented Sardinians from being completely good and, broadening her scope to all her countrywomen, drew a portrait of the Sardinian female which perfectly mirrored the male image:

393

Ibid., 252. Beller 2007b: 298-303. 395 Deledda 2011b: 259. 396 Ibid. 397 Ibid. 398 Ibid., 260. 399 Deledda 2007: 13-14. 400 Ibid., 13. 401 Ibid., 336. 402 Ibid., 341. 403 Ibid. 394

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For that matter all we Sardinian woman are thus made of sinews and fantasy, haughty to the point of vendetta and passionate to the point of sacrifice.404

Eleonora d’Arborea as a Symbol of National Identity In a population long considered to be without a history there was no room for heroes, nor, as a consequence, could there be any room for heroines. The one exception, whose historical reputation enjoyed a remarkable revival in the 19th century, was Eleonora, regent of the kingdom of Arborea in the late 14th century. Eleonora’s success as a historical figure began to feature in literature at least as early as the 16th century,405 by which time she was frequently cited for her wisdom as the driving force behind the Carta de Logu, the codified law of Arborea which was extended to the entire Kingdom of Sardinia and remained in force until 1827. In fact Eleonora had been mentioned a century earlier by a number of authors, whose judgement varied according to their personal fealty to the Aragonese throne – the greater their support for Spanish domination, the harsher their criticism of her.406 Official Aragonese historian Gerolamo Zurita (1510-1580), for one, considered her an out-and-out rebel, holding her responsible for the war against the Crown of Aragon.407 An analysis of 16th- and 17thcentury sources, however, shows a growing appreciation of her historical standing, to the extent that she became a 19th-century

404

Deledda 2007: 131. Pili 1991: 135-196. The article contains an analysis of published and unpublished sources dating from the 14th to the 18th century. 406 Pili 1991: 140: an important exception was Sigismondo Arquer, whose Sardiniae brevis historia et descriptio makes no mention of her, even though the Carta de Logu and her husband Brancaleone Doria are cited. Pili (1991: 140-141) observes a difference in attitudes towards Eleonora according to the geographical origins of the authors. Those from the Cagliari area were generally closer to the Spanish court and their works reflect that loyalty. Prevalent in authors from the Capo di Sopra was a “feeling of belonging to the island” which usually resulted in more favourable judgements. 407 Pili 1991: 142-143. Other 16th-century authors produced very different comments. Gerolamo Olives in his Commentaria et glossa in cartam de logu, Madrid, 1567, the object of a number of subsequent reprints (Pili 1991: 144, nota 35), was highly appreciative of Eleonora’s legislative work, defining it “excellentissima princeps (sic)” (ibid., 145). In his De Rebus Sardois Giovanni Francesco Fara repeatedly acknowledged that for a woman she had an extraordinary ability to govern (ibid., 150151). 405

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romantic myth.408 Among the 18th-century authors who made a decisive contribution to Eleonora’s literary fame, Roberto Pili makes particular mention of Francesco Cetti and Matteo Madao. In the first volume of Storia naturale di Sardegna (1774-1778), written by Jesuit mathematician and naturalist Francesco Cetti (1726-1788), sent to teach at the University of Sassari under king of Sardinia Charles Emmanuel III, she was described for the first time as a “heroine”.409 Admiration for the medieval princess is even more marked in the writings of Matteo Madao (1723-1800). In the pages he devoted to her in his Dissertazioni storiche he dubbed her the island’s “wise heroine”410 who had the merit of compiling “by herself a legal code [...] full of equity and discretion”.411 Thus arose the myth of Eleonora d’Arborea the wise sovereign and expert lawmaker which was passed down to 19th-century Sardinian literature and travel writings about the island. It is clear why Eleonora’s name appeared so regularly in the writings of 19th-century travellers. Smyth and Valery – of whom the latter was cited by Della Marmora – recorded the legendary status attributed to this sovereign for her achievement of codifying all the civil, criminal and rural legislation of her kingdom in a single work of fundamental significance in medieval law.412 Della Marmora included in his notes the fulsome praise devoted to her by historian Pietro Martini (1800-1866), thus falling into the trap of the Carte d’Arborea,

408

Ibid., 138. Cetti 2000: 197. In the appendix to the volume Cetti described Eleonora as “Sardinian heroine, sovereign of the Giudicato di Arborea, Queen Eleonora” (Pili 1991: 193). 410 Matteo Madao, Dissertazioni storiche apologetiche, critiche delle sarde antichità, Cagliari, 1792 (quoted by Pili 1991: 194, note 210; 195). 411 Pili 1991: 194. Madao started his discussion of Eleonora in his Dissertazioni from the strictures on Sardinia expressed by a Swedish author, Jacob Jorna Bjoernstaehl (1731-1779) following his visit to the island (Pili 1991: 194, note 211): Idem, Briefe seinen ausländischen Reisen an den Königlichen Bibliothekar C.C. Gjörwell in Stockholm. Aus dem Schwedischen übersetzt von Just. Ernst. Groskurd (Leipzig und Rostock, bey Johann Christian Koppe, 1780-1783). This work was soon translated: Lettere ne’ suoi viaggj stranieri di Giacomo Giona Bjoernstaehl professore di filosofia in Upsala scritte al signor Gjorwell bibliotecario regio in Stoccolma tradotte dallo svedese in tedesco da Giusto Ernesto Groskurd e dal tedesco in italiano recate da Baldassardomenico Zini di Val di Non (Poschiavo: Ambrosioni Giuseppe), 17821787. 412 Smyth 1828: 36-37. Valery 1837: 124-125. Della Marmora 1860: I, 538-543. 409

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in which the regent is presented in an even more glowing light.413 Eleonora’s fame, however, was not the result of a desire to revere the fairer sex as such, it stemmed rather from a wish to identify her with the attributes generally ascribed to wise and valiant monarchs. According to Tyndale, Eleonora was to be considered among the most illustrious women ever to have ascended a throne.414 Towards the end of the century Vuillier made reference to her, quoting Valery, and Edwardes mentioned her briefly.415 In the writings of 19th-century travellers the figure of Eleonora stood as an exceptional case of the Sardinian female model, worthy of note because she was prepared to put her duties as ruler and the interests of her subjects before her personal feelings, thus donning the mantle of power that was typically male.416 By virtue of such behaviour she went beyond the limits imposed by feminine fragility and was thus able to enter the Empyrean of Sardinian popular mythology. It was no accident that she was the subject of the first historical novel (1847) by a Sardinian author, Leonora d’Arborea by Vittorio Angius.417 And when Deledda published La donna in Sardegna her very first words were found to be devoted to Eleonora d’Arborea, as was only natural, she said, when writing on the model of womanhood. Echoing the words of Carlo Cattaneo, she described her as “the most splendid female figure Italian history has ever had, including the history of ancient Rome”.418 This primacy was based on her personal qualities; she was a “queen, a warrior, a stateswoman, a lawgiver”, able like a “glorious sun” to shine her light on “all the dark corners of our sad and unacknowledged homeland history”.419 Eleonora’s fame undoubtedly dated back to medieval times, since legend and popular tradition hallowed the profound sense of justice which made her a severe figure, but she was also revered for her astuteness, intelligence, magical powers and remarkable physical

413

Della Marmora 1860: I, 153-156; Martini 1859. On Pietro Martini see Dizionario Bibliografico degli Italiani, vol. 71 (2008). 414 Tyndale 1849: II, 346. 415 Vuillier 1893: 418. Edwardes 1889: 84. 416 Mantegazza 1869: 49-50. 417 Vittorio Angius, Leonora d’Arborea o scene sarde degli ultimi lustri del secolo XIV. See Paulis 2006: 211 and Marci 2006: 218-221. See also Spano 1877. 418 Deledda 2011b: 250. 419 Ibid.

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strength.420 Hers was female portrait, then, characterised in literature and in folklore by a combination of qualities, some of which are usually ascribed to men in positions of authority and power. Her femininity was revealed above all in her role as a mother, in the unbounded love for her children and the jealous defence of the name and traditions of her people – characteristics which, as has been observed, Deledda considered typical of Sardinian women. In the Sardinian popular imagination Eleonora was thus a fusion of the essence of the female and the male: the model of traditional motherhood as a vestal and guardian of Sardinian culture, and the political aspiration to self-government for the Sardinian nation which in the 19th century burgeoned on the island in the wake of its cultural nationalism. Despite the reverence in which he was held by 19th-century writers, Eleonora never became a female model of Sardinian identity. It was common women – the icons of the island’s ‘Homeric’ culture and custodians of memory extolled by Bresciani, living, like Penelope, in the shadow of their men and rearing their children according to traditional values – who caught the attention of the men travelling around an island they considered as a fossilised relic. It should also be remembered that in anthropological terms the woman in traditional Sardinian society played a primary role at the crucial points of the life cycle: in addition to being the bearer of life as a mother, it was she who accompanied the deceased on his departure with the rite of weeping.421 Symbolically the woman and human life here came to coincide, and by extension the identity of the Sardinian people was encapsulated in the icon of the mother. Having been amply explored in 19th-century literature, this powerful figure inspired subsequent writers and film-makers who, as we shall see, turned it into one of the most important tropes in the contemporary image of Sardinia. Character Following the analysis of the forms of representation of the people of Sardinia and their island, attention will now focus on the features of everyday life and customs which took on the role of topoi of Sardinian identity in the 19th-century literary tradition. 420 421

Turchi 1986: 177-188. See Bresciani 2001: 395 and foll., and Deledda 2011b: 262.

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A People in “Perpetual Celebration”422 As early as the time of writing his Sardiniae brevis historia et descriptio, Sigismondo Arquer had identified festivities, singing and dancing as salient features in the life of the Sardinian community, insights into the feelings of a people which expressed itself through deeds and rituals in keeping with its traditions and common values. Cum rustici diem festum alicuius sancti celebrant, audita missa in ipsius sancti templo tota reliquia die et nocte saltant in templo, prophana cantant, choreas viri cum foeminis ducunt, porcos, arietes et armenta mactant magnaque laetitia in honorem sancti vescuntur carnibus illis. Sunt etiam multi qui pecus aliquod saginant in honorem certi alicuius sancti ut illud in fano eius potissimum in sylvis extructo et festa die devorent; et si familia minor fuerit ad esum pecoris, convocant et alios ad convivium illud quod in fano celebrant ne quid residui maneat.423

Arquer’s words found full confirmation in subsequent literature.424 Festivities were the focus of great interest from the earliest travel writings, whose authors were struck by the islanders’ passion for the celebrations which brought them together – they did not fail to remark on their importance and profound meaning.425 There were two types of festivity: general ones, those common to all Catholics, and local ones, held in honour of a specific saint in a particular village or parish. The former type were considered similar to the celebrations held by Sicilians or other Italians.426 In a general sense Sardinians displayed the religious faith combined with superstition peculiar to the Catholic tradition in the South. European visitors saw the bond between popular culture and Catholicism as one of the clearest signs of the 422

Valery 1837: 226. Arquer 2007: 38: “When country folk celebrate a saint’s day, after hearing Mass in the church bearing his name, for the rest of the day and night they dance in the holy place, sing profane songs, conduct mixed dances (men and women together), sacrifice pigs, sheep and oxen in the utmost good cheer and eat those meats in the saint’s honour. Many also fatten an animal in honour of a particular saint in order to eat it at his shrine, usually built in the woods, on the festive day; if their families are not numerous enough to consume the whole animal they invite others to the banquet, which continues at the shrine until nothing is left uneaten.” 424 See Smyth 1828: 179-191; Tyndale 1849: II, 54-56; Tennant 1885: 177-187 (reiterating Tyndale almost verbatim); Anonymous 1831: 49; see also ibid., 51-54. 425 Fues 1780: 119. Valery 1837: 224-226. 426 Smyth 1828: 179-181. 423

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cultural inferiority of the South and therefore of Sardinia. Just as Arquer had done centuries earlier,427 they levelled harsh criticism at the clergy, considering it ignorant and unable to wield any positive influence over the people, and never tired of insisting on the responsibility of superstition for the island’s lack of development.428 The Sardinians were so fond of festivities not out of religious devotion but because such occasions were convivial, and those who drew the greatest advantage from them were the priests.429 The value of festivities was not confined solely to their outward manifestations, however. They expressed a way of life so deeply rooted in that society that non-Sardinians, even when taking part in them, revealed their diversity in failing to feel the special “national” character of the ritual, while Sardinians, even those over the age of sixty, felt reinvigorated, as if infused with fresh life-blood which penetrated their bodies through the heat generated by the dances.430 Such was the pull of festivities that what was generally a very sober population felt “an instinctive national passion to participate in these religious orgies”.431 “Sards of all ranks are earnestly devoted to festivity”;432 nothing was more attractive to the Sardinians than a celebration as crowded with people as possible.433 Progress and social development had done nothing to undermine this passion for celebrations: “to the ordinary Sarde a festa is quite irresistible. Even when he is in a measure denationalized by being employed in a mine with continental workers, he will not let the ‘free thought’ of the Italian deprive him of his hereditary pleasures”.434 427

Arquer 2007: 38-40. See Smyth 1828: 196-204; Jourdan 1861: 5-8; Tyndale 1849: I, 232-244. 429 Edwardes 1889: 109. 430 Tyndale 1849: I, 274. Ibid: “On the present occasion none entered more dully into the spirit of the ballo tondo than those who, though essentially Sarde by birth and feeling, have lived in the presence and influence of the court of Turin, without losing their national character and affections; a fresh life seemed to be infuse into them as they gradually warmed in the dance; and though ‘some sixty summers o’er,’ they were roused into all the life and animation of thirty. It was no less amusing on the other hand, to see the Viceroy, with other sedate authorities, for whom the dance had no national charm, figuring in the magic ring; an honor they would doubtless have dispensed with, but which it was politic to accept.” 431 Forester 1858: 278. 432 Smyth 1828: 179. 433 Maltzan 1869: 266. 434 Edwardes 1889: 108. 428

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Dance, music and song were the essential ingredients of every festivity, “the principal needs of the Sardinian people in perpetual celebration”.435 The islanders’ favourite sport, dancing, was usually performed to the music of the launeddas,436 an ancient instrument whose use was particularly widespread in lowland areas and the Campidano,437 made of three rough reed pipes of unequal length and comparable to the Romans’ tibiae pares et impares438 and the tibiae impares played by ancient eastern peoples and the Pelasgians.439 Dances played an important social role in bringing together young people of marriageable age, and provided healthy exercise, approved by doctors and suited to the island’s climate.440 They certainly formed one of the most original spectacles available to visitors.441 However, the most important annotation in the sources regarding the traditional dance – known as the Ballo Tondo (ballu tundu) because it was performed in a circular formation, often in the church square on festival occasions442 – was its assignment to the 435

Valery 1837: 226 (“La danse et le chant semblent les premiers besoins du peuple sarde toujours en liesse”). See also Crawford Flitch 1911: 242 (“They gay clothing gives the town the appearance of being perpetually en fête”). 436 Roissard de Bellet 1884: 96. 437 Domenech 1867: 59. 438 “There can be no doubts but that this national instrument is exactly similar to the tibiae pares et impares of the Romans, with which every ‘Westminster’ is so well acquainted”: Burdett 1845: feb. (II): 232. “In music, vocal or instrumental, the Sardes cannot be said to excel; the national instrument ‘lanedda’ (sic) is supposed to be the same instrument as the flute of mythical and classic fame used by ‘Pan’, but, if so, this high musical genius must have had a better knowledge of the instrument, or been more expert in its use, than the Sardes of the present day, or he never could have achieved the miraculous results that are ascribed to his performances. The only miracle in connection with the instrument in the present day is the extraordinary power possessed by some of the players, who have been known to ‘blow’ for several hours without ever taking the pipes out of their mouth, or rather their mouth from the pipes, and where all the breath comes from is a puzzle, which has never been solved” (Tennant 1885: 270). “Perhaps tom y ignorance of the science of music, and my nonappreciation of it in its highest and classical features, may have contributed to the conclusions I arrived at, and the Sarde music may be scientifically amongst the finest in the world” (ibid.). 439 Della Marmora 1839: I, 205; Tyndale 1849: II, 57; Bresciani 2001: 64; Maltzan 1869: 264; Domenech 1867: 59. 440 Valery 1837: 226. 441 Delessert 1855: 202. 442 Fues 1780: 349. Vuillier (1893: 433) described a scene with a big wagon pulled by two buffaloes each carrying a woman playing a tambourine in accompaniment of a launeddas player. The wagon stopped and the travellers got off it into the road to

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status of “national dance”,443 an attribution also made repeatedly in texts by Sardinian authors anxious to promote the island’s culture.444 Besides being a symbol of Sardinian identity, the dance provided an opportunity for social gathering in a community regulated by rigid behavioural norms, known to and shared by all its members, whose non-observance could result in acts of violence:445 Dancing is a favourite amusement of the Sards. When shooting in the Mountains of Gallara (sic), amongst the wild shepherds of that savage district, I had several opportunities of seeing the Sardish national dance, the Ballo Tondo. Four shepherds stand together in the centre of a hut, and, having drawn their hunting knives, hold them upright on their cartridge belts. One of the party then begins a chant on love, war, or the pleasures of the Chase, to which the others add obligato accompaniments, and this extempore singing is kept up for four or five hours together. Round the singer, meanwhile, a circle of men and women, holding each other by the hand is formed, who dance to exhaustion, when their place is supplied by others, who do not, however, prevent the general movement for a moment. Although this dance appears at first sight rather easy, it is, nevertheless, difficult for those who have not learnt it in infancy. Strangers sometimes attempt it, but they are soon obliged to retire, if they do not wish to amuse the natives at their expense, and even cause the failure of the amusement, for a single dancer who does not observe the proper measure and cadence, discontents all the others. There are certain rules which must be strictly observed in dancing the Ballo Tondo, and the infraction of which often leads to bloody quarrels. Affianced persons can alone hold one another by the hand to palm, or with interlaid fingers. Any man who thus held a girl whom he was not disposed to marry, or another man’s wife, would run considerable risk of assassination.446

Opinions on the dance were highly varied. Though Valery thought that it might be considered voluptuous in its close physical proximity and hand-holding,447 his recollection of it was a positive one, dance “a kind of ring-around, very pretty” – that was the Ballo Tondo. See also the illustration made by the author: ibid., 431. 443 Valery 1837: 224; Della Marmora 1839: I, 197; 256; Tyndale 1849: I, 101; II, 54; Roissard de Bellet 1884: 96; Domenech 1867: 58; Tennant 1885: 269. 444 Paulis 2006: 215. 445 Della Marmora 1939: I, 257; Tyndale 1849: II, 54. 446 Burdett 1845: 231. 447 Valery 1837: 224.

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particularly in the case of an immense and joyous Ballo Tondo he witnessed after a Mass at Selargius.448 Others felt it was sufficiently horrible and primitive to warrant comparison with a bear dance and its practitioners with a company of Tremblers.449 Edwardes described the Ballo Tondo he saw in the village of San Vito as extremely boring450 and another time was struck by the national dance’s funereal solemnity.451 Tyndale compared the wild shrieks which punctuated the spectacle with the cries of Scottish highlanders at the beginning of a reel, and thought that the solemn, austere demeanour assumed by the dancers was ridiculous, more suited to a funeral procession.452 Highland funerals came similarly to Edwardes’ mind when he heard the monotonous drone of the launeddas.453 For the most part, then, the sources recorded disapproval for a custom worthy of a people considered primitive and inferior. Travellers’ accounts went into the details of the national dance. Although national in character, its features varied from one part of the island to another: in the north it was accompanied by a group of singers who stood holding hands in the centre of the circle, singing in loud, guttural tones, while in the south music was provided by the launeddas, traditionally played by shepherds.454 It was observed that differences in execution, such as varying rhythms, were linked to variations in the Sardinian character: lively and even frenzied versions of the Ballo Tondo were typical of the north of the island, whereas its southern forms reflected the indolence and sluggishness of southerners.455 In some northern areas the dance, known as the duru duru, took the form of an “undulation” accompanied by song and was fairly boisterous, as suggested by one of Vuillier’s drawings.456 By contrast, the austerity of the Barbagians was reflected by their lack of

448

Ibid., 229. Fues 1780: 349. 450 Edwardes 1889: 132. 451 Ibid., 130. 452 Tyndale 1849: II, 55: “like the interrupted progress of a funeral”. 453 Edwardes 1889: 131. 454 Smyth 1828: 191-192; Della Marmora 1939: I, 203. 455 Domenech (1867: 59) also emphasised the great energy of dancers in the north, which enabled them to develop remarkable gymnastic qualities. Della Marmora 1839: I, 203; Tyndale 1849: II, 56. 456 Vuillier 1893: 451. 449

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passion for dancing, in which they indulged only at wedding celebrations, dancing to the tune of a zufolo, a small reed flute.457 Aside from the basically hostile judgements, some observations advanced by Edwardes give an idea of the standpoint from which travellers viewed such expressions of the island’s culture. Although Sardinian dance could be considered the grimmest form of amusement on the face of the earth, it would be a mistake to think that its practitioners found it amusing.458 Rather than being a spontaneous expression of high spirits, the Ballo Tondo reflected the Sardinian soul and was suited to it, as were their songs, bagpipes and launeddas.459 The theoretical assumption behind this reasoning is that there was a direct kinship between a people and its traditions, whereby the latter were quite simply the manifestation of national character. Edwardes was thus amenable to the idea of the climate being a factor in the pace of the dance – its steps were accelerated only in the north, where people danced to warm the blood, or in particular cases where somebody bitten by a tarantula would dance with the energy typical of a quick waltz.460 The conclusion was that their traditional dance, like their music and song, were indices of the Sardinian character through which they expressed the essence of their identity. To the above considerations were added the tropes of the primitive and the exotic, in the light of which the ingredients of the festivity became explicit signs of the archaic, outlandish and bizarre nature of Sardinian identity. Similarities were noted not only between Sardinian dance and 19th-century Greek folk dance, but with the dances described by Homer.461 The launedda, the mainstay of

457

Tyndale 1849: II, 247. Edwardes 1889: 130. 459 Ibid. 460 Edwardes 1889: 130. In the latter case Edwardes considered that therapy more acceptable than the alternative of being buried up to the neck in manure. 461 Smyth 1828: 193. Ibid., 192: “Nothing can exceed the gravity of the dancers on these occasions, nor the monotony of the short, mincing steps with which they advance and retire, then shuffle on a little sideways again, to revert to their former motions”. Tennant 1885: 269: “The ‘Ballo tondo’ is the ‘national dance’ of the Island and admits of any number of participants and is not unlike the dances described by Homer, and practised in some parts of Greece at the present day. It commences by joining hands and forming a circle and ‘winding’ to the left, with a step rather difficult to describe, and equally difficult for a novice to perform”. See also Della Marmora 1839: I, 204. 458

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Sardinian music, was also redolent of antiquity.462 When Edwardes came across a long-haired urchin playing a reed pipe in the road, he was reminded of the twenty generations who had preceded him playing the same shrill notes on the same instrument, making him into an icon of island customs.463 Scholars as Orano also paid close attention to Sardinian dance and song, viewing them as collective national rituals bearing traces of the people’s primitive and savage character.464 In Psicologia della Sardegna, Orano stated that “in dance the country melts back to being a big tribe”:465 dance was the Sardinian nation’s epiphany. The characteristics of their dance also assimilated Sardinians to the modern peoples he considered less civilised – Orientals, savage tribes and Southerners.466 He saw a direct link between the prominence dance conserved in a nation’s traditions and the nation’s level of development, whereby in the perpetuation of primitive dances such as the Sardinian one “you feel the lowness, on the physiological scale as much as in morals, of the peoples themselves, you feel the savage, that is to say a population not civilised”.467 Lastly, since primitive peoples gave freer rein to their instincts, without the scruples imposed by 462

According to Della Marmora (1839: I, 204) the launedda was “a monument to the remotest antiquity”. “On inquiring for this last scion of an honoured stock, I was told by a fine-looking man of about forty that his father, the player, was out chopping wood, but that he would send for him immediately. In about half an hour a shepherd, eighty years old, walked into the hut, the very picture of green old age. His hair was as white as snow, but not thinned by time; it fell in clusters over his shoulders, which were broad and flat; his complexion was of a clear Brown, had his eye still glowed with all the fire of the south. On my asking him to play, he took a tin case from the wall, out of which he drew reed pipes of unequal length, the longest of which was about twenty inches. This instrument is a relict of the very highest antiquity, and has survived in Sardinia all the revolutions to which the country has been subject from the time of the earliest Roman dominion to the present hour. It is composed of two, three, and sometimes four reeds (three is the more common number) of unequal length and thickness, and pierced with several holes, like ordinary clarionets. The musician places them all in his mouth, and plays on them at the same time” (Burdett 1845: II, 232). 463 Edwardes 1889: 156. 464 “It has to be said from the outset that in Sardinia dance is definitely one of those most interesting manifestations of collective impressions. Men, women, youths and men up to the age of sixty – all play the same part, they all give of themselves in the same quantity and quality of physical and moral activity” (Orano 1896: 104). 465 Orano 1896: 114. 466 Ibid., 118. 467 Ibid., 107.

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civilisation, Sardinian dance was characterised by its sensual nature and was therefore a mating ritual.468 His analysis of the islanders’ dancing displays gave him the chance to add the Sardinians to the list of nations occupying the lowest levels of civilisation: That dance is undoubtedly one of the most wondrous and complete throwbacks to barbaric and savage epochs of old, that dance is one of the many points of contact by which some Sardinian populations come close to the savage peoples of the present day, such as those of black Africa, New Caledonia, Tasmania and Australia, the Kambichadoli and the Redskins.469

It was observed in the travel literature that just as the nature of dance expressed the essence of national character, so the calm peculiar to the Ballo Tondo revealed the phlegm typical of the islanders.470 Niceforo and Orano took the idea further, identifying the difference in rhythm between the island’s lowland and mountain areas as a reflection of varying degrees of civilisation and loyalty to indigenous Sardinian identity.471 The dances seen in the province of Nuoro were thus an expression of the original Sardinian essence, while those of the Campidano area betrayed the influence of the historical occupying powers and therefore a lower level of adherence to the national identity.472 Furthermore, just as dance was the natural expression of a people living in perfect harmony with its environment, dance was in 468

“Dance is the epic of pleasure, the utmost of voluptuous persistence in all the bodies that take part, and it reveals that beneath the rough, tough hide of the Nuoro peasant – to take one example – there is a spirit bent on something very different from hunting and brigandage. There is no chivalry in it, no sign of difference between the man and the woman. It is a fusion of virility and femininity. The man forgets that he is the family autocrat, the woman that she is obedient to the man. But in the woman is all the satisfaction of revenge over her husband in the unpunished expression – free, no matter how wonderfully veiled – of great sensuality, before everyone, outside any law or custom or modesty or convention” (Orano 1896: 114-115). See also: “The woman is really performing a mating dance” (ibid., 112). 469 Orano 1896: 106. 470 Ibid., 107. 471 Niceforo did not think that song and dance in the villages of central Sardinia had followed the evolution registered in other places. “They also stopped at the beginning of their path, petrified by the blast that froze so much of Sardinian life, just like the swan in Mallarmé’s song which tries in vain to free its wing trapped in the ice of an eternally frozen lake, becoming immobilised in a cold, sad dream” (1901: 595). See Orano 1896: 122. 472 Orano 1896: 123.

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synergy with nature itself: in the description of the duru duru witnessed at Padria, in the province of Sassari, the primitive and exotic nature of the dance became one with the wild Sardinian landscape.473 To sum up, the sources that discussed Sardinian dance reflected a number of tropes – archaism, primitivism and exoticism – perceived in the movements of the men and women gathered in a circle as they shifted slowly in unison in the symbolic ritual of the Ballo Tondo. The same attributes appeared in narrative literature before Deledda and in her work itself, as well as in 19th-century Sardinian painting, in which the theme of the rustic festivity was configured as a national representation of the Sardinian people, taking on the characteristics of a “living work of art”.474 This was particularly visible in the depiction of traditional dance, which captured the solemn, dignified bearing of the participants – characteristics which in the view of the artists and writers expressed the worth and dignity of the Sardinians.475 In actual fact the island’s intellectuals saw this appeal to their origins as a chance to project their need for redemption on to the ancient world. As has been observed, the desire to return to the past is generally a compensatory mechanism typical of times of crisis, in this instance caused by the transition resulting from the relinquishment of independence by the Kingdom of Sardinia (1847) and subsequently by the foundation of the Kingdom of Italy.476 Paradoxically, the attempt to construct an identity based on the past coincided with the opening up of the island to modernity.477 Similar reflections on Sardinian archaism and primitivism were stimulated by song. One observer noted its savage character and its

473

“On such a hearing the idea of music as art falls from the mind, the sense of musical aesthetics is disintegrated. That accordion represents something else. Inside it is the grunt of a wounded boar in a torrid lair in the ravines of Limbara, the threat of a shepherd insulted and the scorching flame of the island vendetta, the call of a bandit riding away through the crags after his crime, the sound of a sad distant echo, as if of dejected sorrow, of bitter separation from lands of light and bliss where lived this people’s forebears, the fleeting, inventive harmony of the Arab who adores and does not forget, who suffers for an eternity when for one day he leaves the warm shade of long sleepy afternoons” (Orano 1896: 127). 474 Paulis 2006: 209-211; 213-214. 475 Ibid., 215. 476 Ibid., 219. 477 Ibid., 220.

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resemblance to Cossack singing,478 and the discussion also centred on the primitive manifestations heard in the mountain gorges of the Barbagia and the Ogliastra, where the song “is an oppression; it penetrates the brain, rasps, buzzes, perforates – acutely, tenaciously, insistently. It is nought but the dissonant variation of a few notes which chase each other, soften, resurge strong and shrill to return, always, eternally, drearily, to resound, slow, low, almost sighs.”479 In that grim song are the bestial cries and the frenzy typical of savage dances; witnessing it was a shocking experience for someone considering himself the product of a superior civilisation,480 like the astonishment caused by the sight of a nomad shepherd, lying still on the ground, singing with his head in his hands and legs clasped together. He “does not appear human, alive, breathing; he resembles a figure roughly sculpted in who knows what stone or wood”.481 The tropes of primitivism and archaism is reinforced in the oneness of man and nature – the notes are the fruit of that habitat, combining perfectly with the surrounding country.482 “The wind carries deep exhalations of sheep, of milk, of hides, of wildness. Everything – the land, the sky, the wind, the vegetation – is in tune with that sad, interminable, indecent song”.483 The words reaching the ears of the listener have the obscenity of humankind still in a primitive state, they are yet more proof of an inferior natural condition in which the human state and the animal state are indistinguishable.484 Since the shepherd – the icon of Sardinian identity – is a creature between the human and the feral, his song is the vestige of a world tied to primitive feelings, not yet touched by the regeneration and moderation of civilisation: The nomad shepherd has neither the blush of shame nor the sorrow of remorse. Who can tell of the brutish matings with the sensual females of the hills? What can be the song emanating from those rough hairy chests, if not a formless animal-like muddle of phrases quivering with

478

Della Marmora 1839: I, 260. Niceforo 1897: 51, and Idem 1901: 595. 480 Orano 1896: 131. 481 Ibid., 142-143. 482 Ibid., 144. 483 Ibid., 145. 484 Ibid., 114: “It is a slow song with the rhythm of Abyssinian music, an unvarying rhythm. But they do not have the excited, palpitating obscenity of refined and decadent civilisations, they have the obscenity of uncivilised humankind.” 479

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violence, with savage desires, with blood and senses, with struggle and matter, with inertia and barbarism?485

National Costume Until the beginning of the 17th century Sardinian country folk dressed extremely humbly, and only town-dwellers could afford any luxury in their attire.486 But as time went on traditional dress, women’s clothing in particular, evolved to comprise the richness and variety that can be appreciated still today at the many cultural events and festivals held on the island every year. By the time the first European travellers came to Sardinia not only was that evolution complete, but in the 19th century visitors observed signs of the increasing inroads of contemporary fashion at the expense of local customs.487 Nonetheless the sight of Sardinians dressed in traditional festive costume was one of the things those visitors found most striking, as their highly detailed descriptions confirmed.488 What most surprised them was the variety and splendour of the clothes, whose variation from village to village was so great as to defeat their attempts to render in words the overall colour and grace of traditional costumes.489 The visual effect was that of a painting by an old master: even Titian’s palette would have struggled to re-create such a rich mix of colours.490 In literary 485

Orano 1896: 145. Arquer 2007: 40; Costa 1913: 27-28. 487 Della Marmora 1839: I, 235; 1860, I, 180; Smyth 1828: 160; 161; Maltzan 1869: 46; Tyndale 1849: I, 266: “The upper classes adopt the Italian style, but the intermediate and lower wear the national dress”. 488 Smyth 1828: 160-164; Della Marmora 1839: I, 208-235; Delessert 1855: 41-44; Maltzan 1869: 36-65; Boullier 1863: 310-311; Domenech 1867: 29-35; 35-39; Corbetta 1877: 60-66; Roissard de Bellet 1884: 72-77; Tennant 1885: 222-225; Vuillier 1893: 476; Balzac in Boscolo 1973: 126; Norris 2003: 120. The only exception was Edwardes (1889: 13), who thought it unnecessary to dwell on the wonder of Sardinian costume since as a whole it was no more remarkable than that of the inhabitants of Ross or Argyle in the Scottish Highlands. He stated that a rich Sardinian woman dressed in festive costume was a sight to be seen, but rather a ridiculous one (ibid., 12). 489 Domenech 1867: 29. 490 Mantegazza 1869: 104-105. The palette metaphor for describing the chromatic richness of women’s clothing was also used by Corbetta (1877: 434-435) when he wrote of the traditional costume he saw in Nuoro. Describing a woman he met in the street, Bechi (1997: 164-165) wrote “She was still there, standing out with her curvaceous bust against the white rocks of Monte Bardia, while her head, brown under the red helmet of her scarf, showed up against the pallor of the sky; soft and black, her big eyes were still smiling in a last goodbye. That slim dark figure against 486

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discourse the chromatic qualities of Sardinian costumes were considered to be further proof of the mirroring between nature and national character. Describing a group of women leaving Nuoro cathedral on Palm Sunday, Mantegazza expressed his admiration for the perfect harmony between their attire and the natural surroundings, citing the browns of the earth and the chestnuts, and the green of the pines.491 This approach was given even greater emphasis by Deledda, whose earliest writings highlighted the affinity between women in costume and the Sardinian landscape.492 Besides their admiration for the sumptuous beauty of Sardinian costume, all the sources agreed on its ancient origins. Faithful to their traditions, the Sardinians were said to have absorbed and preserved customs originating in the distant past, as shown by features of their costume resembling those of ancient peoples. Della Marmora began his discussion of male attire by referring to its ancient origins.493 A similar theme was explored at length by Bresciani in two chapters of his work which were devoted entirely to male and female dress in Sardinia:494 he illustrated what he saw as evident similarities between Sardinian costume and Phoenician, Pelesgian and Hellenic dress, and recognised features which could probably be traced to the ancient Egyptian, Babylonian and Italic populations.495 This archaistic and Orientalist interpretation was taken up by subsequent travellers, who reiterated the theory of the pre-classical origins of Sardinian costume.496 And although the many differences between the costumes of individual villages bore witness to the different paths of development experienced by some regions of the island – the sumptuousness of the costumes in Cagliari and the Campidano contrasted with the primitive simplicity of those in the mountain areas of Benetutti and Busachi – all of them bore the features of ancient

that luminous background was admirable. The voices exclaimed in rapt unison, ‘Oh what a picture!’”. 491 “How beautifully alpine they were! What an artistic interpretation of the mountains! Brown wedded to scarlet; a pine forest with a tiny church decorated in terracotta: a chestnut tree gilded by the red of a mountain sunset!” (Mantegazza 1869: 109). See also Paulis 2006: 247. 492 Ibid., 247-248. 493 Della Marmora 1839: I, 208. 494 Bresciani 2001: 274-293; 294-322. 495 Ibid., 294. 496 See Domenech 1867: 35.

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eastern dress.497 The archaic image of women’s costume was completed by their hairstyles and head-dress: in the 19th century Sardinian women still preferred the style typical of “patriarchal simplicity and modesty”.498 Rather than its practical functions, then, the favourable judgments of Sardinian dress focused on the symbolic meaning that was attributed to it.499 The beauty of the costume corresponded to the people’s fealty to their origins, so even less striking costumes earned appreciation because of their respect for tradition, which was seen as an attempt to conserve the Sardinian cultural identity in the face of the growing threat posed by short-lived fatuous fashions. Although in the 19th century the growing influence of the mainland was perceptible, people who wore traditional costume deserved more respect and had greater dignity than those who succumbed to the empty charm of novelty. According to Maltzan “[i]n the picturesque cut of the national clothing the Sardinian appears as proud as a medieval gentleman, while in European dress, which in the country can rarely be had of good quality, he has the look of a railway worker”.500 Similar observations were made about women’s costume: while French fashion obliged the women of all nations to dress in the same way, in the same colours and fabrics, Sardinian women kept their traditional attire and thus looked better than ladies dressed in the latest Parisian style.501 Traditional costume became the symbol of belonging to a community, of distinction from others, above all a sign of loyalty to an allegedly original national identity, not a surrogate or one distorted by modernity. Sardinian archaism and primitivism, sublimated by the whirl of colours and shapes and fabrics, was thus translated into a 497

Ibid., 38. References to Sardinian costume are too numerous to be listed here. One observer who stood out from the others was Corbetta, who thought that the costumes in the villages of the Barbagia were the finest and richest on the island (Corbetta 1877: 418). The attachment to traditional costume displayed in the villages of the interior was considered as eccentric by the people of Cagliari as it was by mainlanders (Edwardes 1889: 47). The original archaic model was thus said to be perpetuated only in the mountainous Barbagia region, which most fully embodied the trope of Sardinian archaism. 498 Bresciani 2001: 301. 499 On the concept of functional hierarchy in relation to any cultural phenomenon or activity see Paulis 2006: 233-235. 500 Maltzan 1869: 242. 501 Mantegazza 1869: 108-109.

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value, into one of the most attractive, pleasing and picturesque manifestations of Sardinian exoticism. Civilised European travellers, though well satisfied with their own sophistication – as transpired from the contemptuous tone of some of their remarks on Sardinian barbarity – thus used the island’s primitive condition as something upon which to project their vague aspiration to the state of nature and primordial purity, a state which 19th-century man thought could be found only in the corners of the world untouched by civilisation. The virtues of the national costume were also extolled in 19thcentury Sardinian narrative literature. Writers drew inspiration from the accounts of European travellers, to whom they sometimes made explicit reference, and saw traditional costume as a topos of identity.502 In point of fact the tendency to attribute ancient origins to Sardinian dress had been present in the literary discourse for some time, at least since the writings of 16th-century Sardinian scholar Giovanni Francesco Fara, the pivotal figure for the 17th- and 18thcentury authors listed by Enrico Costa in the preface to his Costumi sardi.503 As Costa pointed out, all the most authoritative Italian scholars traced the origins of traditional costume to the ancient populations which had migrated to the island.504 While he admitted some external influence, however, for his part he claimed that Sardinian costume was basically an indigenous development.505 Costa, an intellectual openly committed to the recovery and promotion of Sardinian culture, apparently wished with this claim to distance himself from the conventional wisdom, but in fact he confirmed the same ideological assumption: costume was a monument, proof of the identity of Sardinia and the uniqueness of its national character. The identity, at once barbaric and refined, of the woman in costume thus became a topos of a people in search of historical redemption, exploiting the cult of the primitive then in vogue in European culture. But at the same time it revealed a standpoint which anticipated certain opinions that did not take hold until late in the 20th century. Rejecting the idea that Sardinian identity was essentially original, pure and unchangeable, Costa put forward a concept based 502

Paulis 2006: 237-238. Even Claudio Varese, Piedmontese author of Preziosa di Sanluri, ovvero I montanari sardi, a novel set in Sardinia, openly declared his debt to Della Marmora in the composition of his book (Paulis 2006: 237). 503 Costa 1913: 6. 504 Ibid., 10. 505 Ibid.

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on the principle of historical becoming and cultural fusion. To anyone asserting the absence of a Sardinian history he replied, with shades of Manzoni, that every people had its own, even though it was composed largely of sorrow, defeat and oppression.506 Traditional costume thus became one of the most striking manifestations of the cultural koinè that had come to be created on the island, but also a symbol of the desire to reappropriate the past on the part of those who felt they had been robbed of it. A Nation on Horseback, Ever Armed In addition to the Sardinians’ passion for festive dance, all the travellers were struck by their enthusiasm for horse-riding and hunting, considered as national sports.507 Some writers seemed to have no doubt at all as to the islanders’ passion for and pride in horses,508 hence the observation that “Sardinians are born on horseback”.509 Horses were the preferred means of transport for Sardinian men, even when accompanied by their women.510 Such was their trust in these animals that they used them even on the roughest and most dangerous journeys.511 Although every village on the island had its horse race, the islanders appreciated the skill and acrobatics of the riders rather than the races themselves.512 One example was the San Michele horse race, held at Carnival time on a steep slope in the Stampace district in Cagliari.513 Here the competition consisted of overcoming the difficulties of the course in groups in a quadrille formation which had to execute various manoeuvres during the race.514 Skilled horsemanship ensured social status for the horseman, prestige to which every Sardinian aspired. That was particularly true 506

Marci 2006: 234. Tennant 1885: 278: “Horce-racing in Sardinia may be classed as one of the two great national sports (the ‘caccia’ or chase being the other); and it is carried on both in town and country”. Forester 1858: 302. Some of them, such as Burdett and Buxton, had been attracted to Sardinia precisely by the prospect of big game hunting. 508 Roissard de Bellet 1884: 273-275; Tyndale 1849: I, 198. 509 Corbetta 1877: 63. 510 Smyth 1828: 176. Tennant 1885: 232. 511 Burdett 1845: 230. 512 Della Marmora 1839: I, 251, 253; Burdett 1845: 228; Tyndale 1849: III, 106; See also Tennant 1885: 278-279; Bechi 1997: 161-162. 513 Della Marmora 1839: I, 252-253; Burdett 1845: 230-231. 514 Smyth 1828: 176-177; Burdett 1845: 230-231; Della Marmora 1839: I, 252-253; Roissard de Bellet 1884: 95. 507

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of the Barbagians; the inhabitants of Bitti, reputed to be the best riders on the island, had an expression which ran “S’homine de paga impita, abbaidadilu a caddu” (A man’s worth can be seen on horseback).515 Yet even in observing this passion, the sources evoked the image of the wild and primitive people – their riding technique subjected the animals to excessive strain, their treatment of them was careless and inhumane and their training involved cruel practices.516 The clearest – not to say singularly macabre – proof of the nature of this passion was bound up with the barbaric custom of the vendetta, whereby the insult marking the beginning of a feud between two families was an act of cruelty to the enemy’s horse.517 Such observations thus constituted another element in the broader discourse on the primitive character of the Sardinian people, though their horsemanship did offer the opportunity to extol other qualities considered peculiar to them: The Sardinian shines in all the aesthetics of nature and art when he is on horseback. It is then that his slim brown figure is in keeping with his picturesquely severe clothing, it is then that his agility shines – his strength, his bravery, his wild and independent nature, greedy for space and freedom. His virtues are wedded to those of his steed: they are two creatures made for each other, capturing in one pulsating picture their beauty, their strength, I would almost say their thoughts.518

Physical appearance, character and national costume blended perfectly with the horse – a noble animal, an expression of strength, elegance and independence: a vision combining ethos, ethnos, ars and natura. The vision of the Sardinian horseman was taken as a “pulsating picture”,519 something similar to a “living work of art”, precisely as has been pointed out with regard to the nation dressed in traditional 515

Corbetta 1877: II, 442. Della Marmora 1839: I, 254. Ibid., 435-436; Edwardes 1889: 236-237. 517 Vuillier 1893: 397. 518 Mantegazza 1869: 103: “Il sardo brilla in tutta l’estetica della natura e dell’arte, quando è a cavallo. È allora che la sua asciutta e bruna figura s’accorda col suo vestito severo e pittoresco, è allora che brillano la sua agilità, la sua forza, il suo coraggio, la sua natura indipendente, selvaggia, avida d’aria e di libertà. Le sue virtù si maritano con quelle del suo destriero: son due creature fatte l’una per l’altra che sommano insieme in un sol quadro pieno di vita le loro bellezze, le loro forze, vorrei quasi dire i loro pensieri.” 519 Ibid. 516

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costume engaged in performing the ballu tundu.520 The point may be taken further. The characteristics considered peculiar to the Sardinian horseman, besides evoking the model of the primitive warrior and the intrepid defender of freedom, may in some ways be assimilated to those of the traditional knight.521 Recounting the welcome he received in the region of Anglona, in the north of the island, in 1869,522 Mantegazza recalled that every village had sent a mounted contingent to meet him; when they had all arrived his party was escorted by no fewer than five hundred horsemen. Aside from a certain unease, the astonished travellers felt rather like Oriental sultans, or medieval condottieri.523 Mantegazza wrote, “those men were all individuals, all owners of their own fine horses, all armed, all intelligent, highspirited”.524 Faced with such a sight the scholar exclaimed, “here is an army, here is the army of the future!”.525 Explicit reference to the world of chivalry was also made in Caccia grossa, where Bechi described a young couple on horseback with expressions redolent of a medieval knight with his lady, reinforcing the impression by comparing the man to a tournament champion.526 In the medieval view of the world, God had given noblemen the task of being skilled horsemen and warriors. Their status as combatants was fused with a behavioural code founded on nobility of spirit and a sense of honour, characteristics which stood as the essence of chivalry. When not engaged in an actual war, a knight would display his valour by jousting in tournaments, which were a way of enacting scenes of combat in times of peace. In addition, hunting constituted one of the favourite and most characteristic pastimes of the nobility. In other words, skilled horsemanship, proficiency in combat and hunting and behaviour based on personal honour constituted the essential characteristics of chivalrous nobility. The very same qualities were considered essential in how the Sardinian character was represented. The islanders were excellent shots because they practised from an early age; villagers would typically amuse themselves by 520

See note 474. Maltzan (1869: 242) stated that the Sardinians still had something of the old Spanish caballero. 522 See note 84. 523 Mantegazza 1869: 104. 524 Ibid. 525 Ibid. 526 Bechi 1997: 52. 521

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firing at a coin tossed in the air.527 According to positivist scholars a passion for weapons was actually an ancient, traditional bent, typical of primitive peoples – it was “almost a property of such races”, and “skill in shooting is a man’s prime quality”.528 The prestige of arms was such that Sardinians proudly displayed them to their guests and they were held to be indispensable accoutrements for every man.529 The sources explicitly compared hunting trips – especially for big game – to the organisation of an act of war. A hunt was considered a school for the education of the Sardinians’ aggressive instincts and the honing of their marksmanship.530 Hunting reawakened the savage feelings latent in the psyche of the primitive man,531 so the true Sardinian is to be seen on a hunt: he is a hunter by nature. “A hunter of deer, of course, as he is of men”.532 The violence intrinsic to a hunt proved to be useful for the practice of the vendetta, which expressed “the primary characteristic of the Sardinian regional temperament”.533 Among the islanders those of the Barbagia, the Delinquent Zone, seen as members of a civilisation based on violence, were the ones most specialised in hunting, in the use of weapons and in the practice of the vendetta.534 Yet since nothing was more important to a Sardinian than his honour – so much so that it was “more honourable to be shot, than to die in a bed”535 – those who resorted to violence in feuds were not seen as criminals at all. As has been seen with regard to bandits such as Giovanni Tolu and Peppe Bonu (to name just two), their acts were comparable to noble deeds and they themselves to heroes, to noble 527

Smyth 1828: 142. At the time the use of weapons was widespread and the islanders regularly flouted the prohibition on bearing arms; indeed they never relinquished their favourite weapon, the rifle, and, to a lesser extent, the pistol (Della Marmora 1849: I, 246). 528 Niceforo 1897: 76 and 78. 529 Ibid., 77-78. 530 Ibid., 82. 531 Ibid., 85. 532 Orano 1896: 22. 533 Niceforo 1897: 100, see ibid., 139. 534 Niceforo 1897: 80: “The people of the Zona delinquente are still arrested, in the development of bellicose sentiments, at the starting point, at an infantile stage; the abuse of strength is for them an expression of the highest moral superiority, exactly as was the case in primitive tribes, weapons and fighting are for them the one and only ideal. The Zona delinquente belongs to the old type of civilisation that Guglielmo Ferrero called a violence-based society” (my italics). 535 Smyth 1828: 143.

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knights, never to common criminals.536 Though the practice of taking the law into their own hands might appear primitive, even civilised countries had preserved the custom of duelling,537 a behavioural model which perpetuated the ethos of the knight, resting on a sense of honour. This forma mentis was to be found in the representation of Sardinian bandits, who were attributed with chivalrous attitudes in an apparently contradictory mixture of sentiment and behaviour:538 “Sard honour, like that of chivalry, reconciles an heterogeneous union of violence and religion, bravery and cruelty”.539 In the popular imagination Sardinian society in general, and that of the Barbagia in particular – founded on the nomadic pastoral life – thus retained the fascination of a warrior society. It was a model of society in which men always bore arms and social differences were determined not by the census but by prestige and dignity, which were ideals bound to personal worth, not material possessions: These chivalrous ideas of the equality of social dignity, so different from modern socialistic principles, which scorn all courtesy and every social nicety, seem to be peculiar to all the arms-bearing peoples – the Spaniards, the Arabs and the Sardinians. If they were ever to relinquish the rifle on their shoulder, the pistol and dagger on their belt, I fear that they would have to accept our slippery European manners, the servile baseness of some and the communistic licence of others.540

The literary construction of the Sardinian character thus fused two natures which are apparently contradictory. On one side is the wild and violent spirit of a primitive people still living the life of the hunter, on the other the valour of the man of honour identifiable with the world of chivalry. These types were extinct in civilised societies, but perhaps for this very reason they were sufficiently attractive to be yearned for as a paradise lost. In literary discourse the Sardinia of the nomad shepherds was therefore turned into its opposite: a happy island inhabited by a noble, chivalrous warrior race which had survived the moral decadence found in the civilised world. We thus 536

See section People: Shepherds and Bandits above. Roissard de Bellet 1884: 93. 538 Ibid., 93-94. 539 Smyth 1828: 144. 540 Maltzan 1869: 242. 537

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understand the words of Mantegazza when, fascinated by the blend he saw of ancient barbarism and chivalrous nobility, he called his escort of Anglona horsemen an “army of the future”, almost as if the model of the Sardinian on horseback could serve to overcome the weakness of spirit typical of the men of his time.541 Conclusion The 19th-century texts analysed in this chapter present an image of Sardinia and its people that is essentially consistent and stable, partly by virtue of the plentiful circulation of such works in the European market. In actual fact the stock of images of Sardinia can be fully understood only if seen in the broader context of the conceptual dichotomy between North and South in European culture. In the light of the sources considered there emerges the image of an island encapsulating all the positive and – above all – negative features usually attributed to the cultural concept of the South. The resulting portrait is one of a land which, observed from an ethnocentric standpoint, appears at once fascinating and aberrant in its primitive, barbaric and exotic beauty. What is most striking is that the image of the island canonised in the collective imagination is the result of a distorted vision of reality. From the mid-19th century Sardinia was increasingly identified with the pastoral mountain landscapes of the Barbagia, while its coastal and urban areas were almost entirely absent from the literary imagination. The process of identification of the island’s geography with the Barbagia – repeatedly defined in literary sources as the “true” Sardinia – seems to have been a crucial element in the construction of the Sardinian character, since the representation of the island’s geography and landscape mirrored the portrayal of its people. Their identity was embodied most clearly in the figure of the shepherdbandit, the primitive and vengeful man of honour, inhabitant of the Barbagia and natural heir of the historical Sardinian resistance to foreign domination. The physical and anthropological reality of Sardinia came to coincide in the icon of the Barbagian shepherdbandit. Late 19th-century European literature thus left to posterity an unmistakably primitive and exotic model of Sardinian identity. How

541

Mantegazza 1869: 104 (“ecco un’armata; ecco l’armata dell’avvenire”).

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the 20th century dealt with this tradition is discussed in the next chapter.

2. Sardinian Tropes in Literature after 1900

Sardinia in European Literature after 1900 This chapter will focus on an analysis of texts, belonging to various genres, produced from 1900 onwards. Their selection was guided by two basic criteria. The first is that a text must have exerted a direct influence on the debate on Sardinian identity, thereby contributing to the formation of the 20th-century image of Sardinia. The second is that the written work must have been used as the basis for a film. Although not all the texts fulfil both criteria, the selection has produced an identifiable corpus from which a precise image of the Sardinian character may be derived. Here below are the authors and texts on which the analysis will concentrate in this chapter. The 20th century produced far fewer works of travel literature than the preceding one did. Outstanding among the European travellers were J.E. Crawford Flitch, with his Mediterranean moods: Footnotes of Travel in the Islands of Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Sardinia (1911), and D.H. Lawrence, author of the famous Sea and Sardinia (1921); also prominent are Den Ukendte Ø (1913) by Marie Gamel Holten, who translated Deledda into Danish, and Den oförlikneliga fångenskapen (1931) by Swedish author Amelie Posse Brázdová, forced to spend a period in Sardinia by the inauspicious circumstances of the time.1 The 1950s produced writings on Sardinia 1

See Pala 2002b. J.E. Crawford Flitch, Mediterranean moods: Footnotes of Travel in the Islands of Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Sardinia (London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1911). David Herbert Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1921). In this research use was made of the edition 2009 (Gloucester: Dodo Press). Marie Gamel Holten, Sardegna Isola sconosciuta, translated into Italian by Annette Bodenhoff Salmon (Nuoro: Edizioni, 2005), original title Den Ukendte Ø (Copenhagen: J. Frimodts Forlag, 1913). When the Italian version was republished Gamel Holten had not yet been identified, but she is known to have translated Deledda’s novel Dopo il divorzio with the title Efter skilsmisse (Giacobbe 1992: 433). Amelie Posse Brázdová, Den oförlikneliga fångenskapen (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Natur och Kultur, 1931), translated into Italian by Aldo Brigaglia, Interludio di

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by Ernst Jünger and Thomas Münster (Sprich gut von Sardinien, 1958);2 two other works worthy of consideration, even though they do not fit easily into any ready-made category, are both classics of Italian literature: Elio Vittorini’s Sardegna come un’infanzia (1932) and Carlo Levi’s Tutto il miele è finito (1964).3 The Italian narrative discussed here is represented exclusively by Sardinian writers, starting with Grazia Deledda.4 The analysis will focus on novels and stories of hers which found their way to the big screen, in addition to a limited number of other writings relevant to the subject under discussion (letters and articles).5 The attention thus devoted to Deledda is due to the fact that her works have provided material for screenwriters and directors up to the present day. Another figure deserving particular attention is Emilio Lussu (1890-1975). With Giuseppe Dessì (1909-1975) and Salvatore Cambosu (1895-1962), Lussu stands as one of the foremost voices in

Sardegna. Ritratto inconsueto dell’isola nel diario 1915-1916 di una famosa scrittrice svedese (Cagliari: Tema, 1998), with a preface by Eva Strömberg Kranz and Manlio Brigaglia. During World War I, Amelie Posse (1884-1957) Brázdová was deported together with her second husband, the Czech nationalist and artist Oki Brázda, to Sardinia. She later became a leading anti-Nazi activists during World War II. Reference is also made in this chapter to a passage devoted to the city of Cagliari by Isabelle Eberhard (1877-1904), a mysterious adventurer who lived for some time in north Africa disguised as a man in order to move freely. She left some written impressions of a visit she made to Sardinia at the beginning of the century, now published in Italian in Isabelle Eberhardt, Sette anni nella vita di una donna: Lettere e diari, edited by Eglal Errera (Parma: Ugo Guanda Editore, 1989; new edition 2002) (original title: Sept années dans la vie d’unne femme; Isabelle Eberhardt; Lettres et Journaliers, 1987). 2 Jünger’s account of his stay in Sardinia in 1954 has been translated into Italian under the title Terra sarda (Nuoro: Il Maestrale, 1999). See also Pala (2002: 49-54) and Sanna (2008: 111-134). Thomas Münster, Sprich gut von Sardinien (München: Süddeutscher Verlag GmbH, 1958). In this analysis reference is made to its Italian translation Parlane bene (Nuoro: Edizioni il Maestrale, 2006). 3 Elio Vittorini, Sardegna come un’infanzia (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1932, 1st ed. with the title Viaggio in Sardegna; 2nd ed. 1952). In this research reference is made to the paperback reprint published in the Bompiani collection, Bologna, 2009. Carlo Levi, Tutto il miele è finito (Turin: Einaudi, 1964, 1st ed.). Reference is made to the new edition published by Ilisso (2003), with a preface by Giulio Ferroni. 4 In the 20th century it is in fact only Sardinian writers that write novels with a Sardinian theme. For a full account of Sardinian literature, see Marci 2006. 5 Deledda 1971a; Idem 1981a, 2007, 2011a. See also De Giovanni 2004.

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post-Deledda literature.6 Though not a writer by profession, he earned himself considerable fame for his heroism in the First World War and for his untiring political activism.7 He is worth discussing not just as the author of a fine novel based on his wartime experience (Un anno sull’altipiano, 1938), and a highly symbolic story which can be read as a metaphor of Sardinian identity (Il cinghiale del diavolo, 1938), but because he became a symbol of the Sardinian collective imagination in the 20th century.8 As will be explained, he himself contributed to the creation of his own myth as well strengthening the trope of the traditional Sardinia, given his insistence on pastoral society as the model of the island’s cultural identity. Through his writings and the biography written on him by Giuseppe Fiori, it is possible to grasp how the stock of forms by which Sardinia was represented was broadened during the century through a new iconography. With Giuseppe Dessì (1909-1975) and Salvatore Cambosu (1895-1962), Lussu stands as one of the foremost voices in post-Deledda literature.9 6

Salvatore Cambosu, Lo zufolo (Bologna: La festa, 1932). Idem, Miele amaro, edited by Paride Rombi (Nuoro: Ilisso, 2004; 1st ed. Firenze: Vallecchi, 1954). Miele amaro is a composite work which is to be considered, in Giuseppe Petronio’s judgement, “a kind of corpus of everything that constitutes the Sardinian soul and genius down the centuries” (from the preface to Miele amaro 2004: 10, edited by Paride Rombi). See Marci 2006: 248-249. 7 Born in Armungia into the village’s richest family, Lussu had an extraordinary life. He was already a myth by the end of the First World War, in which he distinguished himself through heroism devoid of any rhetoric or mystification. Leader and founder of the Partito Sardo d’Azione and a declared anti-Fascist, he was sent into internal exile on the island of Lipari, from which he organised a daring escape with the Rosselli brothers. After years of exile abroad, Lussu returned to Italy after the fall of the Fascist regime and joined the Resistance. Having taken part in the Constituent Assembly he then devoted himself to politics. The most striking feature in his life story is the amalgamation between his European experience and his unshakeable attachment to Sardinian culture. 8 Emilio Lussu, Un anno sull’altipiano (Nuoro: Ilisso, 1999), with introduction of Alberto Asor Rosa. The novel was adapted for cinema by Francesco Rosi in the film Uomini contro (1970). It is faithful to the original in terms of its criticism of the war but leaves out the autobiographical elements present in the book (Olla 2008: 163). Emilio Lussu, Il cinghiale del diavolo (Nuoro: Il Maestrale, s.d.). Lussu is also the author of Marcia su Roma e dintorni (1931). 9 Giuseppe Fiori, Il cavaliere dei Rossomori (Turin: Einaudi, 1st ed. ‘Gli struzzi’, 1985; 2nd ed. 2000).

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Among the writers of the middle of the century the most authoritative is most certainly Giuseppe Dessì. An intellectual who made his name in Italian literature above all on the strength of his masterpiece, the novel Paese d’ombre (1972), he also worked successfully in cinema and television.10 In addition to the abovementioned novel, attention will focus on Il disertore (1961), which was made into a film of the same name (1983) directed by Giuliana Berlinguer.11 It is perhaps no coincidence that of all Dessì’s writings cinema appropriated the one which, despite his attempts to interpret Sardinian society in the context of Italian and international history, most evidently features the trope of the primitive and timeless island. There will also be an analysis of his play Eleonora d’Arborea and various references will be made to the two-volume work Scoperta della Sardegna (1965),12 in which Dessì collected literary and scientific texts which had communicated a particular image of Sardinia, in order to “document over time the gradual discovery of Sardinia and to make a contribution to that discovery”.13 In terms of the second half of the century, particular attention will be devoted to authors who have proved crucial to the development of Sardinian literature. The 1950s saw the publication of the novel Squarciò (1956) by Franco Solinas (1927-1982). Although he subsequently concentrated almost entirely on screenplays, his novel plays a decisive role in this discourse because, besides standing as a unique work in Sardinian literature, it was immediately made into a film (The Wide Blue Road, 1957), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo with Solinas’ collaboration in the screenplay.14 From the same period is Maria Giacobbe’s Diario di una maestrina (1957).15 A Sardinian who has now been living in Denmark for several decades, Giacobbe made her name with this autobiographical account of her experience teaching in a number of primary schools in the island’s interior, 10

Giuseppe Dessì, Paese d’ombre (Milan: Mondadori, 1972). Olla 2008: 91-92. Giuseppe Dessì, Il disertore (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961, 1st ed.; Nuoro: Ilisso, 2004). 12 Giuseppe Dessì, Eleonora d’Arborea (Milan: Mondadori, 1964), a historical drama in four acts. Idem (ed.), Scoperta della Sardegna (Milan: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 1965), 2 vols. With Nicola Tanda Dessì also edited an anthology of the prose texts considered the most representative of Sardinian narrative: Dessì and Tanda 1973. 13 Dessì 1965: XIV. 14 Olla 1997. 15 Maria Giacobbe, Diario di una maestrina (Nuoro: Edizioni Il Maestrale, 2003; 1st ed. 1957, 2nd ed. 1975). 11

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revealing herself as an acute and sympathetic observer of people in her troubled homeland. The analysis also focuses on her novel Gli arcipelaghi (1995), made into the film Arcipelaghi (2001) by Giovanni Columbu.16 The beginning of the following decade saw the first edition of the novel Sonetàula by Giuseppe Fiori (1923-2003), an author also appreciated for his investigative journalism and biographies of 20th-century Sardinians, including his above-mentioned work on Emilio Lussu.17 The film Sonetàula by Salvatore Mereu (2008) stands as one of the most significant works discussed in this research. The 1960s also saw the publication of Quelli dalle labbra bianche (1962), a novel by Francesco Masala (1916) dealing with the experience of Sardinians who fought on the Russian front in the Second World War.18 Like Un anno sull’altipiano, it highlights the injustice and absurdity of war. It was subsequently adapted for the big screen in Sos laribiancos. I dimenticati (2001), directed by Pietro Livi. A great deal of critical interest was aroused by Gavino Ledda’s autobiographical novel Padre padrone (1975).19 As demonstrated by the success of the film of the same name made by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (1977), it was interpreted as a primitivist work, regardless of the author’s intentions.20 What critics focused on above all was the novel’s portrayal of the insoluble conflict between an archaic, primitive and cruel Sardinia and the rest of the world – civilised, developed and free. In actual fact Ledda recounts the experience of a man who discovers he is both Sardinian and Italian, without repudiating his origins.21 Among the most significant works of the 1970s is Il giorno del giudizio (1977), by Sardinian jurist Salvatore Satta.22 Like Paese d’ombre (1972) and Padre padrone (1975), the novel bears witness to Sardinian authors’ acknowledgement of their detachment from their origins and their search for new points of 16

Maria Giacobbe, Gli arcipelaghi (Nuoro: Edizioni Il Maestrale, 2001; 1st ed. 1995). Giuseppe Fiori, Sonetàula (Rome: Canesi, 1962, 1st ed.; Turin: Einaudi, 2000; 2008, 2nd ed.). 18 Francesco Masala, Quelli dalle labbra bianche (Nuoro: Il Maestrale, 1998). 19 Gavino Ledda, Padre padrone. L’educazione di un pastore (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975). 20 Olla 2008:170-172. 21 Salis 1994: 85-92. 22 Salvatore Satta, Il giorno del giudizio (Milan: Adelphi, 1979). 17

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reference.23 Though no film has been based on it, Il giorno del giudizio is a crucial work because it reveals the efforts made by Sardinian culture to call its roots into question at a time when the island had undergone a rapid and traumatic process of modernisation. The analysis will conclude with the two most prominent among the emerging authors of the 1980s: Salvatore Mannuzzu e Sergio Atzeni (1952-1995). The literary production of the former, a magistrate by profession and a writer by vocation, marks a turning point in Sardinian culture in that it goes beyond many commonplaces to present a radical rethinking of the island’s image. The analysis of Mannuzzu’s work will concentrate on the novels Procedura (1988), adapted for cinema under the title Un delitto impossibile (Grimaldi, 2001), and Un morso di formica (1989); also worthy of discussion is his essay on Sardinian identity emblematically entitled Finis Sardiniae.24 In the course of a complex life and journalistic career distinguished by his passion for literature and music, Sergio Atzeni also produced a series of novels and essays which met with popular and critical approval alike. He made his name as one of the most authoritative Sardinian voices of the late 20th century, above all because of the awareness with which he put forward an overall revision of the island’s history, sparking a dialogue with exponents of post-colonial literature.25 His narrative works discussed in this research are the novels Apologo del giudice bandito (1986), Il figlio di Bakunìn (1991), Il quinto passo è l’addio (1995), Passavamo sulla terra leggeri (1996) and the short story Bellas mariposas (1996). His critical awareness of the past is also clearly visible in his posthumously-published essay Raccontar fole (1999), in which he attempts to lay bare the falsehoods contained in a great many travel writings on Sardinia.26

23

Marci 2006: 279. Salvatore Mannuzzu, Procedura (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1988) and Un morso di formica (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1989). Idem, ‘Finis Sardiniae (o la patria possibile)’, in Berlinguer and Mattone (1998): 1223-1244. 25 Marci 1999; Marci and Sulis 2001. 26 Sergio Atzeni, Apologo del giudice bandito (Palermo: Sellerio editore, 1986, 4th ed. 1998); Il figlio di Bakunìn (Nuoro: Edizioni Il Maestrale, 1991; 5th ed. 1999); Il quinto passo è l’addio (Nuoro: Edizioni Il Maestrale, 1998; 1st ed. Einaudi, Milan, 1995); Passavamo sulla terra leggeri (Nuoro: Edizioni Il Maestrale, 1997; 1st ed. Mondadori, Milan, 1996); Bellas mariposas (Palermo: Sellerio editore, 1996, 4th ed. 2005); Raccontar fole (Palermo: Sellerio editore, 1999). 24

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Alongside the narrative texts are a series of essays whose position at the centre of a great debate made them a crucial part of Sardinian literary discourse. They include the work of German scholar Max Leopold Wagner, widely considered to be the father of Sardinian linguistics.27 The similarity between his observations on everyday life in Sardinia (in its interior regions) and the image of the island portrayed in the works of Deledda and the 19th-century travellers gives a clear idea of the continuity of representations of Sardinia up to the 20th century and their general diffusion into genres other than the narrative. Another European scholar of great renown in Sardinian culture is Maurice Le Lannou, who visited the island under the Fascist regime. Though essentially a properly-documented academic work, his Pâtres et paysans de la Sardaigne (1941) sets out a dualistic vision of Sardinian society, divided, in accordance with tradition, between its pastoral identity and its agricultural and urban one; here again, there is

27

Max Leopold Wagner, La lingua sarda. Storia spirito e forma (Bern: Francke, s.d. [1950]), new Italian edition with the title La lingua sarda, ed. Giulio Paulis (Nuoro: Ilisso, 1997). Reiterating the superiority of the Barbagian version of Sardinian identity on the grounds of its archaism, the book implicitly confirms the cultural and symbolic primacy of pastoral society in the Sardinian interior. Idem, Das ländliche Leben Sardiniens im Spiegel der Sprache. Kulturhistorisc-sprachliche Untersuchungen (Heidelberg: Wörter und Sachen, Kulturhistorische Zeitschrift für Sprach-und Sachforschung, Beiheft 4, Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1921), now translated into Italian: La vita rustica della Sardegna riflessa nella lingua, edited by Giulio Paulis (Nuoro: Ilisso, 1996). Essential for the purposes of this research are Wagner’s accounts of his travels in Sardinia: Max Leopold Wagner, ‘Sulcis und Iglesiente. Ein Reisebild aus Sardinien’, in Globus: Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länderund Völkerkunde, XCII, 1, 1907, pp. 4-11; ‘Das Gennargéntu-Gebiet. Ein Reisebild aus Sardinien’, ibid., XCIII, 16, 1908, pp. 105-108; ‘Das Nuorese. Ein Reisebild aus Sardinien’, ibid., XCIII, 16, 1908, pp. 245-249; ‘Das Nuorese. Ein Reisebild aus Sardinien’, ibid., XCIII, 16, 1908, pp. 266-269; ‘Reisebilder aus Sardinien. IV: Sárrabus und Ogliastra’, ibid., XCIV, 3, 1908, pp. 40-45; ‘Reisebilder aus Sardinien. V: Das Campidano’, ibid., XCIV, 4, 1908, pp. 57-61; ‘Reisebilder aus Sardinien. Temotal, Macomér und Tirsotal’, ibid., XCIV, 5, 1908, pp. 71-76; and ‘Die Barbagia in Sardinien’, in Deutsche Rundschau für Geographie, XXXVI, 1913-1914, pp. 1-13. These works are now translated into Italian: Immagini di viaggio dalla Sardegna, edited by Giulio Paulis (Nuoro: Ilisso, 2001).

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some resonance between the book’s basic viewpoint and the literary discourse previous to it.28 Among the most influential Sardinian intellectuals of the last century mention should certainly be made of archaeologist Giovanni Lilliu (1914-2012), who discovered the Barumini nuraghe site and in 1963 wrote La civiltà dei Sardi dal Neolitico all’età dei nuraghi, a work which stands as a milestone in Sardinian culture.29 This wellresearched prehistorical study contains a precise and complex interpretation of Sardinian history that the author later summed up in the term “the constant of Sardinian resistance” (la costante resistenziale). This interpretative key had a decisive influence on the cultural debate but also on local opinion, and only recently has it been subjected to critical revision.30 Reference will be made to Lilliu not so much because of his archaeological discoveries as because of the role played by his conception of Sardinian civilisation in literary and political discourse. The 1950s and ‘60s saw the publication of a number of essays whose influence is still clearly perceptible. Mention should first be made of the contribution made by anthropologist Franco Cagnetta and his Inchiesta su Orgosolo (1954) to the debate on conditions in the Barbagia.31 His analysis of pastoral society inspired one of the most important films ever to have been set in Sardinia: Banditi a Orgosolo (1961), directed by Vittorio De Seta.32 In 1959 renowned legal scholar Antonio Pigliaru published La vendetta barbaricina come ordinamento giuridico, containing the results of his research on the Sardinian culture of personal vendetta.33 Underlying his reflections was the conviction that the Barbagia, the most depressed and archaic area of the island from which he came, had developed a culture of its own which was different from that of the Italian state but nonetheless 28

Maurice Le Lannou, Pâtres et paysans de la Sardaigne (Tours: Arrault, 1941), new translation into Italian by Manlio Brigaglia, Pastori e contadini di Sardegna (Cagliari: Edizioni Della Torre, 1st ed. 1979, 4th ed. 2006). 29 The book has been reprinted, extended and updated several times. The third edition was published in 1988 under the title La civiltà dei Sardi dal Paleolitico all’età dei nuraghi (Rome: Nuova ERI). In this regard see also Marci 2006: 267. 30 Lilliu 2002. A revision of certain interpretations of history, including the one advanced by Lilliu, is to be found in Angioni, Bachis, Caltagirone and Cossu 2007. 31 The text has been reprinted with the same title as the film in 1975 and 2002: Cagnetta 2002. 32 Olla 2008: 144-147. About the film Banditi a Orgosolo see chapter 3. 33 The text has been reprinted in an anthology: Pigliaru 2000.

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a culture in its own right in that it responded to the collective needs which had given rise to it. Banditry and the practice of the vendetta, two of the most controversial features of local culture, thus appear in Antonio Pigliaru’s interpretation as the historical product of a conflict between two worlds and two civilisations, in which the one theoretically more modern and advanced – the Italian state – took on the characteristics of a colonial power which oppressed the Barbagian community. Though it was the fruit of a genuinely democratic, sensitive spirit, highly authoritative in its research method and depth of analysis, this vision stands as a semantic reformulation of the relationship between Sardinia and mainland Italy as an unequal one, between the ‘primitive’ (oppressed and colonised) and the ‘modern’ (oppressive and colonialist). Pagliaru’s text also played a key role in the national debate because that time was marked by a recrudescence of banditry, but it remains influential to this day. Drawing specifically on Pagliaru’s theories are a number of films which bear witness to the impact his writings had on Italian society in the second half of the 20th century. The same may be said of Giuseppe Fiori. Besides the novel Sonetàula and several biographies, including some of illustrious Sardinians,34 he published thoroughgoing journalistic investigations into a number of socio-economic questions concerning the island. Emblematic examples are Baroni in laguna and above all La società del malessere, which inspired a series of films on banditry in the 1960s and ‘70s.35 One of the salient facts emerging from the corpus presented above is the predominant role of Sardinian narrators in the creation and dissemination of the 20th-century image of Sardinia. This would seem to imply that after a century in which it was prevalently the subject of outsiders’ narratives, the island has finally become able to 34 Worthy of mention among his biographies are those of Antonio Gramsci and Emilio Lussu, to which ample reference is made in the appropriate chapter: Giuseppe Fiori, Vita di Antonio Gramsci (Nuoro: Ilisso, 2003, new edition of Vita di Antonio Gramsci, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1975) and Il cavaliere dei Rossomori (Turin: Einaudi, 1st ed. ‘Gli struzzi’, 1985; 2nd ed. 2000). 35 Giuseppe Fiori, Baroni in laguna (Cagliari; Edizioni del Bogino, 1961); Idem, La società del malessere (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1968). The two texts have been reprinted in a single volume: Baroni in laguna. La società del malessere (Rome-Bari: Editori Laterza, 1977).

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tell its own story, independent from foreign influences. As will be seen below, however, an analysis of the texts produces no decisive or clear change in the way Sardinians are portrayed. What does emerge is the appearance of dissonant voices, some explicitly subversive of the established canon, as a result of which the repertoire of images tends to expand but without any clean break. The following pages will thus explore elements of both continuity and novelty in the representation of Sardinia and its people in the 20th century. Tropes of Land In the 20th century the representation of Sardinia continued to be characterised by the tropes present in earlier sources, but new ones also emerged. This trend has continued to the present day, without one type wholly prevailing over the other. This section will discuss the traditional images and the new tropes attributed to Sardinia in literature. The Land as a Projection of National Identity Crawford Flitch had no doubts on the subject: “Everybody knows how the destiny of a race is shaped by its environment”.36 He did not deduce from this assumption that man absorbs every feature of the land in which he lives, or that he comes to resemble it. It is rather the case that “[p]laces, not less than men, are haunted by their past”.37 He felt that inanimate objects express the spirit of a place.38 Sardinian literature provides many examples of this conviction – the inhabitants of a landscape frequently mirror its characteristics. In Deledda’s novels geography and history coincide, and the natural elements are tangible reflections of the essence of the Sardinian character. One example is the setting for the peace-making ritual which puts an end to a local blood feud (disamistade): the “hot, almost austere, spring of the uplands” and “the grandiose landscape” appear as a “worthy background to the picture populated by fine-looking people” who take part in the solemn ceremony.39 The sight of places, rocks and forms of vegetable or animal life – everything stands for tradition, for the 36

Crawford Flitch 1911: 272. Ibid., 273. 38 Ibid. 39 Deledda 1981c: 528. 37

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collective memory. Sardinians see the manifestations of nature as an epiphany of their being, and therefore of their past and their origins. Thus in the mind of the protagonist of Colombi e sparvieri Jorgj, listening to his father’s stories of the disamistade in his village, “his imagination flitted here and there like partridges in the olive-trees, and in every stone he saw a memory, in every whispering spring he listened to a legend”.40 As the living memory of the Sardinian people, the landscape and its features communicate the memory of the people’s struggle against an ever-adverse destiny.41 The world around him seems to Jorgj’s eyes “sharp and hard”, a “world made of rock and scrub with branches twisted like limbs which the eternal struggle with the wind has gnarled and bent but not beaten”.42 Remembering her admiration of the landscape from the gallery of the train carrying her to K*** (representing Cagliari), in Cosima Grazia Deledda speaks of “oaks hardened by the pain of the centuries and by their resistance to time and the elements”.43 The image of the wind bending the trees without breaking them – the metaphors of men as wisps of straw,44 rose petals, reeds bent by the wind45 – is also central to Canne al vento (1913).46 Though they lend themselves to a universal interpretation, these metaphors are impregnated with a very specific cultural tradition, one

40

Ibid., 541. In an article written on her first journey back to Sardinia (1901), Grazia Deledda (2011c: 234) wrote, “I always feel a deep, sad fascination when I cross the painful Sardinian landscapes. Sardinia appears to me as a beautiful slave to ill fortune – half naked, lying in the sun, sad and rather slothful, awaiting freedom and better days that will never come”. 42 Deledda 1981c: 543. 43 Deledda 1971c: 816-817. 44 Satta 1979: 196. 45 Marci 1991a: 38. 46 In Canne al vento, Efix says “we’re just like reeds in the wind, dear donna Ester. That’s why! We are reeds, and fate is the wind” (Deledda 1971b: 366). In another passage “Efix also thought of the torrential rains which swell the bankless river and make it spring like a monster and sweep all before it: to hope, yes, but never to trust; to be vigilant like the reeds on the ridge which beat their leaves together at each gust of wind to warn each other of the danger” (ibid., 171-172). These quotations are also in Marci 1991b: 38-39. Deledda uses the image of a “weak, frail reed” to describe herself in a letter written in 1894 to Angelo De Gubernatis (Deledda 2007: 244). 41

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which contains a painful, hopeless vision of the Sardinian people.47 Being reeds in the wind is an ontological feature running through all Sardinian literature right up to the present, a “collective psychological given” expressed in the manifestations of nature,48 as the Sardinian soul springs out in the “strained melody” emitted by Atanai in Salvatore Cambosu’s Lo zufolo (1932), expressing the “millennial suffering of a race”.49 Thomas Münster sees the Sardinians’ profound melancholy as the index of a pessimistic view of life, tracing it back to an alleged distant and exotic origin – perhaps African or somehow connected with bedouin life in the desert.50 The external gaze and the inner gaze converge once again, providing the image of a land steeped in melancholy. It is a frame for the representation of a people eternally oppressed, bloody but unbowed, the trope defined by Salvatore Cambosu as the “myth of the unlucky star”.51 The South In line with the previous century, 20th-century sources describing Sardinia are marked by the contrasting concepts of North and South. Since Sardinia is considered an expression of the South, its Mediterranean character is emphasised and the features peculiar to the South, negative and positive alike, are ascribed to it. On the one hand, for instance, we read of the benefits of the warm climate typical of southern latitudes, and on the other attention is drawn to the problems caused by its excessive heat.52 While the beauty of a clear southern sky is without equal, the extreme heat of the southern regions is 47

Commenting on the concept of the human being as a reed in the wind, Marci (1991a: 39) observes: “It is much more than a literary theme. It is a given in the collective psychology, a sediment etched on the memory, the painful perception of a wounded self, an awareness of the pointlessness of any attempt at defence against threats too great”. 48 Marci 1991a: 39. 49 Ibid., 136. 50 Münster 2006: 112. 51 Cambosu 2004: 42. 52 Crawford Flitch 1911: 222: “I suspect that our only crime is our climate. If we had only had the southern sky, we should also have had the southern gaiety and grace of living”. Again on the pleasant climate: “It is the luck of latitude” (ibid., 224). In her article ‘Tipi e paesaggi di Sardegna’, published in the Nuova Antologia, December 16th 1901, Grazia Deledda (2011c: 233) noted the dramatic effects of the climate on the Sardinian landscape: “For someone who has never crossed the Sardinian countryside it is impossible to imagine how utterly parched it is in the summer”.

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harmful and unbearable, something best avoided.53 As is often the case in the characterisation of the literary trope of the South, intrinsic to its beauty there is something violent, excessive and decadent: The gladdening southern light is capable of an intensity that grips the soul with melancholy more fatally than the gloom of the North. Sooner or later in the experience of every northerner who lives in a southern latitude there comes a moment when he cannot help crying out, “Hateful is the dark blue sky vaulted o’er the dark blue sea”. The grateful southern heat can torture the body as well as comfort it. The eye wearies of the riot of colour, and searches in vain for cool and temperate tones. And that perpetual charm of Mediterranean countries, the sense of the encompassing past, may become suddenly so acute that the mind revolts against the tyranny of everything that is olden, and hates the untimely reminder that the end of strength is weakness, and of beauty decay. The beauty of the South is not assured and indestructible like that of a Greek statue; it depends upon the conjunction of felicitous circumstances; it is like the smile of a woman whose heart is seared. It is a mask, and I shall never again be quite secure against a misgiving that the mask may at any instant drop and disclose those features, as I saw them at Cabras, which are neither fresh nor kindly nor happy.54

In descriptions of the landscape too, nature is revealed as man’s enemy, able to torture and damage him with the extremes of her behaviour.55 The natural world is never described in terms of an earthly paradise, rather those of a scenario that may suddenly become 53 Thomas Münster (2006: 40) noted that the windows and shutters in his hotel room were sealed so tight that there was no way to let in the morning sun. This reminded him of the insufferance of southerners, and therefore of Sardinians, of the sun, which should not be allowed to torment man. According to Jünger (1999: 229) Sardinia, a “torrid rocky country”, was described as “an ante-chamber of hell” (ibid., 229) in the memoirs of a German artilleryman who spent two years on the island during the Second World War (ibid.). 54 Crawford Flitch 1911: 281. 55 Ibid., 262. According to Crawford Flitch (1911: 262) nature is both mother and step-mother: “Nature, who is so great an enemy to man in Sardinia, vexing him with extremes of heat, racking him with fevers, obstructing his progress with heartstraining hills and yielding only a grudging return to his painful labour, had relaxed her warfare”. Lawrence (2009: 141) noted that Deledda’s books captured the effects of the island’s summer heat.

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tragic and infernal. In her heartfelt description of the tragedy of the Sardinian peasants, Maria Giacobbe confirms the image of a harsh climate, in which the sun seems “bad”, a “wicked fiery-haired god”;56 Thomas Münster describes it as a “baleful diurnal ghost” not lacking in opportunities to torment the islanders.57 In his view they experience the open air as something hostile, a space where they are locked in an unequal struggle against nature and have to strain every sinew to wrest the fruit of their labour from the land.58 Pervading all Sardinian literature, this idea is in stark contrast to the tradition that depicted the island as highly fertile and blamed the idleness of its inhabitants for its poverty. Of that terra felix Sardinian novels bear not a trace. Don Sebastiano, protagonist of Il giorno del giudizio, considers his property at Isporòsile “his life’s work”,59 but every winter is compelled to declare war on a brook which takes on a hideous appearance and reveals its “real demon’s face”, rips boulders from the mountain and hurls them at the walls protecting his landholding.60 The descriptions of the countryside in which Gavino Ledda is initiated into the life of a shepherd is also a metaphor of the struggle for existence conducted by man against a hostile climate and environment. Examples are found in the biting cold of the winter, the 56

“The sun is very bad. It burns the land, the grass, everything. And the peasant works with the ox”. “The tragedy of his father, the tragedy of all Sardinians who live on and from the land, the tragedy of Sardinia. The sun which here is not a blessing but a wicked fiery-haired god. The tragedy of drought and at the same time of the infinite patience of the Sardinian peasant who continues to scratch the arid land with his oxdrawn plough. The tragedy of these children for whom the sun’s violence makes bread scarce and often gives nothing to put in it.” “The moon is poor. And cheerful. The moon moves across the sky alone and unclothed. But she cares not and has no children.” “The landscape changes. After sadness at the life of man held slave by the sun, the moon and the vastness of the sky in which she wanders in all the delight of her solitude [...]” (all quotations from Giacobbe 2003: 173). 57 Münster 2006: 40. 58 Ibid., 112. 59 Satta 1979: 74. 60 “On summer afternoons Don Sebastiano would saddle his horse and ride down to Isporòsile – his life’s work, the land he had snatched from the fury of a brook which flowed gently down from the looming Mountain. There was a silent war between him and the brook, which in summer showed its whitening bones amid the thorn-bushes but in winter showed its real demon’s face, ripping boulders from the mountain and hurling them at the walls which Don Sebastiano had erected, and built ever wider, to protect his crops. With a tremendous effort he had managed to take from the stream what little water there was underground, while in the sun there was nothing but fire and death” (Satta 1979: 74).

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thorns piercing the tender feet of the young shepherd, the terrifying encounter with his first snake, and the nightly torment of the fleas ‘swarming’ over the boy’s body “competing for the places where his skin was most vulnerable”.61 The winter cold alternates with dry, oppressive summers, accompanied by ominous swarms of locusts which, recalling biblical images, challenge the sheep for the last blades of grass and so perforce turn herbivores into insectivores, as the Sardinian landscape begins to resemble an inferno:62 The sky changed colour. No longer blue, it became opaque, smoky. The horizon was obscured by a strange fog. The atmosphere changed and clouds of locusts formed out of nothing. With no thunder or lightning, suddenly the most terrible storm broke. The locusts poured down from above by the thousand, landing on top of each other in a vortex of wings. The sun was eclipsed and could not be seen for two or three hours, as if overpowered by the smoke of a fierce fire. Many shepherds tied amulets to the trees and the corn to exorcise them, but to no avail.63

The scourge of locusts is also described in Apologo del giudice bandito. The low yellow cloud advancing across the plain takes on a diabolical appearance, becoming a “bony yellow grin of hunger”; a contemptuous threat bearing down on the peasants, it “looks them in the eye and laughs at them”.64 Even without the locusts, the Sardinian countryside is depicted as a place of privation and suffering, where the ears of corn are “green, stunted” and “swell slowly to yield but a few bushels of flour”;65 only through backbreaking labour are the peasants able to scratch out a living.66 Then there is the nine-month drought followed by a flood in Il figlio di Bakunìn and the sudden frost which 61

Ledda 1975: 48; 23-24; 25-27; 28. Ibid., 55-56. “More striking was the sight of the sheep in that unforgiving struggle against death. Their heads hung low, finding nothing else in their field in the morning they grazed on a moving pasture: the terrible, voracious summer snow. And as they chewed the locusts they seemed to be defying nature itself, as if saying to the locusts ‘you eat my grass and I’ll eat you’” (ibid., 56). 63 Ibid., 54. 64 Atzeni 1986: 10. 65 Ibid., 9. 66 Ibid. 62

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devastates Gavino Ledda’s father’s olive grove67 – considered the “wonder of Baddefrustana”68 – and the years of sacrifice which have gone into it. And lastly, the flock wiped out by drought, further proof of man’s impotence in the face of an uncontrollable climate.69 Thus is nature in this land: ferocious, without restraint, going from one extreme to the other, as if it wished only to try the patience of its inhabitants.70 Although the weather in Sardinia is sometimes indeed unpredictable, its literary representation is dominated by a sense of impotence and precariousness, as witnessed by the constant use of adjectives and references evoking solitude and melancholy as basic assumptions in the Sardinian view of reality. Sardinia is presented as the physical and moral setting for an eternal struggle for existence, it has the double face of mother and stepmother, she who gives life but can also take it at any time. She who subjects her people to repeated misfortunes and thereby forges their spirit, imbuing them with courage, strength and guile, their only weapons in an unequal battle against destiny. As in the case of Zuanne Malune, nicknamed Sonetàula,71 who “living thus, exposed to the harshness of the heavens and of man”, “had emerged from the cocoon of early infancy different in appearance and character”.72 67

Atzeni 1991: 116. Ledda 1975: 130-131. Ledda 1975: 122. 69 Fiori 2008: 50: “The clappers were lazy in the bells. Some sheep began to turn their heads and fall. Others fended off the assault of their newborn, pushing them gently away almost in a caress, maternal and exhausted. Still others threw themselves down on their sides to be killed by their lambs’ last suck. It was a time of plenty for dogs and vultures. In the cemeteries men had dug up skulls and bones in a hopeless act of sacrilegious defiance to the sky, almost as if to provoke it to seethe with clouds. No use. In those folds, arid as if sown with salt, among those animals in search of stalks and fronds, the shepherds felt they could bear no more”. See also ibid., 50. The same image is found in La società del malessere: “And the arid fields, as if they were sown with salt, now have the colour of disease, bare land yellowed by a finger of dry grass” (Fiori 2008: 69). Barbagian shepherds were sometimes compelled to slit their lambs’ throats in a desperate attempt to save the starving ewes if nothing else (ibid., 71-72). Fiori identifies the precariousness caused by climatic extremes as one of the defining characteristics of the shepherd’s condition, along with poverty and backwardness (ibid., 73). Yet amid the clamour of these tragedies, “drought makes no noise, it is a discreet scourge” (ibid., 77). 70 Atzeni 1991: 116. 71 The nickname is in itself ominous: “sonu ‘e tàula, sound of wood, like being in a coffin” (Fiori 2008: 21; see Marci 1991a: 224). 72 Fiori 2008: 22. 68

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Even in the description of lighter moments, the positive notes are qualified. In Cenere (1903), the Sardinian spring resembles a “wild young lass” running and singing in perfect symbiosis with the nature around her.73 But it is a bucolic picture which concludes with a reference to honey “bitter and sweet like the Sardinian soul”.74 The painful note of the island spirit is reflected in nature’s manifestations: the “wild flower” which opens “its melancholy violet petals”;75 the “sad wild plain” visited by Deledda on one of her excursions;76 the “melancholy scrubland”77 and the “funereal serenity of the great dead landscape, of the great solitary sky”;78 the “forest that laughed in the night, yet the leaves that fell from the oaks were like tears”;79 the “wild and beautiful hills” which, with the scent of periwinkle and asphodel, ring to a shepherd’s song, a “gentle classical lament like an Idyll by Theocritus”.80 And lastly, zia Varvara’s nostalgic words, which had “the aroma of her native land, the breeze loaded with the wild herbs of the Orthobene and the Gennargentu”.81 In these images the Sardinian spirit and land reflect each other and are fused in a wild, melancholy harmony.82 Besides the climatic and territorial factors that contribute to forging Sardinia’s southern identity, the North-South dichotomy has a further dimension: the physical split between the island and mainland Italy. In literary discourse Sardinia’s insular character goes beyond geography to become the icon of isolation and thus one of the most effective symbols to express its distance from the Italian and European 73

Deledda 1981b: 153. Ibid. 75 Deledda 1971d: 96. 76 Deledda 2007: 110. 77 Deledda 1981e: 458. 78 Ibid. 79 Deledda 1981f: 794. 80 Deledda 2007: 332. 81 Deledda 1981b: 168. 82 In 1895 Deledda (2007: 260) stated that she had read a letter from Angelo De Gubernatis in “a highly picturesque and solitary place, on the bank of a stream beneath almond trees already in bloom”. Her choice of adjectives immediately calls to mind two features typical of the island landscape, but the scene presents itself to her eyes as an example of man’s symbiotic relationship with nature, as she recalls describing her infinite love for nature and “how it affects [her] temperament” (ibid.). 74

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model of civilisation. According to Crawford Flitch its isolation “is partly accounted for by the configuration of the island. Sardinia turns its back upon Italy”.83 This image is the literary re-creation of the idea of an island turned in upon itself, unable to break out of its natural borders, and it emphasises the crucial role of the mountains as a barrier, an obstacle to contact with the continent.84 Insularity is projected symbolically in the feeling of “being an island” peculiar to every Sardinian.85 Twentieth-century literature gives voice to the contrasting feelings evoked by this condition. On the one hand there is “the Sardinians’ particular Insel-spleen, a sort of historical awareness of isolation and detachment, I would say of the inability to communicate with the Italy to which Sardinia has always been considered bound ethnically, historically and geographically”.86 The greatest pain of Dessì’s childhood and youth was his unrequited love for Italy, for which he felt an “aching love”,87 the love that “people of the South have for the North”; while he had no illusions about Italy’s “congenital incapacity to understand Sardinia”.88 On the other hand there is an awareness of the impossibility of getting away from the island, from the sentimental and psychological condition of being islanders. Even the “Sardinian who lives on the mainland always has the sea behind him, a zone of silence and darkness which separates him from the maternal world of his island”.89 Despite the physical and psychological divide typical of every Sardinian, though, Dessì reasserts the indissoluble bond with this native land, that “little

83

Crawford Flitch 1911: 293. “Along the whole of the eastern coast runs a mountain chain which presents a brusque escarpment towards the mainland and makes the island difficult of access on this side. On the western side the mountains sink to the sea-level in gentler declivities, the rivers flow down widening valleys to pour themselves into that empty basin of the Mediterranean which lies between Sardinia and the islands of Spain. With the exception of the plain of the Campidano between Cagliari and Oristano, once an arm of the sea, the rest of the island, which has a greater extent than Wales, is a network of mountain ranges. They culminate in the centre in the great mass of the Gennargentu” (Crawford Flitch 1911: 293-294). 85 In a letter to his wife Julca Schucht, Gramsci recalled writings in which it was stated that every Sardinian was an island within an island. Though the idea amused him, he acknowledged that it may have contained a basic truth (Gramsci 1994: 383). 86 Dessì 1965: XIII. 87 Ibid., XIX. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., XV. 84

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homeland” in which he became a man and with which he identifies.90 In his eyes the relationship between the island and the mainland is configured as an insoluble bipolarity, in which Sardinia stands as the mother’s womb, unique and irreplaceable for its offspring. From this standpoint the return of the Sardinian to his homeland is inevitable, as in the case of Anania (Cenere), who is driven from the mainland by the need to see her mother again. Saverio (Il disertore) abandons the trenches of the Great War and makes the journey home as if transported by an unknown force.91 Having discovered the world beyond the sea, Gavino (Padre padrone) decides to return to Sardinia strengthened by a new self-awareness. It is no coincidence that the long sequence of returns has been broken only in recent years, with Ruggero Gunale (Il quinto passo è l’addio), who leaves Sardinia for good without knowing exactly where to go or what to look for.92 Through him writer Sergio Atzeni shows a Sardinia standardised to the rest of the world, with the same character and the same concerns, no better and no worse than the mainland – a land that has finally rediscovered its insularity without falling into the trope of ‘islandness’. Wilderness and Primitivism The harshness and unpredictability of the Sardinian climate is not only a literary theme, it stands confirmed by the painstaking observations carried out on the island in the 1930s by French geographer Maurice Le Lannou. Recognising its geographical conditions as the original cause of so many of its people’s historical problems, he echoes the views of the travellers and writers who preceded him on his journey of discovery; it is no coincidence that he begins his study Pâtres et paysans de la Sardaigne (1941) with a quotation from Valery and goes on to state that nature has determined the course of the island’s history.93 Although Le Lannou’s analysis is a reflection based on empirical data, discoveries and considerations, it displays a tendency to classify Sardinia as an unusual place, even compared to other 90

Ibid., XIX. Maxia 2004: 20; 27. 92 Atzeni 1998. 93 Le Lannou 1941: 9 and 22. 91

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Mediterranean regions. His work thus contributes to revisiting the trope of a land so unique as to configure a full-blown continent, exactly as it appeared to the eyes of the writers who had been before him. According to D. H. Lawrence, Sardinia reminded him of Malta: lost between Europe and Africa and belonging to nowhere. Belonging to nowhere, never having belonged to anywhere. To Spain and the Arabs and the Phoenicians most. But as if it had never really had a fate. No fate. Left outside of time and history.94

This confirms the image of a place extraneous to the laws of nature and history, and thus completely different from anything that might be experienced in a journey on the Italian mainland.95 Lawrence’s description is built on two opposed models of landscape in which we may identify an image contrasting the ideas of Italy (alias the North, the continental mainland) and Sardinia (alias the South, the island).96 The continental model is based on the popularity of the Grand Tour of the 17th and 18th centuries, typified by visits to famous Italian cities and appreciation of a splendid natural landscape rich in ruins which evoke classical antiquity. Depictions of the Sardinian landscape, by contrast, are devoid of explicit references to the handiwork of man, almost as if it were virgin territory, still untouched, whose main physical feature is open space. The ruins of classical civilisation still emerging in the Italian landscape stand in opposition to the primordial dimension of the indefinite, potentially unbounded, Sardinian space. This spatial characteristic coincides with a temporality which is 94

Lawrence 2009: 51. “This is very different from Italian landscape. Italy is always almost dramatic, and perhaps invariably romantic. There is a drama in the Plains of Lombardy and romance in the Venetian lagoons, and sheer scenic excitement in nearly all the hilly parts of the peninsula. Perhaps it is the natural floridity of limestone formations. But Italian landscape is really eighteenth-century landscape, to which makes everything rather marvellous and very topical: aqueducts, and ruins upon sugar-loaf mountains, and craggy ravines and Wilhelm Meister waterfalls: all up and down. Sardinia is another thing. Much wider, much more ordinary, not up-and-down at all, but running away into the distance. Unremarkable ridges of moor-like hills running away, perhaps to a bunch of dramatic peaks on the south-west. This gives a sense of space, which is so lacking in Italy. Lovely space about one, and travelling distances – nothing finished, nothing final. It is like liberty itself, after the peaky confinement of Sicily. Room – give me room – for my spirit: and you can have all the topping crags of romance” (Lawrence 2009: 65-66). 96 See Arndt 2007: 388-389. 95

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equally indefinite but projected into the past, as we are led to believe by visualising the idea of an island which stretches as far as the eye can see. This lack of limits and constraints also finds expression in nature’s manifestations, such as the extraordinary dimensions to which the heather and scrub can grow. Yet this land is only seemingly empty because it expresses a profound morality: the vastness of its space stands as the icon of man’s primordial freedom. The island’s physical features evoke the moral qualities of its inhabitants: the wide open spaces of landscape find their counterpoint in the free and indomitable spirit of the islanders – wild creatures compelled for centuries to defend themselves against foreign invaders – and there reemerges the image of the savage world, evoked in a similitude by the term “Celtic”. The flora and fauna manifest the characteristics attributed to the Sardinian soul: the bushes of the Mediterranean scrub are overgrown and brigandish, the cattle are black and wild-looking.97 Decades after Lawrence’s journey, Ernst Jünger remarks on the primitive character of the island’s natural features – redolent, he thinks, of the beginning of time.98 Associated with such a primordial habitat are prehistoric forms of human habitation, in which nature and culture are completely fused.99 The Sardinian landscape continues to be identified with a wild habitat which progress and the advent of the railway seem to have left untouched.100 This applies above all to the island’s mountainous interior, in which the road to Nuoro is “lonely and wild”,101 and the country around the one leading to the village of Mamoiada is among the “harshest and wildest to be seen, where nature itself has the fleeting and untouchable appearance of the fox: stones, scrub, expanses of sheep and silence”; near Nuoro, the road to 97 “Only the heath and scrub, breast-high, man-high, is too big and brigand-like for a Celtic land. The horns of black, wild-looking cattle show sometimes” (Lawrence 2009: 66). As had been observed in previous sources, 19th-century accounts also mentioned the small size of animals as a peculiar feature of the Sardinian fauna (see also Leopold von Schloëzer 1926: 24-25). 98 Jünger 1999: 82. See also Pala 2002a: 49-54. 99 Jünger 1999: 83. 100 One example is the description of the countryside, which after a train passes seems “more deserted and silent than before. In the silence Angelo heard the rustling of the woods, as deep and complex as the anxious murmur of a crowd” (Dessì 1972: 108; also ibid., 126). 101 Levi 2003: 74.

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Locoe is “a dirt track, all sudden twists, clefts of trees and rocks – a ferocious nocturnal elsewhere”;102 the route to Orune has the “unsettling appearance of wild solitude”.103 The island’s isolation and the mystery in which it was shrouded were inextricably mixed with its primitive condition. Travellers felt drawn to Sardinia because it was a land populated by ‘barbarians’. European interest in primitive cultures at the turn of the century104 coincided with the beginning of the campaign launched by Sardinian intellectuals in favour of their native culture. In Sardinian literature the trope of the wild and primitive island was altered by a positive attitude to Sardinian primitivism. The champion of this interpretation was Grazia Deledda, who was decisive in disseminating an image of the Sardinian character and the island itself which at once confirmed and transformed all the tropes then current. In her view archaism was a value, expressing fealty to a lifestyle which is simple but authentic and pure, worthy of brave and unsullied souls. In a letter (1896) in which she comments on Paolo Orano’s Psicologia della Sardegna, rejecting the familiar accusation of corruption and barbarism levelled at the islanders, Deledda expresses the hope that one day Sardinia may appear “in its real intimate character, so grand in its wild mystery”.105 This choice of vocabulary (grand, wild, mystery) recalls romantic visions in which the appalling and the wonderful often coincide and where, above all, the reaction of European travellers to Sardinian (and other) primitivism, a mixture of wonder and contempt, gives way to deep appreciation for a world still archaic and thus worthy of note. This semantic redefinition of the concept of primitive as positive and ennobling, of which Deledda was the main proponent, was found in other forms of Sardinian artistic expression in the early 20th century. And it was a fundamental feature in the work of avantgarde Italian painters such as Antonio Ballero, Giuseppe Biasi and Filippo Figari, some of whom were Deledda’s friends and artistic collaborators.106 It was also apparent in the work of their compatriot Francesco Ciusa, a sculptor who achieved international renown on the 102

Vittorini 2003: 94; also ibid., 104. Levi 2003: 120. 104 Leerssen 2007i: 406-408. 105 Deledda 2007: 312. 106 On Ballero see the study by Naitza and Scano 1986 and Scano’s more recent synthesis (2004). Altea and Magnani 1998; Altea 2004; Murtas 1996. On Deledda’s artistic collaboration with these artists see Ciusa 1992: 121-144. 103

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strength of work imbued with a profound moral tension.107 As will be seen in the section Women below, the techniques used by the abovementioned artists (the immobility of the figures, their depiction with stylised, essential and geometrical features, explicit juxtapostion with the north African and Oriental world), though varied in individual style and development, deliberately re-evoke feelings such as austerity, seriousness and dignity – all values which express the simple, genuine nobility of a primitive people. The ideological perspective which guided the hands of these artists thus reproduced on a Sardinian scale the projection of western myths and fantasies carried out by the European elite with regard to the local cultures of colonised countries. In the case of Sardinia, however, this process was not confined to creating the image of the other as something opposite and irreconcilable, rather the artists in question invested the traditional island world (conceived as primitive, archaic and barbaric) with the task of embodying and giving new life to the idea of Sardinian identity.108 The taste for the primitive provided the opportunity for a highly ideologised and noble representation of the island world. What is remarkable is that this attitude continued to predominate in the debate on, and the image of, Sardinian identity even after the Second World War, involving leading political and cultural figures, while in Europe new ideological paradigms were coming to the fore. In his work Sardegna: isola anticlassica, in 1946 Giovanni Lilliu stated “in none of our lands does the barbaric note sound more distinctly than in this isolated heath, which is also the most ancient, born in the mysterious distances of the azoic age”.109 Though acknowledging the imperfections of Sardinian art, he saw in it “the primordial freshness of every barbaric world”.110 He did not think that this was simply the essence of primitive art in Sardinia but a constant in artistic production up to the 20th century, and thus the fundamental key in which Sardinian civilisation expressed itself. He saw the barbaric character as something intrinsic to the islanders’ soul, which 107

About this artist see Bossaglia 1998. Cfr. Altea and Magnani 1998: 33. 109 Lilliu 2002: 130. 110 Ibid., 130. 108

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was by nature “reticent and quiet in its primitive essentiality” and revealed an ancestral nature “antagonistic and argumentative (that is to say inclined to resistance) of a ‘barbaric’ or ‘anti-classical’ type”.111 In this Sardinian archaeologist’s interpretation, primitivism is the key to the island’s cultural identity and as such is an absolute paradigm, to the extent that he hoped that Sardinian artists would continue to express this innate tendency in the future. To do so they would have to keep their “thought and culture within the innocence and ‘barbaric’ ardour of their origins”.112 The influence of Lilliu’s ideas in humanistic studies is witnessed by the fact that Corrado Maltese, one of the leading art historians of his generation, took up his conceptual pairing of ‘anti-classical’ and ‘barbaric’ and built a systematic interpretation of Sardinian art around it.113 The trope of the primitive which was rooted in the literary tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries thus continued to be productive the 20th, acquiring in Deledda’s work the status of an innate and essential element of Sardinian identity. From a state of ambiguity, ever the object of judgements combining admiration and contempt, the primitive and barbaric island thus became a positive model of antimodernism, initially as the trope extolled by a European bourgeoisie in the throes of an identity crisis and then as the icon of a Sardinian intellectual class attempting to establish as a value what common opinion held to be an anti-value. The upgrading of Sardinian barbarism and primitivism thus constitutes the essential key for interpreting both literary production per se and academic research on it, so much so that we may conclude that the same trope continues to provide the key to comprehending Sardinian culture in the second half of the century. In Deledda’s poetry the value of Sardinian civilisation is projected into its origins, into an archaism that becomes a myth. In Giovanni Lilliu’s interpretative paradigm Sardinian identity is made to coincide with a specific time in that past: the age of the nuraghi, seen as the most glorious period in the population’s history. Lilliu sees the island as the domain of Sardinian identity in that it still bears visible traces of the nuraghe civilisation. The conspicuous presence of about 8,000 nuraghi – the mysterious towers which symbolise the 111

Ibid., 132 and 232. Ibid., 132. 113 See for example Maltese 1962: 462 and foll., quoted by Lilliu 2002: 232. 112

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civilisation named after them – also helps piece together a virtual map of the contemporary Sardinian landscape. Unique constructions which engendered doubt and the most disparate theories in the minds of European travellers at a time when archaeologists had yet to produce satisfactory explanations regarding the society that had built them, the nuraghi were among the clearest and most recognisable signs of Sardinian cultural diversity – they stood as icons in a totemic landscape.114 In the past, the argument runs, Sardinians themselves had long recognised these megalithic constructions not as artistic artefacts or historical monuments but as something which had emerged spontaneously in the landscape.115 Their identification with the island territory is therefore total, nothing separates them, the former appear as the natural consequence of the latter, thus the massive shapes of the prehistoric towers are comparable to huge truncated cones that a primordial subterranean energy seems to have thrust out of the ground.116 While Maurice Le Lannou sees the nuraghi simply as the fossil remains of a world long gone, for Jünger they are the symbol of the “island’s golden age”.117 And they are not just a relic of the past, because the nuraghe civilisation was identifiable with the pastoral world, in the exact same way as was Sardinian society in the 1950s when Jünger visited it. In literary discourse the nuraghe thus becomes the most important emblem of a territory. No longer simply the vestige of a past epoch, it is a symbol, the epiphany of an ethnos.118 In response to Le Lannou, Lilliu stated that “perhaps in the old nuraghe there is something of the secret of the young Sardinia and its hopes for

114

Cfr. Angioni, Bachis, Caltagirone and Cossu 2007: 131. See chapter 5, section Prehistory as a Topos of Sardinian Identity. 115 Giacobbe 1974: 13-14. 116 Jünger 1999: 212. 117 Ibid., 227. 118 Speaking of the Archaeological Museum in Cagliari, Jünger (1999: 208) recalled that even a fleeting glimpse was enough to convince the visitor that the nuraghe civilisation was the island’s golden age. And Sardinia was still first and foremost a land of shepherds, just as it was in the age of the nuraghe.

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the future”.119 A native of Barumini, a village standing in the shadow of the island’s biggest nuraghe complex, this democratic politician and intellectual thus built his position on the ‘Sardinian question’ around a mythicised vision of the nuraghe civilisation, investing all his hopes for the rebirth of the island people in a recovery of the values they expressed in that distant but still tangible past. He thought that the nuraghi, imposing megalithic structures standing out in the landscape, not only reminded visitors of the glories of that past, but reiterated to his fellow islanders the idea of the struggle for freedom of a people never completely vanquished by its conquerors. The nuraghe is the monument to the civilisation of the indomitable shepherds. The island space scattered with nuraghi, domos de janas and other megalithic structures is no longer simply a place bearing the historical traces of a people, but the place in which the epiphany of Sardinian identity is constantly renewed. Solitude Anyone crossing the island is compelled to face the contemporaneous presence of different ages, is confronted with a past still highly visible in the shapes of the landscape and the modus vivendi. Observing the Sardinian world one feels its distance, its remoteness – a feature repeatedly used by writers to define its places and people. Such a context generates a sense of profound solitude – the predominant feeling in the island’s landscape – which, associated to melancholy, pervades all creatures and every place.120 In the bay of Terranova, near Olbia, the sight of a sail arouses a feeling of “immobile solitude” in Vittorini, and “recalls centuries of primitive existence”, the “first certain omen of the character” of 119

Lilliu 2002: 155. It is interesting to note that Lilliu applied the same reasoning when expressing his opinion on an exhibition of contemporary French painting. In the exhibits he recognised the same anti-classical spirit that he considered typical of Sardinian art, the expression of a language opposite to that based on classical perfectionism but meritorious because of its “Mediterranean” flavour, which in turn revealed in the artists “a soul in all its primitive fullness”. Anti-classical art was held to be distinguished by its immediate and universal vernacular, sympathic and conducive to brotherhood (Pensieri sulla Sardegna, published in Lilliu 2002: 160). 120 Cfr. Lawrence 2009: 61, 134. Deledda 2011c: 223. References to solitude in Deledda’s work are innumerable. One example is “the sonorous nostalgic songs that seemed to be impregnated with the solemn sadness of the heath, of the night, of solitude, rose up and spread through the noises of the crowd, filling the air with dream flowers” (Deledda 1971d: 49).

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Sardinia.121 The same feeling is writ large in the sources as the sign of a world lost in its mythical past: “Above all it is Sardinia: in this solitude of all things, of every crag which seems closed in on itself in meditation, of every tree or traveller encountered, and in this light, and in this smell of herds on the move, well beyond the horizon”.122 Giuseppe Dessì defines solitude as a “spatial and temporal” sensation which surrounds every Sardinian like “a halo of mystery” and shows no sign of fading, despite the proliferation of plans for modernising the island.123 This feeling is a “constant condition, the Sardinian’s destiny”; in some villages in the Barbagia “the solitude is such that it becomes anguish”.124 Perhaps, he admits, this solitude is to be identified with the feeling of reliving the prehistory that strikes anyone visiting the island.125 In addition to its primitive artefacts, the island’s natural circumstances also help reinforce the sense of solitude. A hostile environment, subjected to the violent whims of the elements, becomes the setting in which the individual inevitably finds himself alone. In Padre padrone the long and difficult initiation of the young shepherd is marked by the feeling of complete abandonment in a hostile environment.126 To the all-pervading solitude the shepherd-boy Gavino tries to react by using a “language of silence”, a human way of trying to interact with his surroundings. “Because of the solitude, to me nature represents an indefinite ‘you’: the only friendly ‘you’ I can

121

Vittorini 2009: 27. “Ma soprattutto è Sardegna: per questa solitudine d’ogni cosa, d’ogni rupe che par chiusa in se stessa, meditando, e d’ogni albero o viandante che s’incontra, e per questa luce, e per quest’odore di mandrie in cammino, assai al di là nell’orizzonte” (Vittorini 2009: 43). 123 Dessì 1965: XVI. 124 Ibid., XII. Ibid.: “With the exception of some urban centres, apart from Cagliari and Sassari of course, the idea of time up there is different, not only from that in the industrial areas of the north, but also from the countryside in central Italy. Not a social, collective time but subjective and individual, beyond the measure given to the life of the one by that of all the others”. See also Baumann 2007: 100-101. 125 Dessì 1965: XII; see below. 126 “And then that solitude seemed to me an interminable silence: listening to it dulled all my senses” (Ledda 1975: 21). 122

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talk to without shame or unease”.127 The human being thus enters and is part of a system that is at once magnificent and fearsome: Gavino the child, torn from his schooling and, metaphorically, from civilised life, becomes a “seed” which must “sprout and grow only in our field and obey the laws of the vegetable kingdom on the fallow ground of solitude, like all shepherd-boys in Sardinia” (my italics).128 No life is possible outside the symbiosis with the land. Silence expresses a condition of absolute stasis which is superior to, and more powerful than, all human affairs. In the anxiety of flight, after an attack in which he has witnessed the death of a close friend, the shepherdbandit Sonetàula “leaning his head on the rock, finally heard, really heard as if it were pure sound, the clear, broad silence of the countryside” (my italics).129 Silence also dominates descriptions of reassuring landscapes;130 natural manifestations assume human attributes,131 such as the silence emanated by Angelo Uras’ olive trees on the holding at Balanotti, where the souls of the dead are hidden,132 or “the murmur of the 127

Ledda 1975: 52. There is more: “This confidential language I had with nature, which was basically the language of silence, had become natural and familiar, almost as if reality were silence and things its words. The nicknames and the slice of reality that I created or used in unison with that silence were the ones I used when I spoke to my father” (ibid.). 128 Ledda 1975: 13. 129 Fiori 2008: 102. 130 This is exemplified by some passages from Elias Portolu: “At last they began to go up the mountain. Dense thickets of lentiscus rose and fell amid the dark shine of the schist, peppered with dog-rose in full bloom. The horizon stretched out broad and pure, the fragrant wind undulating the intense green heath lands as it blew: an ineffable dream of peace, of wild solitude, of immense silence broken only by some distant cuckoo’s call and the faint voices of the wayfarers. And then, all of a sudden, the sublime landscape profaned and laid waste by the black holes and slagheaps of the mines; then peace once more, dream, splendour of sky, of dark rocks, of distant seas; once more the unbroken realm of lentiscus, of dog-rose, of the wind, of solitude” (Deledda 1971d: 31). “O pale nights of Sardinian solitudes! The piercing call of the scops owl, the wild fragrance of thyme, the bitter smell of lentiscus, the distant murmur of lonely woods are fused in a monotonous and melancholy harmony, giving the soul a sense of solemn sadness, a yearning for things ancient and pure” (ibid., 35). 131 The spring is thus described: “all green, without flowers, pure and austere, almost holy” and “inexpressible silence intensified the gentleness of the landscape” (Deledda 1981f: 893). 132 “not as the silence of things is perceived, but as is perceived the silence of people who say nothing and think. It seemed to him that his thoughts on the Will and last wishes of Don Francesco were also the thoughts of the trees, or rather of the souls that

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alders” heard in the deep silence, giving Anania the impression “that her hope animated the things around her, that the trees trembled as if surprised by an arcane joy”.133 The primacy of solitude in the Sardinian world is evoked in a passage by Antonio Pigliaru, in which he posits a direct link between the socio-economic condition of the Barbagia, known as the island’s bandit country par excellence, and the physical features of the landscape and the character of its inhabitants. Setting banditry in a context dominated by centuries of poverty, his description evokes various cultural references, some explicitly cited, others instantly recognisable. In his view crime in Sardinia thrives in a landscape of the highest spiritual potential but desolating and without a history; a landscape that surrounds every village and the sheepfolds scattered in the hills and the small patches of land which the hoe can break, binding a man’s life and destiny to such pronounced solitude and so great a silence as always to give the impression of the virgin landscape of a world which has just emerged from creation or a final deluge. It is the human landscape and the truest landscape of Deledda’s world, what is least literary and most human in that world.134 (my italics)

In Pigliaru’s words we see once again the concept of a land thankless and with no history, from which man is barely able to scratch a living. The “spiritual potential” of nature recalls the idea that the Sardinians’ inner strength is projected into the land, as a result of which ethnos and topos coincide. What emerges above all is the image of the island as a place of unchanging identity, oblivious to the passing of time: a virgin land still intact and genuine, in particular a locus animi, echoing with the themes and atmospheres conjured by Deledda. Solitude and silence are the key words in defining the island’s physical and human space in the thoughts expressed by Giovanni Lilliu, who refers on various occasions to “the vast solitude of its

are locked inside the trees, as his mother had told him and as everyone in Norbio believes” (Dessì 1972: 58). 133 Deledda 1981b: 217. 134 Pigliaru 2000: 304.

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spaces”.135 The two words do not simply define the distinctive characteristics of the island landscape, they re-evoke a way of living life which is considered typically Sardinian, as Grazia Deledda pointed out to her son Franz: And you are very much of the Sardinian race (more than Sardus) and that taste for solitude is something atavistic, as I feel it and as Nicolina does too; it is the ancient shepherds, contemplators and philosophers, who live again in us; who study and do not grasp the mystery of being.136

It is a solitude that pervades all things and recalls pastoral society and the humble wisdom – because it knows its limits – of the naturalist shepherd-philosopher, as does the awareness of being a minuscule part of that mysterious and unintelligible all, as does the restlessness of Sonetàula, who “rather than of man, he had grown as the son of forest and sheep, in the long silences of Monte Entu”.137 Further examples of the “silent island” abound, but they would add little to what has already been written here. There is thus a subtle but tenacious plot running through the 20th-century literature, a plot dense with references in which the island space becomes a map of the Sardinian soul and leads the reader backwards in time to the origins of Sardinian civilisation, to the root of the concept of identity considered indispensable by intellectuals such as Pigliaru and Lilliu. Even these men, whose writings exert an influence on the cultural debate to this day, seem incapable of ridding themselves of a stereotyped vision of Sardinia. Indeed, their ideas strengthen the concept of an original Sardinian identity opposed to the world of the other (alias the mainland, the modern Italian state) – for Pigliaru an identity to be acknowledged and understood, in Lilliu’s view a possible model for the future.

135

Lilliu 2002: 225; 294. Quoted in Lilliu 2002: 322. Deledda had two sons, Sardus and Franz. Nicolina was Deledda’s sister. 137 Fiori 2008: 13. 136

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Incommensurable Time138 Silence, solitude, obliteration of the temporal dimension – these are the specific features of a land re-created in literature as a place far and separate from the rest of world, whose distance is measured in temporal rather than spatial terms. At the beginning of the 20th century, as Crawford Flitch observed, “Sardinia is the forgotten isle of the Mediterranean”.139 Despite the proliferation of journeys of discovery made by the curious and the adventurous, despite the puffing of the steam trains that by this time reached the island’s most remote corners, Sardinia was still considered virgin territory and, above all, a place out of time. Though he admitted in a reflection on the differing degrees of civilisation in various parts of the world that life in most countries continued much as it had been in the 18th century, Crawford Flitch concluded that Sardinia was in a category of its own: on this island the past centuries lived side-by-side with echoes coming from the beginnings of time.140 The conception of time was completely alien to it: It is not easy to say precisely what o’clock it is in Barbagia, which is the heart of Sardinia. When at a turn of the road you encounter a cavalcade of horsemen in scarlet tunics with white-slashed sleeves, the period appears to be that of the sixteenth or seventeenth century; when you overhear a sorrowful dirge and see a procession of hooded figures passing through the tortuous streets of an age-blackened town, when a woman with a pitcher on her head and all Assyria in her face greets you with the salutation, “May Jesus Christ be praised,” you are not far from the beginning of our era; when in a glade of the forest you surprise a group of herdsmen gathered round a wineskin, some drinking, some dancing an ancient, almost forgotten measure to the accompaniment of Pan’s pipes, you know that you have passed down

138

The definition of the concept of “still time” (tempo fermo) comes from Dessì (1965: XVII). 139 Crawford Flitch 1911: 291. 140 There is a positive, liberating side to visiting a country anchored in the past, as pointed out by Ernst Jünger, who found that when entering “these backward areas on the edge of civilisation it is as though iron bars fell away, and the heart becomes free” (Jünger 1999: 80).

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the labyrinth of all the Christian centuries and come out into the spacious sunlight of the pagan world.141

These words evoke a centuries-old tradition that had lost none of its strength. At about the same time, Leopold von Schloëzer observed that in many ways life on the island was lived as it had been in antiquity, such as to bring to the traveller’s mind settings described in the Bible or the Homeric poems.142 That is not all. As late as the 1950s, the shrewd and ironic Thomas Münster devoted the opening page of his Sprich gut von Sardinien (1958) to the observation that Sardinia continued to be unknown to Europeans, comparable only to some small country in the darkest part of Africa.143 According to Ernst Jünger Sardinia was, paradoxically, a “young country” because the imperceptible flow of time had ensured the conservation of what elsewhere had become “past historic”.144 This induced the traveller on the island to meditate on history and prehistory.145 But above all, leaving the larger towns and penetrating the interior, he underwent a singular experience in which everything he saw seemed familiar: it was made up of images seen in childhood or in dreams.146 In an article entitled La Sardegna si è fermata ai bronzetti (1953), Lilliu reached similar conclusions. Having recognised that the waves of colonisations were a decisive factor in the island’s history, he went on to say that “the effect of that fate was the condemnation of this windy archaic land, placed between sea and sky, to picturesque immobility; almost an exhibition, or the vestige, of a closed ancestral world, during the development of worlds and humankinds more recent and in 141

Crawford Flitch 1911: 225-226. See also: “On the Mediterranean shores, where the writing is still legible, the tale is usually the same: before Rome – Greece, Carthage, and Phoenicia. When your imagination has carried you back as far as it conveniently can, and out of school-day memories and the mind’s jetsam of classical lore you have attempted to reconstruct and repeople a past civilisation, you find that you have to set out on a further journey to more unknown and alien regions. Of Greece and Rome we can form a coherent if not an exact account; but of that mysterious race which set out from the coast of Tyre and Sidon to explore the world, feeling its way from headland to headland round the shores of the Mediterranean, like a blind man groping round a room, our images are fantastic and confused” (ibid., 284-285). 142 Schloëzer 1926: 18. 143 Münster 2006: 7. 144 Ibid., 218. 145 Ibid.; see Dessì 1965: XVI. 146 Ibid. This statement may be referred to Vittorini’s Sardegna come un’infanzia.

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motion”.147 Interestingly, his description of the island’s condition verges on the poetic; his use of adjectives such as ‘archaic’ and ‘picturesque’ betray the influence of Deledda.148 The sublimation of the idea of an immobile Sardinia also appears in the writings of Giuseppe Dessì. Though fully aware of the changes in the island and although his work had successfully communicated the meaning of the historical process accomplished there,149 he did not shun the myth of an immobile, timeless land. He recognised that Sardinia was in danger of eluding European historical time.150 He thought that every mention of the past became the memory of an “incommensurable time” and harked back to the dawn of the island’s history, in particular to the nuraghe civilisation, which he identified with the Laestrygonians of the Homeric epos who destroyed Ulysses’ fleet by hurling rocks at it.151 He explained Sardinia’s immobility by recourse to another concept (which was also important to Giovanni Lilliu’s theories), that of the “resistance”; it was the result of an “intimate, irreducible rebellion” by the islanders against what is foreign to them.152 In 20th-century descriptions the status of unknown land is fused with the concept of atemporality, whereby Sardinia appears as a “wild space empty of history”153 and the Supramonte, the island’s heart, admired from the open main door of the church at Orgosolo, stands out like “a sharp picture of arcane beauty”.154 The idea of a wild and timeless world continues as one of the main themes in analyses written by travellers on the island, as does the representation of the archaic, Homeric and eastern origins of its culture. Jünger explains the latter trope in the light of the experience that a traveller could still have in Sardinia in the 1950s. The archaic world of the east is recalled 147

Lilliu 2002: 165-166. The same concepts are repeated on the same page when Lilliu speaks “of a picturesque but disheartening fixity and narrowness” (Lilliu 2002: 166). 149 In Giuseppe Marci’s view Dessì’s work confirms literature’s capacity to read and interpret the past better than historians themselves (Marci 1991a: 178). 150 Dessì 1965: XVII. 151 Ibid. 152 Dessì 1965: XV. 153 Levi 2003: 37. 154 Vittorini 2003: 99. 148

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by scenes from everyday life which evoke images from the Bible and the Holy Land.155 But above all the island is a place devoid of any connection with the rest of the world,156 in which “it is still possible to sleep a light slumber between the atoms of atemporality, what in the sequence of the ages was configured as a patiently woven ideal model”.157 This suspension of history is something Dessì described as a simultaneous occurrence in space and time: It can happen to anybody, in Sardinia, to slip outside historical time through things, through the matter of which things are made – wood and stone, and become weightless, as inside a spaceship.158

This suspension of time seals the difference between the island and the mainland even in the face of historical events of national importance. The massacre of miners at Buggerru in south-western Sardinia in 1904 led to the proclamation of the first ever general strike in Italy, yet it seemed to be of little consequence on the island.159 The same atemporality emerges in the 1950s in the literary production of authors such as Maria Giacobbe, Giuseppe Fiori and Franco Cagnetta.160 Yet, though differently from 18th- and 19th-century travel literature, their reading of the Sardinian question contains the tropes that had for centuries characterised the writings of foreign travellers. Recounting her first experiences as a teacher in the schools of remote villages, Maria Giacobbe emphasises the “wild beauty” of those places, populated by people “chained” to ancient traditions in a world dominated by absolute immobilism and the “monotony of days which only the arrival of a stranger seems to be able to relieve for a

155

Jünger 1999: 218-219. See also ibid., 224 and Schloëzer 1926: 18. Jünger 1999: 24. 157 Ibid., 22-23; 108. 158 Dessì 1965: XVI. 159 Buggerru is Italy “even though it doesn’t seem like it” (Dessì 1972: 307), however “news of the massacre (at Buggerru) spread to the workers of all Italy. In Milan it was announced to the crowd at a protest rally and sparked a general strike across the whole country. Only in Sardinia did it have no effect, and the silence in Buggerru after the massacre, on that sad September afternoon, was a symbol of the silence of the whole island in the national entity” (Dessì 1972: 313). 160 The idea of a land out of time, separate from Italy, also typifies the view of Salvatore Satta in his masterpiece Il giorno del giudizio (Marci 1991a: 162). 156

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moment”.161 The way of life in the Barbagia is still that of Homer’s times, so there are no differences between the pastoral life of those times and that of the 20th century.162 And the feeling of jumping backwards in time is not confined to those who visit the island’s interior; similar reactions are felt in places such as the lagoon of Cabras,163 a “large bay shaped like a human ear” on the west coast,164 where nothing has changed in the life of its fishermen.165 The difference between Sardinia and the rest of Europe appears in the opening pages of another work by Giacobbe, Gli arcipelaghi (1995). The man-made landscape of modern Milan is contrasted with a singular image of the island: a creature of indeterminate nature which belonged to ages such as those when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Arriving in Sardinia by aeroplane gives the impression of an unbridgeable difference between the island and the outside world: Leaving Milan, they had flown over towns, rivers, cultivated fields, woods, roads alive with traffic. A European landscape. A land inhabited by people. People of today. The island over which they now flew was the earthen back of a mastodon dead for thousands of years. Sparse, arid bristles bordered the cracks and scratches etched on the dry mud.166

The negation of a dynamic conception of history seems to express a feeling widespread among the islanders. Thomas Münster was astonished by the vagueness of their notion of time and space;167 he 161

“After that I had other supply postings: a month in one place, two weeks in another. New villages, new faces. Remote sheepfolds along the coast, villages clinging to mountainsides, all similar in their wild beauty and the daily habits of their inhabitants, chained to ancient traditions that outside conditions cannot corrode because these too have not changed for centuries; all frighteningly similar in the poverty that almost compensates for the monotony of the days which only the unhoped-for arrival of a stranger seems to be able to relieve for a moment” (Giacobbe 2003: 25). 162 Fiori 2008: 74. 163 Ibid., 8. 164 Ibid., 15. 165 Ibid., 18. 166 Giacobbe 2001: 9. 167 Münster 2006: 9. The same concept is found in Dessì 1965: XV-XVI.

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thought that they lived only in the present and their lack of any sense of time was confirmed in everything they said.168 Memories were not experienced according to a historical consciousness, they remained vivid precisely because they were considered current and still operative in the present.169 In literary discourse the conviction that the island lives in an atemporal state translates into the symbolic opposition between the modus vivendi in Sardinia and elsewhere. The former is dominated by a state of inertia, life is projected towards an ever-present past, as opposed to the constant becoming which characterises life beyond the sea. Thomas Münster recalls meeting a man who proudly stated that he lived in a Carthaginian burial cave – which did, however, have a street number.170 In his view “stone-age men, cavemen, men of the nuraghi – all this, even today, lives alongside ‘modern’ men”. And if the inhabitants of the few towns must necessarily be considered such, they too can come up with some surprises.171 The presence of the past is read in the traces left on the land or, as is often the case in Deledda’s writings, it is read in the landscape which calls up the memory of distant ages. In Canne al vento a “silent ring of huts” near the church of Nostra Signora del Rimedio looks “like a prehistoric village abandoned for centuries”.172 In Colombi e sparvieri the house of Columba, daughter of the old bandit zio Remundu, was shrouded in “a sense of barbaric poetry and a veil of legends”.173 In the same novel Jorgj, admiring the view from the town hall balcony, admits to feeling as if he were “below the walls of a Barbarian castle. The whole landscape recalls the time of the feudal lords, with the cramped village and stone perimeter walls, tracks that seem designed for ambushes, solitary hooded and armed figures riding watchfully across slopes criss-crossed by dry stone walls. Everything has a feeling of ancient and wild poetry”.174 The past continues to exist alongside the present, Sardinia seems to be “troglodyte Switzerland, or at least of a time before the hoteliers”.175 Ernst Jünger 168

Münster 2006: 16. Ibid., 17. 170 Ibid., 24. 171 Ibid. 172 Deledda 1971b: 172. 173 Deledda 1981c: 543. 174 Ibid., 666. 175 Ibid., 671. 169

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also sees the landscape as a map of signs recalling the past, but they remain basically inscrutable, unfathomable, because the island has not been touched by the great currents of history.176 The succession of occupations has left traces on the island but has never subverted the deepest soul of its people who, like their land, have remained essentially pure, unreachable, untouchable, indomitable.177 Perhaps no-one has been able to express better than Carlo Levi the image of the island’s atemporal, static and perpetual nature: “Here, Sardinia’s isle, every going is a returning. In the presence of the archaic every cognition is recognition”.178 The reference to Ulysses’ journey in Dante’s poem with the quotation of Sardinia’s isle evokes the pre-classical Homeric world which is at the centre of one of the primary tropes in literary discourse on Sardinia. The landscape gives Levi the impression of time falling into a black hole, like a homogeneous reality in which life, death and the passing of generations are fused in one totalising vision where the only constant presence seems to be the Mediterranean sun: “stones, rocks, sheep, asphodel have the same colour, the same pale off-white, just slightly violet and slightly grey: the colour of suns passed away centuries ago, of ancient bones calcinated in the sun”.179 The traveller may sometimes feel he is “almost a disconnected fragment, amid others, of a life in which extraordinarily distant times seem to unfold together, under the same sun, the same black gaze of the animals”.180 Even 176

Jünger 1999: 228. Ibid., 229. 178 Levi 2003: 35: “Qui, nell’isola dei sardi, ogni andare è un ritornare. Nella presenza dell’arcaico ogni conoscenza è riconoscenza”. In another passage in Tutto il miele è finito, Levi (ibid., 79) writes “And still that ever-present sense of duration and permanence, that dual sense of immediacy and memory, that makes things new and different seem identical and at the same time gives me images new and different, already seen” (“E ancora sempre quel senso della durata e della permanenza, quel doppio senso di attualità e di memoria, che mi fa sembrare identiche le cose nuove e diverse, e, insieme, mi dà immagini nuove e diverse viste un tempo”). 179 Levi 2003: 36: “[p]ietre, rocce, pecore, asfodeli, hanno lo stesso colore, lo stesso biancastro leggero, appena un po’ viola e un po’ grigio: il colore dei soli trapassati da secoli, delle ossa antiche calcinate sotto il sole”. 180 Levi 2003: 37-38: “quasi un frammento sconnesso, fra gli altri, di una vita in cui tempi straordinariamente lontani pare scorrano insieme, sotto lo stesso sole, lo stesso nero sguardo degli animali”. 177

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moving from one place to another turns into a journey in time, “an invisible passage in time”.181 The condition of archaism is visible in the marks of Sardinian culture scattered in the landscape: on a visit to a nuraghe there is the physical sensation of being “in an unknown region, before childhood, full of animals and wild grandeur”, and the “sense of archaic cruelty” of its inhabitants, “archaic men barricaded in the towers, in a cruel nature”.182 To identify the time at which the island’s history came to a halt, Crawford Flitch looks at the end of Roman dominion over it: “when the power of Rome decayed, Sardinia fell into a kind of enchanted sleep from which it is only now awaking”.183 According to others, such as Thomas Münster and Ernst Jünger, the Romans’ involvement with the island was marginal, and the same may probably be said for all its conquerors.184 It is thus distinguished by its immobility: despite the succession of invasions and cultural influences, “everything in the life of Sardinia becomes immemorial and goes back to the creation of the earth”.185 The island leaves history to project itself ineluctably into a mythical or mythicised past such as that re-created by Deledda; a world where time continues not to flow, as emblematically symbolised by Dessì in the mountain in Il disertore, an icon of genuine Sardinian identity in contrast to the (fictional) village of Cuadu, a metaphor for the encroachment of modern civilisation.186 Mythical Island The framework which puts the island in the world of myth, outside history, perpetuates the representation of the journey in Sardinia as an experience almost unreal, fantastic, belonging to the realm of dreams and fiction. According to Thomas Münster, only few days after arriving in Olbia or Porto Torres you really enter Sardinia, which means Europe and the 20th century have been left behind.187 At times 181

Levi 2003: 43. Ibid., 47. In a way the town of Carbonia represents the negation of the atemporal image of Sardinia. A mining centre founded by the Fascist regime, populated by workers brought from all over the country, “it is the other face of Sardinia, totally oblivious to shepherds and nuraghi, with time counted in days and hours, not millennia” (ibid., 54). 183 Crawford Flitch 1911: 292. 184 Münster 2006: 65-67. Jünger 1999: 228. 185 Vittorini 2009: 55. 186 See section Modernity Unfulfilled below. 187 Münster 2006: 24-25. 182

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the description of the landscape is turned into a full-blown dream experience, as in a powerful passage in which Crawford Flitch depicts the coastal region of Sinis, in western Sardinia: [b]ut that night I dreamed a dream. I saw a woman sitting upon the red mud of the shore of a still lake. The mud was as hard as a stone and split into fissures by the heat. All round her the air moved in infinitesimal vibrations. Her feet were bare, and the earth that had eaten into them was shot with all manner of iridescent colours. Her fingers were shrunk to such a thinness that the bronze rings which she wore upon them rattled whenever she moved a hand. The raising of an eyelid seemed to demand an intolerable effort. Her eyes were as blank as those of a dead sheep – they showed not a hint of pleading or sorrow or any kind of desire, not even of weariness or despair. They were meaningless utterly. Then I knew that her name was Sinis.188

Apart from the metaphors and images appearing in writers’ accounts, the journey in Sardinia thus reveals its authentic nature. Since it cannot have the aim of producing a cold, objective account of what is real, besides being an itinerary in space and time it is essentially a captivating exploration of the potent and tortuous byways of the imagination and the unconscious, from which emerge irrational fears and atmospheres. Rather than discovering a real island, the traveller continually re-creates it, projecting on it the dreams and myths that have accumulated in the collective imagination. As Sergio Atzeni tellingly observed, “Sardinia is a dream of the Europeans; Europe is a dream of the Sardinians; the borders between reality and fantasy are blurred, the threshold has disappeared; everybody needs an elsewhere in which he can live out his nightmares”.189 The mythical transposition of the island in Carlo Levi’s Tutto il miele è finito is one of the most powerful images conjured by writers to represent Sardinia, a combination of many of the tropes mentioned thus far. The village of Orune, in the heart of the Barbagia and the symbol of the whole island, is for the Torinese writer “one of the places of the imagination and the memory”,190 a place embodied in the 188

Crawford Flitch 1911: 288. See Atzeni 1988, quoted in Marci 1999a: 92. 190 Levi 2003: 110. 189

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symbolic figure of the homonymous crow he took from Sardinia to the mainland and nurtured until its escape.191 In the writer’s imagination that pastoral centre in the Barbagia is identified with the sacred bird of the nuraghi whose cawing recalls shepherds’ songs,192 Sardinian dances, sheep-stealers and “the outlaws of a world archaeological and present”.193 Transfigured as a crow which chooses escape and freedom, in his memory the village appears as a complex magma of memories and acoustic, tactile and olfactive resonances in which the island’s arcane and mysterious character is recognised and in which time has no value. Orune is “an image, a form, a name which unites a multiple reality of animals and stones in the immobile undulation of the flocks of time” (my italics).194 In the fantasy image of Orune the crow flying over the sea “to Sardinia’s isle, to the granite rocks, to the asphodel meadows, to the twisted oaks that rise solitary in deserted fields”,195 the memory re-runs a journey lasting a few hours by aeroplane but which in actual time is much longer, because “a few minutes are enough for a journey of tens of centuries”.196 Modernity Unfulfilled To the image of the island out of time, the passing years have seen the addition of a new model by which to interpret things Sardinian: given the impossibility of denying the changes under way, in literary discourse the island has turned from a “remote” land into one in which modernisation has begun but not been properly completed. The force of the past seems to stand as a highly resilient barrier to the impetus of the new, strong enough to impede the definitive step into modernity. This state of transition has become a trope no less potent than that of the timeless, immobile island. In a way it is a variation of it, since it assumes the confirmation of existing tropes such as that of the primitive, wild and barbaric land. It also reproduces the familiar 191

Ibid., 57-61. Levi (2003: 11) observes that the predominance of the pastoral economy has destroyed the role of agriculture, which has effectively produced a regression of civilisation in Sardinia. Ibid., 57. 193 Ibid., 110. 194 Levi 2003: 110: “una immagine, una forma, un nome che unisce una realtà molteplice di animali e di pietre nell’immobile ondulare delle greggi del tempo”. 195 Levi 2003: 61: “all’isola dei sardi, alle rocce di granito, ai prati di asfodelo, alle querce contorte che sorgono solitarie sui campi deserti”. 196 Ibid. 192

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paradigm of the ontological opposition of North to South and island to mainland (archaism-modernity, indigenous-foreign) within the island itself. In literary discourse the idea of a land in transition produces a series of metaphors and representative forms that transfer the struggle for supremacy between past and future into physical space. An analysis of locations in Sardinian novels proves particularly effective in identifying the mechanisms used in constructing an opposition between the new (alias modern, progressive, civil, in line with European standards) and what appears ‘genuinely’ Sardinian (alias archaic, primitive, barbaric and wild). Commenting on the publication of the story Il cinghiale del diavolo, in 1967 Emilio Lussu observed that the archaic world depicted in the book, “patriarchal and barbaric, had its own civilisation and its own culture”.197 But, he said, “it has disappeared and has not yet been replaced by a new, more advanced, civilisation which can integrate it into the modern world”.198 These words provide a key to interpreting a great deal of Sardinian literature of the second half of the 20th century, when the awareness of the end of an era is accompanied by concern for a future as yet unknown. The uncertainty caused by the transition to modernity provokes a clinging to the past which, for all its faults and limitations, stands as the only familiar reality and as such one which is held up as an irreplaceable model. The advance of modernisation is feared above all because it is seen as the result of rules and lifestyles coming from abroad, it appears as another subjection to foreigners which requires the sacrifice of origins and identity, and is therefore perceived to be yet another instance of colonisation. Even the most aware authors thus express a new form of mythicisation of Sardinia and its cultural identity. The defence of its alleged archaism becomes the last foothold to avoid being sucked into the quicksand of modernity. Among the Sardinian authors who have best expressed the dichotomy between ancient and modern, special mention should be made of Giuseppe Dessì. In Il disertore traditional origins are represented by the mountain landscape and the open country, with the sheepfold, a “silent and deserted place”, “a desert” showing no trace 197 198

Lussu, Il cinghiale del diavolo [s.d.]: 46. Ibid.

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of progress and devoid of the clamour of modern times.199 There in the hills reigns the absolute silence in which past and present are fused in a timeless pain.200 It is a habitat in which people move like animals and live in symbiosis with nature: the main character Mariangela goes from field to field “burrowing through the thorny hedges like a ferret. In the wood she knew tracks known only to goats. She always ran, never stopping, with that trotting way she had”.201 In Sonetàula by Fiori the opposition between ancient and modern, tradition and innovation, is embodied in the contrast between the two locations in which the story is played out: the village of Orgiadas and the mountain hideout of the shepherd-outlaw.202 While the village welcomes progress, symbolised by the campaign against malaria and the introduction of electricity,203 the open country is identified with an immobile, timeless world where the rhythm of life follows that of nature: “on the crags of Monte Entu, where everything had always been the same, herding and milking, and spending the freezing nights clinging to a sheep for warmth, and the scent of broom cancelled out from time to time by the smell of wet earth, and the migration of men in search of pasture, as far as their flocks’ hunger would take them”.204 Despite the elements of novelty in Sonetàula, Fiori’s decision to set the novel in the mountains and among the sheepfolds is a sign of the persistent identification of the island with the pastoral world.205 Similarly, dissatisfaction with the price being paid for progress is translated in Maria Giacobbe into the prevalence of nostalgia for a past that was far from perfect but more acceptable than the disappointments of the present.206 199

Dessì 2004: 80. Ibid. The association of the mountains and the open country with silence is a recurrent theme in the novel: see pages 110 and 121. Silence reigns over the place where lies the dead body of the deserter Saverio (ibid., 123) and in the sheepfold which becomes a secret tomb (ibid., 132). The novel’s final words are “in the silence of the mountains” (ibid., 134). 201 Ibid., 81. 202 Despite some elements which constitute a departure from traditional narrative models, the novel depicts a Sardinia in conformity with the tropes: archaic, pastoral and primitive, identifiable with the wild open spaces of the mountains and the sheepruns. See Marci 1991a: 226-227. 203 Fiori 2008: 122; 116-119. 204 Ibid., 71. 205 Marci 1991a: 228. 206 Ibid., 273. 200

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While in Il disertore and Sonetàula the island seems divided between two contrasting forces, Il giorno del giudizio registers an awareness of the demise of that unique archaic world that literary tradition had placed at the centre of the Sardinian narrative. The author sees no alternative to the past, so his works are built around the idea of decay and death. His native Nuoro, the island’s moral capital, is depicted as “an immense sun-baked necropolis”.207 In a famous chapter of the novel the town is split into three parts, like Gaul.208 The three districts reflect the souls that make up the social, economic and moral identity of the town and, symbolically, the whole of Sardinia. Nuoro is Sardinia, with its shepherds, peasants and bourgeoisie. For all its inhabitants the only certainty is that they will end their miserable existence in the town cemetery. Il giorno del giudizio is essentially a book of the dead, Satta’s Sardinia is an imago mortis.209 To his eyes his town is a cemetery populated by souls with no hope, because “nothing is more eternal, in Nuoro, nothing more ephemeral than death.210 His despairing words betray nostalgia for a mother-earth irretrievably lost, and thus reveal a desire to belong to the past, to a Sardinia simple, poor, archaic and primitive, in which life had its problems but at least had some meaning. Even though the bleak interpretation put forward in this work flies in the face of modern reality, then, it confirms the tropes of archaism and authenticity. Living away from the island and find it less recognisable every time he visits it, Satta displays a preference for the Sardinia of his childhood, which matches the image of a primitive land. In his nihilistic reading, the only positive element left is the invincible force of nature: When all this ridiculous charade is over, I tell myself, the crags, the scrubland and the sky will still be there, and the last word will be theirs. Illusions perhaps, but never have I needed illusions as I do now. The positive thing I have brought with me is the vision of this unreality, which helps me to bear the reality to which I have returned. 207

Baumann 2007: 156. Satta 1979: 26-41. 209 Marci 1991a: 164. 210 Satta 1979: 12. For a possible comparison between Satta’s Nuoro and Joyce’s Dublin, see Marci 1991a: 164-165. 208

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The remedy – geography, as Pirandello said. And I think Sardinia is a geographical expression in the best sense of the term, one in which history and current events dissolve.211

Convinced that Sardinia has lost its identity, Satta sees the rugged beauty of its land as the only force destined to survive the wearing down of time and history. The island’s historical dimension thus fades away, leaving in its place an icon of an immobile world where time measured by human memory has no meaning. The Sardinia Satta pines for has no place in the objectivity of real space, but coincides with the fictional image of a land in its primordial and essentially unchanged form. As he admits in a letter to a friend, fortunately he can still admire “in the yellow countryside – a limitless stone field that harks back to creation – an eternal note that I can still hear and which draws me to peace”.212 It is interesting to note that the same thought is to be found in Procedura (1988) by Mannuzzu (who is a great admirer of Il giorno del giudizio), where the contemplation of nature – where it is still intact – is the only consolation in a general condition of natural and moral degeneration.213 These authors cling to a vision which idealises the image of a land frozen in its timeless and primordial dimension in order to overcome their despair at the damage caused by modernisation, or at least to console themselves in the face of the uncertainties of the future. Fuelled by an exoticist position, distrust of modernisation is also common to non-Sardinian writers, who clearly prefer the (fictional) archaic and primitive Sardinia to the (real) one being laboriously modernised. This explains their tragic predictions on the island’s future.214 According to Jünger, while malaria had allowed it to remain isolated and preserve its identity for centuries, the eradication of the disease would bring with it a new scourge: mass tourism and all its attendant ills.215 In this collective imagination there is no hope of an island modernised and integrated into mainstream civilisation; the result of progress will be that life in Sardinia ends up being the same 211

Satta quoted in Baumann 2007: 157. Baumann 2007: 157. 213 Marci 1991a: 281. Mannuzzu (1998: 1229) blames the degradation of the island’s landscape on the Sardinians themselves. 214 Wagner and Lawrence both thought Sardinia was in danger of losing its original identity. 215 Jünger 1999: 231 and 65. 212

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as anywhere else. Probably an improvement, but not necessarily happier.216 It is an island with no real choice: it can either cling to a fierce defence of its alleged original diversity or surrender to the blandishments of the outside world and lose itself irremediably. One particularly subtle foreteller of a finis Sardiniae is Salvatore Mannuzzu. His writings, which capture a feeling of profound melancholy, are imbued with a sense of disintegration, of an advanced state of decay.217 The fear that Sardinia would lose itself in the pursuit of modernisation has become a painful certainty. In his novel Un morso di formica (1989) the island – or rather the image the reader expects of it – has completely disappeared. All that is left is holiday resorts, anonymous and identical to those anywhere else in the world. The book presents a clear-eyed depiction of Sardinia’s integration into the global system and its standardisation with the rest of the world,218 so there is no more room for the representation of the unique and timeless island. But it does echo the nostalgia for a past in which the island was primitive and poor but much more genuine than the faded image it now presents of itself.219 Sardinian Forests Foreign travellers dwelt in great detail on the majestic beauty of the Sardinian forests, expressing their admiration for woods still intact, impenetrable and unknown. Della Marmora, for one, waxed lyrical about the green-clad slopes of the Gennargentu. Particularly rich in the Barbagia region, the forest heritage was not simply a feature of the island landscape – it was held up as a trope of a specific idea of Sardinian identity. Since mountain forests had provided refuge for people fleeing foreign conquerors, they were a symbol of Sardinian resistance. In Caccia grossa Giulio Bechi speaks of the Barbagia as an unspoilt virgin habitat, the ideal refuge for feral-looking bandits.220 Yet during the 19th century a great deal of that changed. The construction of the railways and the development of the mining 216

Ibid. Marci 1991a: 280-281. 218 Ibid., 285. 219 See Marci 1991a: 285. 220 Bechi 1997: 47. 217

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industry wrought irreparable damage to the island’s forest heritage.221 From Deledda onwards, Sardinian literature has displayed increasing interest in this degradation, especially in terms of its symbolic meaning. It has become a vehicle for the metaphorical depiction of the condition of a people dominated and exploited by foreign powers. This mechanism finds one of its most powerful poetic expressions in Paese d’ombre.222 In Dessì’s novel the reinterpretation of Sardinian history is developed in parallel with the tragedy of the destruction of the forest which the hero, Angelo Uras, fights until his death, drafting a thoroughgoing reforestation plan.223 Awareness of the ruthless exploitation of the island’s resources by foreign occupiers is contrasted with the idea that its forests are the tangible proof of Sardinian resistance.224 While the woods stand as the icon of a humanised nature – “the rustling of the wood, as deep and complex as the anxious murmur of a crowd” – the trees felled in the outrage committed by foreigners are the sign, the simulacrum, of a land colonised.225 The forest fire is also described in terms befitting a human massacre. The suffering of the trees caught up in the flames, with their contortions as they go up in smoke, is redolent of the Sardinians’ tragic history.226 At the same 221

As Le Lannou (1941: 61) observed, since the mid-19th century Sardinia’s forest heritage had been seriously depleted by an acceleration in the rate of tree felling. He was of the opinion that the island’s emergence from its isolation had been abrupt and not always to its advantage, as shown by the destruction of its forests in the interests of railway construction. 222 In an article written in 1901 Deledda (2011c: 233) complained about the indiscriminate felling of trees, calling for a law which would strictly forbid cutting down any tree still standing. For a detailed analysis of the symbolic locations in the novel see Marci and Pisano 2002. 223 See Marci and Pisano 2002: 10; 113-114, 273-274; 326-328. 224 “The protection of Sardinia’s forests was of no interest to its Piedmontese rulers. Sardinia continued to be thought of as a colony to exploit, especially after the unification of Italy, and its inhabitants were considered to be like Calabrian brigands” (Dessì 1972: 180). The mines in the book are seen as a misfortune for the island because they attract foreigners who destroy the forests to feed the mining industry (ibid., 190). The destruction of the forests in the novel, set in south-west Sardinia, is a consequence of the sale of the exploitation rights for the mines at Parte d’Ispi (ibid., 73). See also Dessi 1972: 182: “‘...Here the trees are like they were in Josto’s day...’ ‘Who was this Josto?’‘One of ours, he fought the Romans. At the same time as Hannibal, I think’”. On this dialogue see also Marci 1991a: 188. 225 Dessì 1972: 108. 226 “An entire mountain was burning and the roar sucked in all the other noises, giving the illusion of a frightening silence. They couldn’t hear their own voices even if they

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time, however, the forests emanate an aura of eternity. The immortality of the woodland landscape coincides with the Sardinians’ fate, because there is no division between man and nature, just as Angelo Uras “identified himself with the land, with the village, with the woods of Norbio”.227 Deciding to have the slopes of Monte Linas replanted, he finally takes possession of a sense of time, and in so doing symbolically shows the Sardinians how to assert themselves as a free nation and at last take their destiny into their own hands: [Angelo Uras] had a sense of time, he knew he would not live long enough to see those mountains covered with trees. The same awareness enabled him to conceive time with a dimension much vaster than individual lives, that brief cycle in which dust takes on the appearance of man and returns to dust. But fortunately trees last longer, he thought, unconsciously associating them with the idea of the duration which ties generation to generation; he thought of Balanotti’s gigantic centuries-old olive-trees and the magnolia which shaded the public wash-house.228

His confidence in the plan is rewarded: in the space of a few years the pines have multiplied to 15,000 and a century later ten times that number, and “when the wind blows they murmur like the sea. Up towards the church there are some massive ones, with greyish branches as if shocked by a cosmic wind which has blasted them, but like the wind, eternal, indestructible”.229 The reassuring presence of that green sea, hissing as the wind blows, becomes the simulacrum of the tireless voice of a land abused by foreigners but never appeased, finally able like the Arab phoenix to find the moral strength to rise from its ashes.230 shouted. They heard the crackle of the leaves and branches, bangs like exploding shells, and in the din the noises were visible, because on the hillside trees could be seen twisting up and disappearing in a burst, then falling to the ground in sparks” (Dessì 1972: 190). 227 Dessì 1972: 196. 228 Ibid., 328. 229 Ibid., 330. 230 The novel’s contradictory ending, in which Angelo Uras dies trying to persuade his fellows of the need to accept rationality and abandon their irrationality and fatalism, seems to cast a sad shadow over the story. Angelo Uras is aware of what the island

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The Barbagia In the popular imagination the island coincides with the Barbagia and its agro-pastoral culture, establishing a primacy with which no other area can compete.231 From this standpoint it is only in the mountain areas around Nuoro that the island’s culture can be found in its purest and most authentic form. In Wagner’s view man and landscape coincide: a natural paradise which has remained as simple and rugged as the people living in it; a nation faithful to patriarchal custom, speaking a conservative language. In his eyes the world of the Barbagia is essentially identical to that depicted in the works of Grazia Deledda, who earned herself the distinction of making known a reality of which most people were unaware.232 The German linguist’s words converge with a portrait of Nuoro penned by Deledda some years earlier in a contribution to Sardinian demological studies,233 in which she defined it as a “small town in the strong and rocky Logudoro” and “the most characteristic of Sardinian towns”.234 In her view Nuoro is “the heart of Sardinia, it is Sardinia itself in its manifestations. It is the open field where incipient civilisation fights a silent battle against the strange Sardinian barbarity, so exaggerated beyond the sea”.235

needs for real innovation, but perhaps his fellow islanders have yet to reach the same maturity: see Marci 1991a: 176. 231 According to Wagner (1913-1914: 1) “[t]he Sardinians distinguish three regions bearing the name Barbagia, and they are connected: Barbagia di Seúlo, di Belví and di Ollolái. They are mountain places set apart from the world, difficult to reach and almost unknown, located around the island’s giant, the Gennargentu (1834 m), the highest peak of the wild Ichnusa”. Coined by the Romans, the name Barbagia – Barbaria – occurs in an inscription first published by Muratori in which mention is made of «civitate Barbariae in Sardinia» (ibid.). 232 Wagner 1908b: 245. 233 Deledda, Tradizionali popolari di Nuoro (1894), now published in Deledda 2011d. 234 “This small town in the strong and rocky Logudoro (one of the four judicial districts into which King Gialeto divided Sardinia following the uprising against Byzantine occupation and the expulsion of the Greeks from Cagliari), now simply a district council seat after being a provincial capital, is without doubt the most characteristic of Sardinian towns” in Deledda 2011d: 65. 235 “È il cuore della Sardegna, è la Sardegna stessa con le sue manifestazioni. È il campo aperto dove la civiltà incipiente combatte una lotta silenziosa con la strana barbarie sarda, così esagerata oltre mare” (Deledda 2011d: 65). In a letter to Angelo De Gubernatis, Deledda (2007: 66) mentions the Nuoro area, defining it her “native region and the island’s most beautiful, most characteristic”. Crawford Flitch (1911: 231) too speaks of the Barbagia as “the heart” of Sardinia. According to Levi (2003: 91) “Nuoro is the invisible capital of the shepherds’ lands”. About Nuoro Lawrence

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Wagner thought that the real Sardinia coincided with that recreated in Deledda’s poetry, indeed her literary production seems to lend credence to a world which would otherwise be considered mere fantasy. This explains the similarity of views emanating from the writings of the German linguist and the Sardinian author, an affinity reflected above all in their choice of vocabulary. When still very young Deledda described the mountains in her native province as strong and rocky, words projected symbolically onto the rebellious, courageous, gritty spirit of its inhabitants and used to characterise the geo-symbol par excellence of the Barbagia: the “island’s giant”,236 that is to say the “wild, virgin” Gennargentu, “with its luminous peaks almost edged in silver”,237 “the gate of Silver”, the mountain inhabited by a nation of indomitable shepherd-warriors.238 Wagner’s words on the Gennargentu echo the images and atmospheres already seen in writings by Della Marmora.239 He recounts that the ascent on the Fonni slope, possible only with the aid of Sardinian horses, ensures a view so spectacular that the whole island “looks like a model”.240 He enjoyed the panorama from the summit “looking at the sun as it lit up one peak after another and from the heights shone its rays onto the valleys”.241 However, such descriptions give only a partial idea of the disastrous consequences of railway building on the island.242 Though they did not entirely ignore the progress under way, travellers preferred to dwell on the wild and archaic character of the landscape. Their perspective continued to be dominated by the features of a land whose original beauty revealed its cultural authenticity despite (2009: 139) had this to say: “There is nothing to see in Nuoro: which, to tell the truth, is always a relief. Sights are an irritating bore”. 236 Wagner 1908a: 105. 237 Deledda 1981b: 171 and 28. 238 Crawford Flitch 1911: 230. See chapter 1. 239 Wagner (1913-1914: 12) did point out, however, that the advent of the railway had favoured development in mountain villages previously utterly wild and inaccessible. 240 Wagner 1908a: 105; 106. The same image is to be found in Crawford Flitch (1911: 230), who says of the Gennargentu: “The sky-line flows with a billowy undulation, the highest point, La Marmora, being scarcely distinguishable from half a dozen other crests. In the dry morning air the detail of every swelling and gully was as clear as on a relief map”. 241 Wagner 1908a: 106; see chapter 1, section Tropes of Land. 242 See previous section.

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repeated foreign occupation and rule. Indeed, they recognised archaism as a value worth defending and so expressed a sense of bitterness at the progress which was ruining what was fine and valuable in that ancient world.243 Not only is Sardinia identified with its innermost region, then, but to that region are attributed the characteristics considered peculiar to its inhabitants in a vision embodying a perfect synthesis between man and nature. The topos of the wild and inaccessible Barbagia is identified with the rebellious spirits of its people, forever at war with foreign invaders, a land of free men, as testified by Crawford Flitch in his description of the Barbagian world.244 Thomas Münster observed that the Romans, despite their many overseas conquests, never managed to subdue the “coriander of land” he called the Gennargentu uplands and that in Sardinia rebellion was a permanent condition;245 hence the legends speaking of mortal danger for mainlanders coming to the island.246

243

Wagner 1913-1914: 2-3: “There is no doubt that since the island returned under Italian rule a gradual change has occurred, in customs and in ideas, and a new time has begun even in these isolated hills. I am as pleased about that as the Sardinians are, but I am also aware that this new wind of civilisation will sweep away for ever much of what is still beautiful and good up there. Beautiful is the Barbagia, primordial and virgin as few regions still are in the old Europe! With the Albanian mountains and the Taygetus it shares the advantage (or disadvantage, depending on the point of view) of being rather inaccessible. The common traveller from the mainland who hurries across the island (or rather crawls, because hurrying cannot be associated with the snail’s pace of Sardinian trains) from Golfo Aranci to Cagliari, through endless tracts of hard rock and parched and desolate heathland, has no idea that beyond the ironcoloured hills rising on the horizon slumber magnificent forests of oak and chestnut, that brooks of the coolest water spring from the rocks, that here survives a picturesque patriarchal society redolent of Homeric and Biblical times and that the real Sardinia, the one worth visiting, is here and here alone. Nor will the town-dwelling Sardinian in Cagliari or Sassari inform him of this, because he despises the people of the interior, considering them far beneath him, and is deeply convinced that the world so masterfully described by Grazia Deledda in her novels is merely the product of an excited poetic imagination”. 244 Crawford Flitch 1911: 236. 245 Münster 2006: 65-66; 67. 246 Ibid. The association between the mountain environment and the feeling of freedom appears metaphorically in a story by Deledda about a baby boar. In the young animal torn from his land it is not hard to see the Sardinians’ aspiration to hold on to their freedom: “Farewell native mountains, scent of musk, sweetness of freedom barely tasted like mother’s milk!” (Deledda 1971e: 826).

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The synergy and mirror-imagery between landscape and national character was discussed by Wagner in 1906 in a work devoted to Sardinian popular poetry, in which he postulated the indigenous origin of a particular type of poetic form known as the mutos, likening the melody of these chants to the nature of the Sardinians and their environment.247 The topos of the Barbagia continues to hold sway in the popular imagination to this day, and for contemporary writers Nuoro is still the virtual centre of Sardinia. Not only does Marcello Fois see the whole island in his native town, he holds it up as the symbol of the contradictions of the modern world.248 For writers from the south of the island such as Flavio Soriga (1975), Nuoro is like a reminder, a reproach, a warning, a condemnation. For us, with no Nobel prize winners to flaunt, much less women prize winners, nor eternal days of pitiless judgements, nor piles of bulletriddled corpses, nor the rough justice of round-ups and shoot-outs, for us, the sleepy nap-taking modernised denizens of the Campidano lowlands, of the horrible dormitory suburbs of the capital, for us sortof Sardinians, Nuoro is what we have been, and perhaps what we should be, what we would have been, what we will never be.249

247

Paulis 2001: 17-18. A similar concept appears in Padre padrone, where the protagonist says that “singing in D, the key most typical of the Logudoro, amid the fervour of nature whose chords burst out from the leaves at the mercy of the wind, from the thunder and from the rain, came out beautifully and I killed time.” (Ledda 1975: 68). In his L’isola dei sardi, Rinaldo Caddeo (1881-1956) expresses similar views on the influence of the landscape on the national character. The Sardinians’ innate strength is explained by “the gigantic shadows of the hills and the crashing fury of the torrents” (Caddeo 1903: 172). Brought up to be combative and brave, “the Sardinian grows up without regard for danger and, especially the shepherd, fears nothing, inured as he is to long solitudes in the horror of the night and the storm” (ibid.). 248 Baumann 2007: 317. 249 Quoted in Baumann (2007: 317): “Nuoro è come un richiamo, rimprovero, monito e condanna. Per noi che non abbiamo Nobel da vantare, e meno che mai donne, né giorni eterni di Giudizi spietati, né tanti morti impallinati, né giustizie all’ingrosso con retate e sparatorie, per noi pisolanti sonnacchiosi ammodernati abitanti delle piane del Campidano, degli orribili dormitori extraurbani della Capitale, per noi sardi così così, Nuoro è come siamo stati, e forse come dovremmo essere, come saremmo stati, come non saremo mai”.

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Here Soriga pens a picture summarising many of the elements considered typical of the Barbagian world. Aside from its substantial literary tradition, the young writer is attracted by what has for centuries made European culture hold up the Barbagia as the icon of Sardinia: its identification with an archaic society practising primitive but exotic customs such as the vendetta. To this day, therefore, there persists the idea of an island split into two distinct parts: the authentic Sardinian part with Nuoro and the Barbagia at its centre, and the rest of the island, modernised and compliant with the standards of the world beyond the sea. Barbagia is re-created in the written word as a rocky, mountainous landscape marked by a certain austerity. Yet rigour and severity are considered typical of the Barbagian character. The heart of the island, so different from the warm and welcoming southern regions, is identified with a wild, inhospitable landscape and above all is part of a vision which identifies archaism as the defining cultural feature of the Sardinian world. This convergence between the wild landscape and the archaic state of the island culture re-emerges in Sea and Sardinia when Lawrence, mentioning some old peasants he has come across, says that “queer they looked, coming in with slow, deliberate tread of these elderly men, and sitting, rather remote, with a gap of solitude around them. The peculiar ancient loneliness of the Sardinian hills clings to them, and something stiff, static, preworld”.250 Like the land around them, these men are the bearers of a sense of life that does not fall within the parameters of civilisation. In their remoteness, shrouded in solitude, they express an existential condition that goes beyond the laws of physics. The island experience coincides with a journey back to the origins of existence. Since the Barbagia is the maximum concentration of Sardinian identity, the greater the distance from it the more the island’s characteristics, and by extension those of its people, tend to lose their intensity.251 The only area to reveal a certain affinity with the Barbagia is the island’s rocky north-eastern corner, the Gallura, “the extreme appendage of Sardinia, in great stone-populated solitude”.252 This region is defined with the same vocabulary that predominates in the literature on the typical Sardinian landscape: a land essentially bare, wild and inhospitable, where there is no sense of time and the 250

Lawrence 2009: 134. Wagner 1908c: 269. 252 Levi 2003: 126. 251

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permanence of original nature rules unopposed, a land characterised by the sentiment supreme in the Sardinian soul, loneliness, and by the physical element closest to the fixity of nature, stone. A lunar landscape, and as such heavy with mystery; an “original world, which resembles an immense ruined temple”, a “land of silence”,253 a “vocabulary of granite which knows only the words of the wind and the sun, which very gradually change it through the ages, and which is there, crowded with unmoving silent images, from a past so distant as to confound the imagination”, so that “in this land it would seem that men have never lived: the only possible inhabitants are the occasional solitary shepherds, who pass and leave no trace”.254 The identification of the Barbagia with the Sardinian identity belongs to an interpretative model which to this day runs right across European culture. In his renowned study Le Mediterranée et le Monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949), Fernand Braudel identifies mountain communities as the driving force in the development of Mediterranean societies precisely because of their synthesis of national character and landscape.255 This model is considered to be applicable to Sardinia, where the mountains have stood as a decisive force in the islanders’ past – they are responsible, as much as if not more than the sea, for their isolation. The mountains have also begotten those “pathetic and cruel outlaws” in Orgosolo and the nearby villages who put up such a fierce resistance to the Italian state. This is a reality re-created by ethnology and cinema.256 Braudel sees a clear connection between the wild mountain environment and the Sardinians’ rebellious character: “the mountains are mountains. That is, an obstacle. But at the same time a refuge, a land for free men”.257 The geographer Le Lannou also emphasised the predominance of the mountains in the island’s landscape, going as far as to posit the existence of two Sardinias forever at war with each 253

Ibid. Ibid., 128 and 126. 255 The mountain man dresses in a distinctive way, arousing the mirth of lowlanders, he is the object of their mockery, he is a laughing-stock (Braudel 1995: 30-31). The coastal areas were settled later than the mountains because of malaria and stagnant waters (ibid., 37). On islands and isolation: ibid., 145 and foll. 256 Braudel 1995: 23. 257 Ibid., 24. 254

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other: the pastoral island of the hills and the agricultural one of the lowlands.258 Both scholars thus recognise the Barbagia as the mountain area par excellence which is the centre of Sardinian civilisation and identity. These considerations shared common ground with the thought of Sardinian archaeologist Giovanni Lilliu. Though he acknowledged the limitations of Braudel’s general theory, Lilliu did think it had some application to Sardinia. He also saw the Barbagia as the territory symbolising Sardinian identity in that it was populated by the shepherds of the resistance, the direct descendants of the nuragic civilisation in which he recognised the archetype of Sardinian man.259 Moreover, he agreed that the pastoral world was always at loggerheads with the rest of rural and town-dwelling Sardinia, the part of the island subject to foreign domination and thus less genuinely Sardinian.260 The image of the Barbagia as a primordial paradise, magnificent and fearsome, preserved down the centuries by its isolation, is also present in one of the 20th century’s most influential works on Sardinia. In Franco Cagnetta’s investigative piece Inchiesta su Orgosolo (1954), the Supramonte, heart of the Barbagia, is described as an impenetrable place, the realm of the “real Orgosolo man”:261 Here everything is alien, unyielding, insensitive to every world of man: a frightful Eden. This is the Supramonte, Sardinia’s most isolated territory, the heart of the Orgolese, all shrouded in the mineral, animal and vegetable world; mysterious, as obscure as the territory of another planet. In it lives the Orgosolo shepherd. When I entered the woods looking for the first signs of man, I was confronted by clues of an extreme, incredible primitiveness.262

In Cagnetta’s view it is in the Barbagia that the primordial conditions of the life of an original hunting community have been preserved intact.263 His words confirm the trope of the Barbagia, as Alberto

258

Le Lannou 1941. Lilliu 2002: 230-231. 260 Ibid. 261 Cagnetta 2002: 51. 262 Ibid., 56. 263 Ibid., 83-84. 259

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Moravia points out:264 he thanks the author of Inchiesta su Orgoloso for seeking the “true features of a lost world” and enabling the reader to feel “the purity of the Sardinian mountains, the raw innocence of that life, the wholesome and poetic virginity of those landscapes”.265 To Moravia the Supramonte is a “desolate, wild highland” inhabited by “people so archaic and so very closed”.266 Cagnetta’s ethnological research thus also rests on the preconception of Sardinia as a place which is primordial and exotic compared to the European continent, a ‘paradise lost’ just a few hours by air from the major European capitals. The representation of the Barbagia as a hostile place is also to be found in another influential work: Antonio Pigliaru’s La vendetta barbaricina come ordinamento giuridico (1959). According to the renowned jurist, “the whole life of Barbagian man, the Barbagian shepherd, is a life led in direct and exclusive contact with nature, and can therefore not be anything other than naturalistic”.267 Since Barbagian man – the shepherd – is compelled to live solo come fera (as lonely as a wild beast) in the hostile mountain environment, his philosophy of life is pessimistic,268 so “existence is resistance; resistance against a destiny forever adverse, conducted in the only way possible to save at least his human dignity: with his head held high”.269 The Sardinian mountains are thus loaded with a terrible and fatalistic sense of existence: they have begotten a race who are valiant (balentes) rebels not for their own pleasure but out of necessity. Town and Country The opposition between the rural and urban worlds has been a constant in the Sardinian imagination.270 The attention of travellers is directed mainly to the mountainous areas of the interior because they are considered most typically Sardinian. Repeating a 19th-century 264

Alberto Moravia wrote the preface to the French edition of Inchiesta su Orgosolo. Ibid., 286. 266 Cagnetta 2002: 282. 267 Pigliaru 2000: 216. On the archaic nature of Barbagian society see Pigliaru 2000: 261. 268 Ibid., 220; see ibid., 300. 269 Ibid., 218. 270 Leerssen 2007a: 280. 265

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adage, Crawford Flitch said “Cagliari is not Sardinia”,271 while the “Barbagia is the heart of Sardinia”.272 Tension between urban and rural areas is expressed in antagonism between town- and countrydwellers: the former despise and look down on the latter, who feel completely out of place in a world so distant from their own.273 Towndwellers see the agricultural and pastoral areas as another Sardinia, which has nothing in common with the urban environment;274 in their eyes the centre of the island basically coincides with the image of the wild, primitive, criminal region prevalent in European literary discourse. Conversely, for country folk the island’s historical capital Cagliari is a symbol of subjection to foreigners and is thus inferior to the interior, whose inhabitants have always fought for their freedom. This irreconcilable opposition is confirmed in other 20th-century sources. At the same time, however, as we have already observed in the construction of identity on binary pairs, the opposites tend to be confused. While it is admitted that Cagliari, perfectly located to be Sardinia’s capital,275 has developed remarkably and “aspires to be a little Paris”,276 its modern face is not that “of the true Cagliari”.277 The writer-traveller remains fascinated by the daily ebb and flow of life, whose origin is to be sought “indefinitely far back in time”.278 Even in the place considered the most advanced on the island, the people, driven more by instinct than reason, continue to live as in medieval times – or have “perhaps not even entered into them”.279 Even Sardinian towns then, Cagliari first and foremost, though considered far removed from the original model of Sardinian culture, still embody its immobilism. The dualism between town and country, and the coasts and agro-pastoral areas, is also a recurrent theme in Deledda’s poetry. She attributes moral primacy to the rural world, since it has preserved the 271

Crawford Flitch 1911: 301. Ibid., 302. 273 Cagliari thus rejects Angelo Uras, the main character in Paese d’ombre (Dessì 1972: 324). But this does not mean that he can count on the appreciation of people in country villages, who think that in Cagliari only dolts become famous (Atzeni 1991: 15). 274 See Fiori 2008: 179. 275 Crawford Flitch 1911: 205. 276 Ibid., 206. 277 Ibid. 278 Ibid., 206-210; the quote is on page 210. 279 Ibid.; see also ibid., 212. 272

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values that ennoble the Sardinian people. The rustic environment is the space watched over by memory, a temple to the past and tradition, and therefore to the true spirit of the Sardinians. In Colombi e sparvieri, Jorgj is compelled to admit “in the town I pined for my wild and windy country, and returned joyfully to my hovel”.280 Poor, primitive and wild as it is, the country is always superior to the town. Jorgj is pulled by nostalgia for ‘the known’ (su connottu), for tradition, the part of him inseparably joined to his place of origin, which gives everything meaning. If the rustic world is the true home of the Sardinian soul, in the rural habitat the symbiosis between man and nature becomes total, to the point of being expressed in the metaphor of the maternal bond, in which blood ties generate the highest form of affection and security.281 Jorgj, indeed, goes so far as to say: Like a child at his mother’s bosom I felt cradled and safe when I sat on the rocks or rested my head on the grass. The wind was my brother, the clouds the dreams that couldn’t betray me; the echo the only voice that couldn’t deceive me.282

The idea that urban locations are an accentuated expression of the national character is also evinced by elements of comparison in the descriptions, especially the recourse to chromatic references to noncolours or faded hues. Beyond the green forest-clad slopes of the Gennargentu and the fertile red plain, Wagner could make out 280

Deledda 1981c: 555; see also ibid., 578. In another passage built on the sense of profound symbiosis between man and nature Jorgj states: “I felt the inebriation of solitude and listened to the voices of things” (Deledda 1981c: 566). The maternal simile recurs in the novel: “like a mother the wild land gave me sincere warnings and advice” (ibid., 576). The profound sense of fusion between human being and nature is a feature of all Deledda’s works. One example is a significant passage in Marianna Sirca where a maternal bond is clearly evoked: the heroine hides in “a rock hollowed out like a cradle, and she had slipped inside it, happy to be alone, mistress of everything but hidden from everything; it seemed to her she was the stone inside the fruit, the chick inside the egg. Thus huddled, happy that the passing shepherds did not pull her by the skirt and say with a wink: ‘Can I borrow your place, Marianna?’ she had fallen asleep” (Deledda 1981f: 769; my italics). 282 Deledda 1981c: 565. 281

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Cagliari, which, with its cliffs, towers and churches, looked like a “city in the desert immersed in a uniform grey colour”.283 The city is identified with a colourless emptiness, worthy of no great attention, and it left virtually no trace in his writings. Elsewhere, Cagliari is said to bear the marks of the eastern origins of Sardinian culture. In a highly evocative description, Lawrence captures the capital’s extraneousness to the Italian urban model, just as he had observed the enormous divide between the island’s landscape and that of the mainland; the city’s stark bareness and vertical conformation conjure up visions of Jerusalem and other sun-beaten or desert-like Mediterranean locations. In the glaring Mediterranean light Cagliari looms like a mirage rather than a real place. Even the literary representation of Sardinia’s most emblematic city, then, evokes the exoticism that characterises every experience, real or imagined, on the island: And suddenly there is Cagliari: a naked town rising steep, steep, golden-looking, piled naked to the sky from the plain at the head of the formless hollow bay. It is strange and rather wonderful, not a bit like Italy. The city piles up lofty and almost miniature, and makes me think of Jerusalem: without trees, without cover, rising rather bare and proud, remote as if back in history, like a town in a monkish, illuminated missal. One wonders how it ever got there. And it seems like Spain – or Malta: not Italy. It is a steep and lonely city, treeless, as in some old illumination. Yet withal rather jewel-like: like a sudden rose-cut amber jewel naked at the depth of the vast indenture. The air is cold, blowingbleak and bitter, the sky is all curd. And that is Cagliari. It has that curious look, as if it could be seen but not entered. It is like some vision, some memory, something that has passed away. Impossible that one can actually walk in that city: set foot there and eat and laugh there.284

Some years after Lawrence, Sicilian writer Elio Vittorini also saw Cagliari as the “Jerusalem of Sardinia”.285 His time spent in the capital was summed up in the tactile and visual sensation of just a few colours: the cold yellow of its limestone, the white of its clay roofs and the black of the odd palm-tree. Although such a picture could 283

Wagner 1908d: 41. Lawrence 2009: 47-48. 285 Levi 2009: 80. 284

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recall Africa and its deserts, it turns out to be a mirage of nothingness and pure space.286 The urban Sardinia depicted in literature thus reveals two faces which are apparently irreconcilable but synergically linked in the vision of the Sardinian character. The symbol of urban life and modernity, because it is the opposite of the Barbagia, Cagliari is a simple projection, fragile and evanescent, of Sardinian identity, but at the same time it evokes the eastern, Homeric, primitive and exotic connotation of Sardinian civilisation ab origine. This duality is reflected in the words of Anania; on his train journey to Cagliari he feels torn between a feeling of vitality and an inner drive, awakened by the sight of a “black nuraghe”,287 that takes him back to his origins. The city thus generates dynamic sensations, it becomes a force directed towards action and the future, while the nuraghe, the icon of Sardinian identity par excellence, pulls him back to the past “amid the ruins and the memories imbued with the wild aroma of lentiscus; solitary, haunted by shadows and ghosts from epic ages”.288 Though described as the place of the future, of action, of vital force, Cagliari appears as an exotic reality distant from western modernity, an “enchanted country” which induces a “voluptuous drowsiness”.289 It “resembled a Moorish city”290 where evening fell 286

Vittorini 2009: 81: “[S]ento che Cagliari è una città assai diversa da qualsiasi altra. È fredda e gialla. Fredda di pietra e d’un giallore calcareo africano. Spoglia. Sopra i bastioni pare una necropoli: e che dalle finestre debbano uscire corvi, in volo. I tetti sono bianchi, di creta secca. Da qualche muro spunta il ciuffo nerastro, bruciacchiato, d’un palmizio. Ma non è Africa. È ancora più in là dell’Africa; in un continente ulteriore, dove sia città essa sola. Attorno la terra sfuma in nulla; logora di stagni e saline che sembrano spazi vuoti, spazi puri. E il mare, al di là dal cerchio delle gettate, anche lui è nulla; d’una bianchezza di mare morto” (“I feel that Cagliari is a town very different from any other. It’s cold and yellow. Cold with stone and an African limestone yellow. Bare. Above the bastions it looks like a necropolis; it is as if crows are about to fly out of its windows. The roofs are white with dry clay. Sprouting from a wall here and there is the scorched blackish tuft of a palm-tree. But it’s not Africa. It’s even further away than Africa, in another continent, where it is the only city. Around it the land fades to nothing, worn down by ponds and salt-beds that seem like empty spaces, pure spaces. And the sea, beyond the circle of the jetties, is also nothing, a whiteness of dead sea”). See also Eberhardt 2002: 87-88. 287 Deledda 1981b: 127. 288 Ibid. 289 Ibid., 128. 290 Ibid., 127.

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with “an eastern gentleness” and “seemed like a dream”.291 Giuseppe Dessì describes its people as “sweaty and impatient, wearied by the sirocco which carried the burning breath of the African desert across the sea”.292 These images of urban life conform to the alleged preclassical, eastern and exotic nature of Sardinian identity. Counter-images: Urban Modernity The 1980s saw an attempt to revise the prevailing image of the urban world in Sardinia. Not only did this change broaden the repertoire of places evoked in literature, it was the litmus paper indicating a redefinition of the concept of Sardinian identity. Exemplary in this regard are the urban environments described in the writings of Salvatore Mannuzzu and Sergio Atzeni. A desire to discuss Cagliari was one of the main reasons why Atzeni decided to take up writing.293 Aware of the absolute primacy of the Barbagia as a literary trope and of the absence of a literary tradition focusing on the urban world and the south of the island, Atzeni stated from the outset that he wanted to describe Sardinia as a whole.294 His novel Apologo del giudice bandito (1986) is set in foreign-occupied Caglié (Cagliari) in the fateful year of 1492. If the year of the discovery of America is supposed to represent the beginning of a new era, the walled city – stinking, rubble-strewn, heaving with manure, and above all mortified by the ignorance and vices of its malformed and mean-spirited people – is the sardonic negation of the new epoch;295 rather than the beginning, 1492 seems to mark the end of modernity.296 Apologo presents once more the familiar dichotomy between the city and the mountains, recognising the latter as the beating heart of the island’s civilisation and identity.297 With its towers and bastions whitening in the sun, the

291

Ibid., 129. Admiring the city and its environs from the hills of monte Urpinu, on the horizon Anania sees the clouds forming “profiles of camels and bronze figures” that remind him of a caravan and nearby Africa (Deledda 1981b: 135). 292 Dessì 1972: 323. 293 Marci 1999a: 30-31. About this subject see also Urban 2012: 419-428. 294 Marci 1999a: 31. 295 Marci 2006: 33. 296 These words appear on the books’ cover: “On a closer look [...] the suspicion arises that it is around that date that the apologue coalesces. That the Apologo del giudice bandito is an apologue of the end of Modernity.” 297 Though it is true that for Atzeni the urban environment is a meeting point for country folk and city-dwellers (Marci 1994: 120), the story centres mainly on the

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walled city stands in contrast to the topos of the hills, the land of free men like Itzoccoro Gunale, the Sardinian hero captured but undefeated because he is the bearer of a superior moral ideal.298 The book presents the traditional town-country dichotomy in a distinctive form, as a bi-polar opposition between the walled city and a “liquid environment”. The closed space of the centre of power is opposed to the indefinite vastness of the swamps and the sea surrounding the kingdom’s capital. Fleeing Caglié, the slave Juanica regains her freedom by crossing the swamp – a formless space dominated by sandy waters, reed-beds and the wind – and reaching a mysterious logu, the realm of free Sardinians.299 In his subsequent books, set in different epochs, Atzeni develops his project of exploring other Sardinian landscapes. In this journey in space and time he replaces the familiar image of the Barbagia with that of a modern urbanised island, open and ready for assimilation to what is different. This change is already apparent in Il figlio di Bakunìn (1991). The story is set in the mining industry during the industrialisation of the early 20th century, the crucible of a modern life achieved through the miners’ toil and sacrifice. In their daily struggle for existence in the bowels of the earth there is no memory of the island of the shepherds and their silent flocks – instead there appear the workers’ first attempts at unionisation and the destructive force of Fascism. The miners’ struggle is interwoven with the events of History – with a capital H – so there is an awareness that time on the island is passing in step with the rest of the world. The novel depicts a composite region in which the centre of gravity of Sardinian identity is shifted from the mountainous interior to the south, the location of Cagliari and the mining industry. Set in present-day Cagliari, Il quinto passo è l’addio (1995) is centred on Ruggero Gunale, a man who decides to leave the island by ferry in search of a better life. Though the story is played out in a location that is not Sardinia proper, the thoughts running through struggle between those in power in Cagliè (s’istrangiu, the foreigner) and he (the Sardinian, Itzoccoro Gunale) who has made the mountains his own free realm. 298 Atzeni 1986: 11 and 86. 299 Ibid., 77-84; 82. As will be seen below, the contrast between the city and the liquid space around it recurs in subsequent works which Atzeni sets in Cagliari.

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Gunale’s mind as he makes the crossing hark back continually to his life on the island. It was a life shaped by his experiences in Cagliari, the movingly beautiful city, much beloved of the author,300 to which the entire first page of the book is devoted.301 It is not simply the background to the events re-lived in Gunale’s memories, it is an integral part of his identity. The description of the city details its architectural and morphological features, echoing some of the accounts previously offered by traveller-writers, but also transmits an image radically different from the traditional one: Mouth open to the flies, Ruggero Gunale looks with wet and stony eyes at the receding city: the golden cross on the cathedral dome and sloping down around it the catarrh-coloured palaces of impoverished Spanish nobles, surrounded by stone bastions no man can scale, where clumps of capers hang in the wind, of a smiling green. He looks at the modern districts outside the walls coming down from the hills to the oily dark-green sea, the fine palazzi and porticos from the era of Baccaredda (writer and mayor, beloved and wicked) and the legacy of this age to those of the future: the mournful glass cube that conceals the alleys of the port and offends the town hall, white and dancing, beside which it has pushed in with the insolence of a viceroyal bureaucrat of times past [...]. Ruggero Gunale looks at the receding city. He salutes its Pisan towers and its bell towers.302

300

Atzeni 1998: 54. Marci 1999a: 55. According to Marci, Atzeni’s intimate relationship with Cagliari was such that he had a “carnal” perception of its various manifestations, from physical reality to the mood of its inhabitants (ibid.). 301 Atzeni 1998: 13-14. 302 Ibid.: “Bocca aperta alle mosche, Ruggero Gunale guarda con occhi umidi e impietriti la città che si allontana: la croce d’oro sulla cupola della cattedrale e attorno a corona digradando i palazzi color catarro dei nobili ispanici decaduti, circondati da bastioni pietrosi invalicabili a piede d’uomo, dove pendono chiome di capperi al vento, di un verde che ride. / Guarda i quartieri moderni fuori le mura scendere dai colli al mare oleoso e verde cupo, i bei palazzi e portici dei tempi di Baccaredda (scrittore e sindaco, amato e carogna) e il lascito architettonico di quest’epoca ai futuri: il cubo luttuoso e vitreo che nasconde i vicoli del porto e offende il municipio bianco e danzante cui si è affiancato con protervia da funzionario viceregio d’altri tempi [...]. / Ruggero Gunale guarda la città che si allontana. Saluta torri pisane e campanili”.

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The first thing about the view of the city as seen from the deck of the ship is its vertical profile: from the apex represented by the golden cross atop the cathedral on Castle hill – the medieval citadel – to the buildings covering the slopes of the hill down to the seafront. The gaze which follows the succession of buildings also traces a temporal development, since they represent the stratification of past ages up to the expansion of the “new town” which “has devoured the almond groves, supplanted by a display of sparkling shop-windows”.303 This is a location which is faced with its natural border, the sea, towards which Ruggero Gunale initially shows the Sardinians’ intimate, profound, atavistic mistrust.304 When, in his dream of flying on the winds, he “reached the shore, he looked at the sea and asked himself, ‘Shall I cross it?’ and replied, ‘No. It’s too wide.’ He went back, came down from the roof and woke up”.305 In the eyes of Ruggero-Atzeni Cagliari conserves the fascination of the East, being depicted as a vertical city as characterised by Lawrence and Vittorini.306 A city dried by the sun and cooled by the winds. As the afternoon heat produces vapours which whiten the air and the walls, they rise and shroud the city together with the intense light, so that it appears as “a medieval monk’s vision”, a “Jerusalem ascending to God”.307 It is a place which continually reminds travellers of its multi-ethnic and multi-cultural history, centrally located as it is between different worlds; and of its Middle Eastern and African connotations, revealed by the wind from the Sudan carrying red desert sand and unloading it on the city in warm rain and by the breath of the East advancing in the form of clouds or vapour.308 This exoticism is not a facade, it is an integral part of the city’s Mediterranean soul, bursting out in the potent scents of the scrubland – rosemary and juniper.309 Indeed, Atzeni’s Cagliari 303

Ibid., 20. On the ship Ruggero meets a bandit who has decided to make the crossing by sea but says he prefers the land, because it’s safer (Atzeni 1998: 114-115). 305 Ibid., 14. 306 It is also described in the book as “the white city of light flying behind the gold cross” (ibid., 16). 307 Ibid., 15. 308 Ibid., 24; 119; 124. 309 Ibid., 25. 304

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is an olfactory landscape, to be sampled as an experience overwhelming all the senses; a habitat that captivates in its succession of intense scents and aromas: the smell of the sea which so bewitches visitors that they can never leave for good.310 In his emphasis of its olfactory properties Atzeni propounds the image of a place with a primordial, irrational dimension usually associated with the state of nature – and thus opposed to urban civilisation. The transitory condition of he who physically detaches himself from the island to begin a sea voyage leads to a reflection on the concept of insularity. In the Sardinian imagination the crucial geographical characteristic of being an island had become a synonym of isolation, of unbridgeable separation from the world beyond the sea. But in Atzeni’s literary world the redefinition of the urban environment involves a re-working of the semantics of insularity. Observing the city’s buildings from the deck of the ship, Ruggero reads the complex plot of Sardinian history, its succession of occupations, the passing of the baton from one conqueror to the next, but above all a historical future produced by the inextricable mixing of natives and colonisers. The idea of the foreign city, not truly Sardinian because it has been inhabited and forged from the outside, is turned on its head to become the opposite, a post-colonial urban trope which recognises the essence of its nature in the melting pot of diverse peoples and cultures. The Cagliari of Il quinto passo è l’addio tells its own story and, through it, that of the whole island and those who have lived on it, Sardinians and non-Sardinians alike: The white ship sails off and behind a tall white limestone tooth vanishes the old Phoenician lookout-tower, outpost of Europe and a breath of Africa and the East at the gates of the West, populated by a dark race related to Hannibal, eyed by barefoot marauders, swept by all the winds, inhabited by all perfumes and stenches and by every kind of human intelligence and vice and by the odd virtue, as everywhere men go. Ruggero knows the winds, the perfumes, the marauders. He thinks he is a prince of old stock, he is the son of a blacksmith and a witch, he is ignoble and as mad as a mouflon.311 310

Ibid., 23. Ibid., 67: “La nave bianca si allontana e dietro un dente alto e bianco di calcare sparisce l’antica fortezza vedetta dei Fenici, l’avamposto d’Europa al respiro dell’Africa e d’Oriente alle porte d’Occidente, popolato da una scura genia parente di 311

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The product of the clash-and-encounter between peoples and cultures in its island space, Atzeni’s Cagliari is a negation of the principle of a pure, original and indigenous identity embodied in the topos of the Barbagia. He replaces it with a new concept that originates in the cultural melting-pot, an identity that is authentic in its spuriousness, in its capacity to integrate and amalgamate with what was originally different from it, like Gunale – of humble origins, the spontaneous fruit of miscegenation.312 The primacy of the Barbagia and the system of binary pairs at the basis of the concept of Sardinian identity (town and country, mountains and coast, centre and periphery) are swept away to be replaced by a land which recognises itself ab antiquo in the heterogeneity of its landscape, race and culture. Atzeni’s Sardinia may thus be compared to post-colonial worlds such as the Creole society re-created by Patrick Chamoiseau in Texaco, where Atzeni found much in common with his native island; like Martinique, Sardinia is at last able to tell its own story after centuries of being the helpless object of the narratives of others.313 The attainment of Creole status in Atzeni’s work is accompanied by a reconfiguration of urban Sardinia in conformity with the image of the contemporary metropolis.314 Rather than being unique, Cagliari faces the same problems that beset other modern cities. The medieval citadel – the stronghold of foreign occupiers, un del los castels plus bel de món315 (one of the finest castles in the world), a static and definite nucleus, complete within its walls – is now contrasted to the image of a place subjected to a constant centrifugal force that expands its borders, destroys the centrality of the old nucleus and multiplies poles of aggregation; contiguous but Annibale, adocchiato da predoni scalzi, battuto da tutti i venti, abitato da tutti i profumi e i fetori e da ogni genere d’ingegno e vizio e da qualche virtù, come ovunque siano uomini. Ruggero conosce i venti, i profumi, i predoni. Si crede principe di antica stirpe, è figlio di un fabbro e di una bruscia, è ignobile e folle come un muflone”. 312 See Marci 1999a: 46-47. 313 Atzeni 1994. 314 Pala 2001: 127. 315 On late medieval urban development see Urban 2000. The quotation is from a document of the Aragonese Royal Chancellery (Archivo de la Corona d’Aragón, Cancelleria, reg. 424, fols. 85v-87) edited by Rafael Conde y Delgado de Molina and †Antonio Maria Aragó Cabañas (1984: 219).

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distinct, these in turn entail a remodelling of the forma urbis. The vertical city is thus overlaid by the horizontal city, whose peripheral sprawl swallows up green areas and turns them into shopping centres; old working-class communities are broken up and put into tenement blocks – anthills of the lumpenproletariat. In addition to the historical centre, Il quinto passo è l’addio rehearses the Spanish quarter, the Margine Rosso littoral, the city’s Poetto beach, old quarters and new districts in a succession characterised by simple juxtaposition rather than any clear hierarchy. Its borders increasingly blurred, Cagliari becomes indistinguishable from its hinterland, thus replacing the town-country dichotomy with the image of a multiform landscape whose centre, periphery and extra-urban areas are co-penetrated and fused together. Cagliari’s new horizontal status is evidence of a rethinking of the urban dimension, at once local and global, of Sardinian history. In Atzeni’s posthumously-published story Bellas mariposas the overturning of the urban image reaches its culmination, as the periphery prevails over the historical centre. In his exploration of city life, the writer centres the narrative in an anonymous backwater of the urban fabric. Much of the story is played out in “palazzina 47C di via Gorbaglius quartiere di Santa Lamenera periferia di Kasteddu” (building 47C, via Gorbaglius, district of Santa Lamenera, outskirts of Kasteddu),316 a council tenement presented as a microcosm of any contemporary metropolis. Although some details are left out – for local readers the references are clear enough, however – each of us as a citizen of the world (industrialised, urban, globalised) is able to imagine them.317 The reader discovers the city and its hinterland following Cate and Luna, who wander around by bus and car and on foot in an undirected frenzy, as if driven by an unknown irrational force.318 The place where the two girls fetch up is the council estate they left a few hours earlier – a kind of Indian reservation where people live marginalised lives, in Sardinia no less than anywhere else on the planet. Like Mannuzzu, Atzeni leaves no room for the representation of a Sardinia on the road to modernity; what he does leave is the bitter 316

Atzeni 1996: 66. Illuminating in this regard is the description of the girl’s movements. The hours they spend going from one part of town to another after leaving the beach enable us to piece together a map of the city. 318 See Atzeni 1996: 91-112. 317

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taste of awareness of a future which has already been but has not brought the benefits hoped for.319 The horizontal character of the Cagliari in Bellas mariposas is the realisation that there is no centre, no ideal and spiritual reference point to inspire human action. In its place there is movement, the horizontal dimension of space experienced, crossed, but never really interiorised or possessed, as revealed by the continual senseless, hopeless motion common to all the story’s characters. Yet Bellas mariposas, as will be explained below, does produce a new form of spatial bipolarism, one whose opposites are Cagliari on the one hand and its beach – il Poetto – on the other; almost as if Atzeni, despite his disillusionment with the present, wished to indicate one more chance of escape, hope or dreams for his fellow-townspeople. Salvatore Mannuzzu’s novels also display a particular attention to the representation of space as a metaphor of contemporary Sardinian identity. The story in Procedura (1988) is played out in two places: a rural location recalling the traditions of the agricultural and pastoral environment, and its opposite, a modern urban setting. Although the anonymity of the places in question, represented by one letter and an asterisk, gives an idea of the distance the writer wishes to maintain between the events and the narrator, careful scrutiny reveals C* to be a village in the Planargia, the area in the province of Sassari where the author was born and still feels at home. It is thus a place of origin, simple and genuine, with its characteristic aromas and sensations.320 By contrast, T* (Sassari) is the location of the law courts, of urban society, more complex but not thereby better than traditional society. The crumbling buildings and melancholy greyness that characterise it confirm its state of general decay.321 In other words, the Sardinia of Procedura is a land that has reached the end of the line. It disappears altogether in Mannuzzu’s following book, Un morso di formica. Its place is taken by holiday resorts, non-places,322 nameless locations with no identity, almost all the same, in which even memory offers no consolation because perhaps that past wasn’t 319

Marci 2006: 284-285. Marci 1991a: 280. 321 Ibid., 281. 322 Augé 1995. 320

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worth so much after all.323 As if to say that the pure, genuine Sardinia no longer exists, and probably never did. In conclusion, the forms of representation of the urban world presented by the two most influential contemporary Sardinian authors break away from a centuries-old tradition that put the Barbagia at the centre of Sardinian identity. Its removal entails a complete redefinition of the island space in the narrative imagination: the whole island, from coastal towns to the slopes of the Gennargentu, is now immersed in the flow of history, with all the attendant – above all undesirable – consequences. Gone is the representation of Sardinia as a closed, isolated entity, resistant to the outside world; it is replaced by the image of a land that has always been a crossroads of different peoples and cultures, one whose island status appears to be a resource, or at least a possible alternative. This evolution has begotten a new trope – that of a land matching the model of the post-colonial territories324 – which is destined further to enrich the vast repertoire of images and symbols that for centuries have characterised the cultural construction of the idea of Sardinia. Counter-images: The City and the Beach The primacy of the representation of the pastoral and mountainous Sardinia left little space for maritime and coastal settings in literature.325 Preference for the mainland image of a land closed in upon itself deprived Sardinia in the collective imagination of its essential geographic feature: its status as an island, understood as the potential for encounter and exchange with different worlds. The only piece of Sardinian literature to be set completely in a maritime location is Franco Solinas’ novel Squarciò (1956). Telling the tragic story of a clandestine fisherman who lived in real life, it is set in the archipelago of La Maddalena in north-east Sardinia, the author’s birthplace.326 Although the choice of location was certainly 323

See Marci 1991a: 283-284. Pala 2001. 325 Grazia Deledda’s descriptions of mountains and valleys are accompanied by visions explicitly recalling the maritime environment. On this recurrent feature of Deledda’s poetics and its symbolic significance see Guiso 2005: 16-26. As Marci (2006: 281) points out, references to the sea are also to be found in Vincenzo Sulis’ autobiography (Sulis 2004), along with highly evocative descriptions of coastal landscapes. 326 Brigaglia 1958: 53-54. 324

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revolutionary for its time, it did not overturn the Sardinian tropes. As Manlio Brigaglia pointed out in his review of the novel and the film The Wide Blue Road (Pontecorvo 1957) based on it, the environment of the archipelago, so unusual in Sardinian narrative, actually recalls the background of the Barbagian shepherd.327 Its main spatial connotation is that of an indefinite place, potentially infinite, which perfectly embodies the libertarian energy of Squarciò, the fisherman forced by poverty to break the law; in this it is no different to the topos of the mountains, the realm of freedom for the shepherd-bandit. The majesty of the forests around Nuoro is replaced by the vast expanse of the sea, which under the apparent calm of the surface reveals itself as a jungle, a complex world populated by animal and plant life where the daily struggle for existence is played out as it is among the shepherds in the rugged hills of the Barbagia: Squarciò looked at the sea through the sheet of glass. Prairies of tender green grasses, deserted savannahs, peaks, caves, precipices, intricate forests of branches, flowers that suddenly lit up like glass stars on a Christmas tree; there, a thousand watchful, desperate lives, never still, or immobile only to await their prey, gambled their existence. All in silence, not a sound, a voice, a clumsy move. The colours, which we call black green yellow amaranthine, were not those – they were nameless, invented by the sea.328

With its “vast panoramas”, the marine landscape too is a mysterious world ruled by silence and solitude, a characteristic common to all the places and creatures which “gamble” their existence in Sardinia.329 Squarciò’s world thus stands as a variation of the image of the wild and primitive land rather than a contradiction of it.

327

Ibid., 54. Solinas 2001: 45: “Squarciò guardava il mare attraverso la lastra di cristallo. Praterie di erbe tenere e verdi, savane deserte, picchi, grotte, precipizi, foreste intricate di rami, fiori che si accendevano all’improvviso come stelle di vetro su un albero di Natale: là, mille vite attente e disperate, mai ferme, o immobili soltanto per aspettare la preda, giocavano la loro esistenza. Tutto in silenzio, non un suono, una voce, una distratta goffaggine. I colori, che noi diciamo nero verde giallo amaranto, non erano così, ma senza nome, inventati dal mare”. 329 Ibid., 44. 328

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It is the novels of Mannuzzu and Atzeni which really go beyond the traditional representation of the seashore in Sardinian literature. Both writers abandon the concept of the sea as a constant danger and give it the function of mediating between Sardinians and the rest of the world. It is an open frontier, a resource of people and ideas which has brought change to the island, for good and ill. In Procedura and Un morso di formica, however, the coastal environment is afflicted by the same degradation found in the towns;330 the holiday resort settings of the latter novel are a metaphor of the end of the representation of the unique and genuine land, but they also signal the birth of a new trope: the Sardinia at last caught up by globalisation. In Sergio Atzeni’s writings descriptions of the sea are loaded with further symbolic meanings. It stands for the very existence of the Sardinians, in that their history is made up of the stratification of the peoples from various places who, for one reason or another, fetched up in Sardinia.331 The island’s entire history is no longer encapsulated in the fixed majestic icon of the mountains, a place separate from the rest of the world, but is the result of the constant flow of populations to the island’s shores: We forgot the distances between the stars and realised we were at the centre of a sea whose population increased day by day. We could not stop the human cycle, nobody can. We would have to meet other people, so as to grow. That meeting comes at a cost, and it has to be paid.332

In Atzeni’s universe it is the sea which feeds life to the island, bringing it the races which will make it Sardinian. Sardinia has become the destination of various peoples, the locus of the inevitable encounter between different peoples. How could the ancient Sardinians have refused any contact with, say, Phoenicians making landfall at Chia if they spoke their language?333 330

Marci 1991a: 281-283. In the novel Passavamo sulla terra leggeri custodian of time Antonio Setzu, repository of the collective memory, says of the Sardinian people: “We passed over the land as lightly as water” (Atzeni 1997: 45). 332 Atzeni 1997: 61. “Dimenticavamo le distanze fra le stelle e comprendevamo d’essere al centro di un mare che si faceva di giorno in giorno più popolato. Non potevamo fermare il ciclo dell’uomo, nessuno può fermarlo. Dovevamo incontrare gli altri uomini, per crescere. L’incontro ha un costo, pagarlo è inevitabile”. 333 Ibid., 48; 59. 331

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The sea and its shores act as resources nourishing the Sardinians’ hopes in other works by Atzeni. In his novel Il quinto passo è l’addio the bars on Poetto beach and the locals trying to sneak into its new private sections symbolise revolt, a desire for change and revolution, to the accompaniment of the revolutionary rhythms of 1970s music.334 The same sea and the same beach stand as an icon for the opportunity of purification and rebirth in Bellas mariposas. In one scene Cate talks of the time she went to the beach with her friend Luna (whom she later discovers to be her sister): today at the beach we got there at nine no blokes only mums and little kids blokes get up late we left our towels by a nice lady’s umbrella who was breast-feeding and we dived in when I’m swimming I forget home neighbourhood future my dad the world and myself I should have been born a fish I like darting around just under the surface and coming up for air and looking at the sun that sparkles on the ripples of the north-west wind or flashes on the east-wind waves that suck you down I like playing on the waves stretching out so that they carry me up and drop me in a trough sliding down fighting the undertow breaking into them head-on sometimes they slap you hard and when the water’s flat like yesterday (the north-west went away and the east wind came later) I like listening to the sound of my breath in the water going in and out every three strokes 334

Marci 2006: 283.

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I like feeling my feet spread out like hands to push me and my legs doing the frog movement Luna swims exactly the same Santa Lamenera people there’s not one who swims freestyle we’re rough.335

The inebriating experience of swimming, with its detailed description of the various positions the body takes up in the water, is the symbol of immersion in another reality, different from the monotony of everyday life; it renders the individual oblivious to daily suffering (“I forget home neighbourhood future my dad the world”) and the passing of time.336 It is an oblivion that becomes desire for another existence and leaves room for dreaming (“I should have been born a fish”). The representation of this marine landscape in which a young Sardinian has the courage to let herself go, to earn the right to dream of a different future, is a completely original image of Sardinia, in total contrast to the tradition which cast the sea as a constant threat. Atzeni cannot imagine a Sardinia without its sea, a lung which brings it fresh oxygen, brings it life. The island’s symbiosis with its sea is total, as is that with its people – a synergy marked by Cate’s regular breathing in unison with the water. Swimming beneath the waves, complete immersion in the water, entails the trusting feeling of abandonment in a symbolic amniotic fluid in which to be reborn, not the fear of being 335

Atzeni 1996: 88-89: “oggi in spiaggia siamo arrivate alle nove e maschi nessuno soltanto mamme con bambini piccoli / i maschi si svegliano tardi / abbiamo poggiato gli asciugamani vicino all’ombrellone di una signora simpatica che stava allattando e ci siamo tuffate / quando nuoto dimentico casa quartiere futuro mio babbo il mondo / e mi dimentico / dovevo nascere pesce / mi piace guizzare sotto il pelo dell’acqua e uscire ogni tanto a respirare e guardare il sole che scintilla sulle ondine di maestrale o abbaglia sulle onde di levante che ti succhiano in basso / mi piace giocare con le onde allungarmi perché mi portino in alto e mi buttino in un gorgo / scivolargli sotto combattendo il risucchio / passargli in mezzo spaccandole a volte sono dure come schiaffi / e quando il mare è come ieri piatto (il maestrale è andato via il levante arriverà più tardi) mi piace ascoltare nell’acqua il rumore del mio respiro che esce e entra ogni tre bracciate / mi piace sentire i piedi che si allargano come mani per spingermi e il movimento a rana delle gambe / Luna nuota uguale preciso / Gente di Santa Lamenera non c’è uno che nuota a stile siamo grezzi.” (The sign “/” in Atzeni’s text marks the beginning of a new line separated from the last by a blank one). 336 Cate says: “I spent the time in the sea and I wasn’t aware of time passing” (Atzeni 1996: 91).

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completely lost in the infinite vastness of being. Through these images Atzeni provides the collective imagination with a land at last able to be itself, ready to invest in its island status, aware that life is always the fruit of an exchange, though often unequal, of giving and receiving. People The Shepherd In emblematic terms the 20th-century representation of the Sardinian people was opened by the publication of Caccia grossa,337 Florentine army lieutenant Giulio Bechi’s fictionalised chronicle of his experience in Sardinia. The book renders his feelings of horror and wonder at the primitive world populated by creatures he had no compunction in describing as “loutish hairy troglodytes”.338 At the centre of his image of them is the “fine hardy race of shepherds, decked out in their red-flecked sheepskin costumes, galloping through the crags, shotguns on their backs, as proud as the sharp peaks of their hills, as free and wild as their forests”.339 The shepherd is the symbol of Sardinian identity, the anthropological synthesis of a race of mountain-dwellers, skilful horsemen and hunters whose only laws are honour and vendetta, a race whose feral nature is accompanied by a marked sense of hospitality.340 This confirmed the 19th-century tradition of Sardinian tropes, though it was augmented by the theories 337

As Manlio Brigaglia has recently shown, parts of Bechi’s work were plagiarised from the chronicle of the military actions published in the daily newspaper La Nuova Sardegna, in that he gave “first-hand accounts” of episodes in which he took no part (see pages 16-20 of the preface to the 1997 edition of Bechi’s work, edited by Manlio Brigaglia). The paper’s response to Bechi’s attacks included an ode written by poet Sebastiano Satta to the bandit Lovicu, who escaped death in the fighting at Morgogliai (Brigaglia 1997: 17 and the poem on pages 23-24). 338 Bechi 1997: 158. 339 Ibid., 62. 340 Ibid., 169. Subsequent travellers also saw hospitality as a typical Sardinian characteristic. In this regard see Gamel Holten (2005: 16 and 34); Vittorini (2009: 42) observed: “Like all nations still primitive at heart, the Sardinians have this cult. A man cannot travel freely in their land without becoming, once sighted, the object of hospitality and being passed from one host to the next. For them it an impelling need”. Münster (2006: 61) described the Sardinians as the most hospitable people on earth.

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of the genetic inferiority of southerners advanced by the positivist school of criminologists, who placed Sardinians at the lowest level of human development. Bechi’s impressions coincided with the picture that had emerged in an anonymous report dated 1834, which explained the crimes committed by shepherds in terms of natural and anthropological conditions comparable to the first stage of human development.341 Described as a primitive character endowed with a range of practical gifts which enable him to survive in a hostile environment, the shepherd is a pure creature in the sense that his existence is bound to the cycle of nature and ancient customs, but he is above all the expression of an anti-modern culture based on his code of honour. Coarse men, toughened by a harsh climate, from this standpoint shepherds are above all work-shy, desirous of living free and independent, wandering between mountains and plains with the sole purpose of finding pasture for their flocks.342 Behind this analysis was a school of thought convinced of Northern cultural superiority and appreciative of how the Italian state was dealing with a wild, archaic South. A similar view may be discerned in the memoirs of Giuseppe Farris, a warrant officer in the Carabinieri involved in the campaign against Sardinian banditry at the same time as Bechi.343 The conflict between the army and the bandits took on the character of a Manichean struggle between civilisation and barbarism. With a rhetorical style typical of the genre, Farris contrasted the heroism of the king’s soldiers with the ferocity of the brigands and their extraneousness to civil society. In line with a long European cultural tradition which postulated a direct link between physical features and 341

The report is cited by Da Passano 1984: 200 and mentioned several times by Loi 2001: 78. 342 Ibidem. In his travel dairies Max Leopold Wagner recorded that the people of the Nuoro area were distinguished by the extreme simplicity of their way of life – they were shepherds, whose only wealth was their livestock. He thought that Sardinian mountain-dwellers were born nomads; they were skilful horsemen, loved to hunt and preferred to sleep in the open (Wagner 1908b: 246). He had words of admiration particularly for the inhabitants of Orúne, who, though hardly living saintly lives, were magnificent to behold. They preferred wandering the forests and living as migrant shepherds to the backbreaking toil of agriculture (Ibid., 249.). 343 Giuseppe Farris, Maresciallo Maggiore dei Carabinieri Reali, Dieci anni di brigantaggio in Sardegna. Memorie (Rome: ed. Voghera, 1914). This text is also quoted by Cagnetta 2002: 149.

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personal character,344 Farris illustrated his narrative with photographs of bandits. To convince the reader of the “innate ferocity” of Paolo Solinas, a glance at his portrait would suffice;345 the photo of Antonio Manconi showed the “appearance of a determined criminal”;346 the portrait of the “bloodthirsty” Giuseppe Noli Coi represented “the typical figure of a criminal with fox-like cunning”;347 the photo of Antonio Soro stood as an example of “the true type of wild man, thirsting for blood”,348 while that of Pietro Sotgiu “shows all the features in him of the true type of audacious evil-doer”.349 Yet the model of the primitive, wild and vindictive Sardinian characteristic of the above texts is not far removed from that present in the work of the island’s most authoritative representative of the early 20th century, Grazia Deledda. In her novel Colombi e sparvieri (1912), protagonist Jorgj speaks of his people: The little village where I was born is devoted almost exclusively to stock-rearing. The nature of the rugged hilly terrain allows no agriculture, and in any case because of their special character the inhabitants could never get used to patiently tilling the land. The man of these mountains is still primitive, and if he manages to steal a goat and eat it with his companions or his family he is as pleased as he would be with the successful completion of a mission. The day before or the week before, he too had a goat stolen, so why shouldn’t he get his own back? And if you say he did wrong, he’s insulted, and bears a grudge like a man whose rights you have tried to take away. Segregated from the rest of the world, in continual strife with his few fellows, often with his own kin, his own brother, the man of this village thinks he can procure his own justice with the weapons he possesses: his muscular strength, his cunning, his tongue. He does not know what society is, and to him the law is an illogical force to be eluded because it cannot be beaten. And for that matter he’s right – far-off society remembers him only to exploit him. It demands taxes and forces him into military service and does not protect him from his 344

Agazzi 2007: 398-399. Farris 1914: 30. 346 Ibid., 83 and 85. 347 Ibid. 348 Ibid., 139. 349 Ibid., 141. 345

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enemy or from thieves, gives him no help when the freezing winter kills his livestock, does not save him from false witness when he is accused of a crime. So he sees to his own defence out of instinct, out of habit, as of right.350

The story containing this description stands as a sort of distillation of the pre-20th-century image of Sardinia, in which the hero is once again a shepherd – primitive and brave but ferocious.351 Deledda dwells at length on the picturesque: detailed descriptions of Sardinian song and dance and vivid images of characters in costume enable the reader to see colourful pictures of village life. All these elements were later exploited to the full in the film made from the book.352 The Sardinian identity outlined in Colombi e sparvieri is also to be found in works 350

Deledda 1981c: 522: “Il paesetto ove son nato è quasi esclusivamente dedito alla pastorizia. La natura del terreno montuoso, accidentato, non permette l’agricoltura, e d’altronde gli abitanti per l’indole loro speciale non possono abituarsi a lavorare pazientemente la terra. L’uomo di queste montagne è ancora un primitivo e se gli riesce di rubare una capra e di mangiarsela coi suoi compagni o con la sua famigliuola se ne compiace come di una piccola impresa andata bene. Anche a lui, il giorno prima o la settimana prima, è stato rubato un capretto: perché non dovrebber fiarsi? E se voi gli dite che ha fatto male si offende, e vi serba rancore come un uomo a cui voi tentiate di togliere qualche diritto. Segregato dal resto del mondo, in lotta continua con i pochi altri suoi simili, spesso coi suoi stessi parenti, col fratello stesso, l’uomo di questo villaggio si crede in diritto di farsi giustizia da sé, con le armi che possiede: la forza muscolare, l’astuzia, la lingua. Egli non sa cosa è la società, e la legge per lui è una forza illogica che bisogna eludere perché non si può vincere. Del resto ha ragione: la società lontana si ricorda di lui solo per sfruttarlo: gli richiede i tributi, lo costringe al servizio militare, e non lo salvagarda dal suo nemico, non dai ladri, non l’aiuta quando l’inverno rigido fa morire il suo bestiame, non lo salva dal testimonio falso quando egli è accusato di qualche crimine. Egli quindi si difende da sé per istinto, per abitudine, per diritto”. 351 In a letter written in 1897 to Angelo De Gubernatis, Deledda (2007: 341) observed that “deep down in all the individuals of my still half-wild race there is a kind of pride that prevents us from being completely good”. 352 See also the introduction to the novel, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola (Deledda 1981c: 473-475). It is significant that the plot of Colombi e sparvieri was used as the background for one of the most spectacular films set in Sardinia: Proibito (Monicelli 1954), whose plot revolves around the rivalry (disamistade) between two families. The characteristics passed down as typical of Sardinians in literary discourse was now presented on cinema screens to a huge audience in search of entertainment and thrills, drawn by the dangers that they generally tried to avoid in everyday life. The archaic Sardinia – violent, passionate, adventurous and thus fatally attractive, in other words adventurous and exotic – thus proved to be ideal for the appetites of cinema-goers. On this film see chapter 3.

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by Deledda which place less emphasis on folklore – confirmation that this representation of the primitive Sardinian people expresses her forma mentis, despite her declared intent to abandon certain preconceived models.353 The figure of the shepherd is fused with that of the bandit in another of Deledda’s major works: Marianna Sirca (1915), which revolves around the doomed love between Marianna and Simone Sole.354 The classic shepherd who has turned bandit out of necessity, the lowly Simone makes a stand against the social order to throw off the yoke of ill-treatment to which he is subjected and assert himself as a free man. The tragedy of his character is that although he has committed no crime he is forced to live on the edge of society; he is an outlaw without being a criminal, and therefore a romantic hero.355 Though the character she portrays is surprisingly fragile, in some ways childish,356 Deledda draws on the traditional repertoire of bandit and man-of-honour tropes: Simone has been brought up to be resilient and to be able to defend himself at all times (balente), in accordance with the saying that men “should be men, not rabbits”.357 At the same time he is a primitive creature: his behaviour is animal-like and deep within him lie a “wild beast” and “something feline”.358 His hair smells of grass, dust and sweat; it is “a smell both wild and scented” which arouses in Marianna a “sense of savage strength”.359 353

It should be remembered that Colombi e sparvieri belongs to a key period in Deledda’s literary career, when the publication of some of her most significant novels (Marianna Sirca, Canne al vento, La madre) brought her international renown. 354 Though the story is built around the impossible love between Marianna Sirca and the bandit Simone Sole, Vittorio Spinazzola points out that the main theme of the novel is actually the decline of the traditional family structure (Deledda 1981f: 765). 355 Deledda 1981f: 762. Other bandits are featured in the book. One of them, Bantine Fera, has none of Simone’s weaknesses, he is a “real bandit, his own man, reckless and brutal” (Deledda 1981f: 913). He became an outlaw as a result of defending his honour but subsequently devoted himself to crime out of instinct, which drove him to evil deeds (ibid., 913). He is brave and, when necessary, ferocious (ibid., 849). 356 Emblematic in this respect are the scenes in which Simone rests his head in Marianna’s lap: Deledda 1981f: 795 and 850-851. 357 Ibid., 790. On Simone’s background as a shepherd and his decision to be a free man and therefore an outlaw, see ibid., 790-792. 358 Ibid., 925; 777. 359 Ibid., 795-796.

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Deledda thought that the Sardinian bandit was “one of the most interesting types” produced by the “proud region” of Nuoro.360 Among the most remarkable specimens she noted the “fierce hero” Lo Vicu: “a fine-looking young man, not without intelligence and highly astute”, born in Orgosolo, a village known for the “beauty and strength” of its inhabitants, who were prey to “generous and violent instincts”.361 Though he was a true “hero of evil”,362 he was a natural heir of the Sardi pelliti, and was thus an emblem of the Sardinians who had sought refuge in the mountains of the Barbagia and were able to withstand all foreign attempts to subjugate them. Though her characters reflected the traditional Sardinian image, from early in her career Deledda seemed to complain about popular prejudices regarding Sardinians. In her correspondence with De Gubernatis, she was eager to stress the positive experiences recorded by foreign travellers in the island, which she adduced as proof of the falsehood of the ideas spread about her compatriots.363 Yet the essays she wrote on regional traditions have left us vivid descriptions of the people of Nuoro which feature the very tropes she appeared to rail against. The inhabitant of this region “has the defects and the virtues and the passions of the primitive man and the superstitions which belong to all peoples in general and were not beneath even great spirits, from Luther to many great men living today. He kills out of passion, driven by the obstinacy of the vendetta”.364 The man of the Barbagia, under the unwritten law of balentia, was therefore required

360

Deledda 2011c: 228. Ibid., 229. 362 Ibid., 228. 363 Deledda 2007: 183-184: “Have you ever dreamed of me among the brigands? Perhaps before falling asleep you have thought of Sardinia and, as we know, thinking of Sardinia you think of brigands! Yet on all my long excursions through the woods and the wild mountains I have never even seen one, and all the mainlanders and the English who come here to hunt are full of praise for Sardinian hospitality, if for nothing else, when they leave, and they flatly deny that there are any brigands here.” (“Dunque mi hai sognato fra i briganti? Forse prima di addormentarti hai pensato alla Sardegna e, si sa, pensando alla Sardegna si pensa ai briganti! Eppure nelle mie lunghe escursioni attraverso boschi e montagne selvaggie, io non ne veduto mai ancor uno, e tutti i continentali e gl’inglesi che vengono per le caccie, se ne vanno entusiasmati per l’ospitalità sarda, se non per altro, e poi negano recisamente che vi sieno quì dei briganti.”). Roberta Masini, editor of the volume containing the collected correspondence between Deledda and De Gubernatis, dates this letter to 1894. 364 Deledda 2011d: 66. 361

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to be an avenger, a true romantic hero able to make good the lack of justice.365 On her arrival in Sardinia, Swedish writer Amelie Posse Brázdová recorded that she had received letters of presentation from Deledda, whom she had previously met in Rome, along with much good advice on how to deal with the latter’s compatriots, who were “haughty and primitive but cordial”.366 Having spent some time there, she wrote in her diary that the Sardinians in Deledda’s books were perfectly true to life.367 In a letter sent from Rome in 1901 to lawyer Giuseppe Pinna on the occasion of Wilhelm Hörstel’s visit to Sardinia to write about it for German newspapers, Deledda emphasised the need to help him understand the island’s real ills, while at the same time avoiding “the overstatements made by all those who have written about our affairs”.368 She therefore urged him to introduce Hörstel to the poet Sebastiano Satta and the few other people in Nuoro who could provide him with “true information” (my italics).369 Though she explicitly stated the wish to present a more real image of Sardinians, one devoid of prejudices, it is clear that Deledda herself was unable to avoid recourse to those very tropes; her writings are marked by a continual oscillation between assertions of the worth of the Sardinian people and descriptions of them in line with their primitivism. Significant in this respect is the recurrence in her novels of one of the most important elements in the construction of national character in literary discourse: the mirroring of the characteristics of a race and the land it inhabits:370 the characters in Colombi e sparvieri are described

365

Guiso 2005: 74. The quotation from Posse Brázdová 1998: 58, is recorded by Guiso (2005: 115). 367 “I had many subsequent opportunities to ascertain how realistic her psychological descriptions actually were. A great many times I came across characters and individuals, often among villagers, who seemed to have stepped from her books. And this was before she became famous and won the Nobel prize” (quoted in Guiso 2005: 115). 368 These circumstances and a passage from the letter to Giuseppe Pinna are reported in Guiso 2005: 115-116. 369 Ibid. 370 Smith 1999: 149. 366

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as proud, grim in face and expression, tough in demeanour, as enigmatic as the rocks of the mountains in which they live.371 That Deledda always remained faithful to the pastoral and primitive image of Sardinians is shown in what she has to say about her brother Andrea in her posthumously-published autobiographical novel Cosima. Head of a rich landowning family in Nuoro, he has the mentality peculiar to a rich shepherd: he lives a rough life but is first and foremost a free man.372 Although no-one has ever taught him to ride, as a young boy he is happiest when he can gallop like “an adolescent centaur”, and his skill exemplifies the innate ability of Sardinian horsemen: “he even rides bareback on unbroken colts, and his shouts to spur them on compete with their neighing”.373 In him we perceive “the instincts of a race still primitive” in perennial conflict with an inborn goodness, the torment of an unquiet soul which drives him to the expression of a primordial freedom nourished by boldness and abandon.374 As if to say that the primitivism of the shepherdhorseman must always be tempered by an ethical sense, the only force able to harness his wildest instincts and convert them into chivalrous courtesy.375 In his essay on Eleonora d’Arborea (1929), Camillo Bellieni provided confirmation of the romantic but dark image of Sardinian shepherds.376 Completely separated from the rest of the world, they were forced to live in silence in “dark sheepfolds”.377 They spent their

371

“They were proud, arrogant men, tall brazen-faced youths, old men from whose dark faces seemed to hang the creepers of the oaks beneath which they spent their days and nights. In all of them was something hard and enigmatic: they are part of the nature of the rock from which our mountains are formed” (Deledda 1981c: 528). Such references abound. Another example is the simile of Sardinian honey – bitter and sweet, like the Sardinian soul (Deledda 1981b: 153). 372 Deledda 1971c: 700. 373 Ibid. 374 Ibid., 723. 375 An image of two men on horseback “with faces like Cimbri looking for a Roman senator’s beard to pull” suddenly takes on an elegant, chivalrous air on the appearance of a female figure riding with one of them, her arm around his waist (Vittorini 2009: 57). 376 See section Women below. 377 Bellieni 2004: 96. “Shepherds of good repute and ill, because during their long dreaming the joy of stealing often springs up like a revelation. Their eyes light up like those of a goshawk, then they swarm down from the high rocks, clinging to the underbrush, to boulders, to olive-trees bent by the wind as by a curse, crawling

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long days in the open, carving staffs and decorating pumpkins and water-bottles with hunting scenes and other themes reflecting their experience. “They have the languid, dreamy eye of a goat” and sing “painful monotonous dirges of love”, but can turn into marauders when taken by the frenzy for plunder.378 For these “primitives, who have the naive heart of Homer’s heroes, plunderers and poets”, Bellieni noted that the Carta de Logu had no mercy.379 That medieval legal code laid down severe penalties for crimes such as rustling and damaging livestock and cultivations: one was the tearing out of the tongue with a hook, prescribed for a shepherd guilty of hiding other people’s animals in his flock.380 Bellieni reported the general conviction, held since those times, that shepherds were “almost damned by God from their birth”.381 An appreciation for an archaic people, proud and still faithful to its origins, is also the unifying theme of 20th-century travel narratives, marked by their insistence on the uniqueness of encountering an archaic civilisation.382 The sense that knowing Sardinian man entails a journey in time to a distant, idealised and mythicised past is common to all the writer-travellers: Wagner, Crawford Flitch, Gamel Holten, Münster and Jünger, but also Vittorini e Levi.383 As if in a game of through brown patches of cistus; then they descend on the enemy’s lair and make plunder”. 378 Ibid. 379 Ibid. 380 Ibid., 93. 381 Ibid. 382 Admiring celebrations for the feast of San Costantino (Santu Antine) in the village of Desulo, Crawford Flitch (1911: 269) observed: “The light played such tricks with their faces that the effect was like that of a congregation of those grotesque Sarde idols which you may see in the museum at Cagliari suddenly come to life after two thousand years of immobility”. Another reference to the archaic and “remote” aura surrounding the Sardinians is to be found in Sea and Sardinia: “There came in three peasants in the black-and-white costume, and sat at the middle table. They kept on their stocking-caps. And queer they looked, coming in with the slow, deliberate tread of these elderly men, and sitting rather remote, with a gap of solitude around them. The peculiar ancient loneliness of the Sardinian hills clings to them, and something stiff, static, pre-world” (Lawrence 2009: 134). Levi (2003: 35), too, thought that the shepherd leading his flock had a “remote face”. 383 Wagner 1908d: 41. Crawford Flitch 1911: 210: “In the streets of Cagliari I found myself caught in a fiercer current of human life, the source of which is indefinitely far

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mirrors, the trope of the Barbagia as the real Sardinia is accompanied by a belief in the physical and moral superiority of the Barbagian over the other islanders.384 These ideas were also nurtured by Sardinians themselves; Münster was amused to relate how even in the 1950s people in the north and south of the island tended to consider themselves mainlanders, while only the inhabitants of the Gennargentu area were unable to find any mitigation in their “sad” fate of being Sardinians.385 At the beginning of the century the inhabitants of the interior were still being described as savages. Wagner recorded that the people of Orgosolo were tall and strong, wore their long hair in plaits and used boarskin shoes.386 The penetrating stares and indomitable .

back in time”. Gamel Holten (2005: 22) recalls the silence and solitude of the Barbagia landscape, a country which seems unchanged, as it was at the beginning of time. Münster 2006: 24-25. Jünger 1999: 29. See also his observations on the primitive character of Nuragic (prehistoric) bronze figurines (ibid., 232) and the nobility of men still in the state of nature such as the Sardinians (ibid., 144-145). Vittorini 2009: 55. Levi 2003: 35 and 66. In this regard see his description of Battista Corraine, the old man of Orgosolo who was the only survivor of the vendetta between his and the Cossu family. Dressed in typical shepherd garb, he appears to Levi (2003: 109) like an “ancient king”, so “hospitable, simple and solemn” that he is “a monument to time, a stone which looks with living eyes”. 384 Wagner 1908b: 245. Crawford Flitch (1911: 302): “Barbagia is the heart of Sardinia”. Gamel Holten (2005: 104) observed that the Barbagia was “the savage heart of the savage Sardinia”. Wagner had more to say about the people of southern Sardinia. He thought that the Cagliari end of the Campidano was more civilised than the rest of the south and that the physical appearance of its inhabitants bore traces of the succession of peoples and races who had settled on the island. What most struck him was the similarity between the landscape of southern Sardinia and the eastern Mediterranean, a characteristic reflected in the physiognomy and customs of its people: Wagner 1908d: 40 (“Das Campidano von Cagliari macht infolge der Nähe der Hauptstadt einen zivilisierteren Eindruck als die moisten Teile des Südens der Insel; im Typus der Bewohner aber offenbart sich die alte Rassenkreuzung. Nirgends in Sardinien wird man mehr an den Orient erinnert als hier. Nicht nur durch die Landschaft, die mit den nie endenden Hecken des Feigenkaktus (Opuntia), mit den stachligen Aloen und den da und dort aufragenden, manchmal – wie im Campu mannu bei Cagliari – auch Gruppen bildenden”). 385 Münster 2006: 10. 386 Wagner 1908c: 268. Vittorio Angius also noted that Sardinians had thick beards and wore their hair in plaits (quoted in Loi 2001: 117-118). His colourful portrayal of the inhabitants of Bitti owes much to Wagner (1908b: 249). He described them as tall, strong, hirsute men whose clothes were customarily dark rather than eye-catching; they had a penetrating gaze, shining eyes and clipped movements and gestures. The old men, grey but still curly-haired and bearded, resembled figures from the Old Testament ruled by the law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Gamel Holten

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expressions observed in old people was taken as confirmation of their savage nature.387 The shepherds of the black granite village of Fonni had dark complexions and sported black beards.388 Crawford Flitch spoke of his astonishment on meeting some islanders whose features and apparel expressed a barbaric splendour.389 This savage appearance was combined with a primitive mentality and set of customs, such as adherence to the principle of honour and the personal vendetta;390 nonetheless, they had their own rules of etiquette.391 Forged by their habitat,392 the Sardinian people were vigorous, hardy and above all jealous of their freedom;393 they were the embodiment of a primordial (2005: 104) also observed that the men of the Barbagia were strong and of rude health. The inhabitants of Fonni were also shepherds for the most part and in some respects resembled those of Bitti. They still wore seamless boarskin shoes and their attire was easily recognisable by their characteristic dark-brown doublets (Wagner 1908c: 269). 387 Wagner 1908b: 247. 388 Gamel Holten 2005: 60. 389 Crawford Flitch 1911: 245-246. “For my part, I was taken up with admiration of the patron and his four sons. Their dress had a rich and barbaric splendor. The sheepskin had a curled black fleece of the finest gloss; the giubbone, or short jacket, was of flame-like vermilion; the vest of crimson velvet, with bars of golden embroidery; the white shirt fastened at the throat with jeweled buttons. The men were nearly perfect specimens of the human animal – erect, defiant, all muscle, blood, and bone, a hidden energy plainly perceptible in every line of their statuesque repose” (ibid., 246-247). At the feast of San Costantino in Sedilo Crawford Flitch encountered “peasant priests, as raw and terrible as pugilists; skin clad shepherds who had lived so long in the mountains that they had become as wild as the beast they herded” (ibid., 257). As time passed the use of the national costume gradually diminished, but even those who emigrated and dressed differently seemed unable to rid themselves entirely of their origins. The past still made itself felt, as in the young man encountered by Levi in a bar in Orune: though similar to the others in build and gait – “set square on his bow legs” (Levi 2003: 111) – he was flamboyantly dressed, but even in this case his attire “somehow followed an exotic, colonial, warlike tradition, that of the shepherds’ costume” (ibid.). Like other emigrants he was still basically “outside and within his ancient pastoral world” (ibid.). 390 In this regard Wagner (1908b: 249) noted the demeanour prevalent among the inhabitants of Bitti: the men were never seen unarmed when on horseback and it was best to steer clear of them. Gamel Holten (2005: 16; see also 60) described Sardinia as a land of passionate love, cruel and unfailing vendetta and extreme hospitality. 391 Gamel Holten 2005: 66. 392 Crawford Flitch 1911: 247. 393 Gamel Holten 2005: 104. In this regard see also Münster 2006: 98.

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humankind diametrically opposed to modernity, endowed with an uncorrupted virility and incapable of being tamed.394 Their libertarian character was expressed in their choice of a nomadic shepherd life and in customs in keeping with a warrior spirit such as skilled horsemanship and the use of arms, abilities useful for people living in a condition of constant strife.395 Alongside the theme of primitivism, 20th-century sources made consistent reference to the Oriental character of the Sardinians as a whole. Speaking in vague terms of the ‘East’ – referring sometimes to North Africa, sometimes to the Middle East, sometimes to the preclassical and biblical Mediterranean – meant drawing on the trope of a people not only archaic and primitive but exotic, fascinating and different from the model of the European white man. Distant and mysterious places, real or imagined, were evoked by certain encounters, such as that with locals whose dark skin left a strikingly African impression.396 The facial features observed in the Cagliari Campidano betrayed a mixing of races and reminded Wagner of the East, as did the people’s attire, and the women in the Barbagian village of Mamoiada were distinguished by the Oriental beauty of their features.397 Describing a young lady by the name of Malvina, Jünger recorded the unmistakably African shape of her face and noted a correspondence between her physical appearance and character.398 The girl looked to him like a Nubian cat; staring into her face he had the impression of entering another dimension of time, one in which centuries were just small change. Malvina’s face became the head of the Princess of El Amarna, the smile of the Sphinx.399 As much as appearance, the Sardinian character also recalled the East. Münster observed that the peculiar feature of the Sardinians was the melancholy typical of desert people: forever at the mercy of sun, wind and sand, they saw open space as hostile and were always aware of the 394

Lawrence 2009: 56, 83. On the importance of horsemanship for a Sardinian see also Münster 2006: 81, and the descriptions offered by Gamel Holten 2005: 18, according to whom “a Sardinian on his skinny little horse is a picturesque sight”. She also dwelt on the constant presence of weapons (ibid., 52-53). Gamel Holten noted that in the Barbagian village of Fonni thieving and other crimes were a constant factor, making life there resemble a perpetual state of war (ibid., 60). 396 Wagner 1908e: 60. 397 Wagner 1908d: 40. Idem 1913-1914: 7. 398 Jünger 1999: 211. 399 Ibid. 395

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threat of death.400 In short, the Sardinian world continued to be identified with the topos of an Eastern people and its limitless potential to become what Europeans demanded of it to satisfy their insatiable appetite for the fantastic and the unreachable. The anthropological model of the indomitable, rebellious shepherd reasserted itself forcefully in the public mind in the 1950s, with the return of the problem of banditry. Though there was undeniably a sharp increase in this form of crime, the familiar tropes were given a new lease of life above all by the media attention it attracted.401 Yet even the period’s most influential scholar Antonio Pigliaru, though rejecting an existential interpretation of the Sardinian character and the outdated tenets of positivist criminology, analysed the roots of the crime problem from the assumption that the people of the Barbagia conserved social customs and practices dating back to the primitive state of mankind.402 The renowned jurist thought that the anthropological epicentre of the Barbagia was constituted by the shepherds and their ancient customs, the historical product of a people which was compelled to live in an impenetrable habitat and developed an indigenous community structure to regulate its social relations.403 He thought that the Barbagian shepherds’ condition could only be explained in a human context that had remained primordial, since their conception of life was still rigorously naturalistic.404 This vision therefore confirmed the representation of a closed, impenetrable world, self-produced and self-regulating, which found itself in an allencompassing conflict with an outside (alias the Italian) state, which imposed new rules and forced it to relinquish its own.405 The trope of the Barbagia as a closed and static entity also appeared in the anthropological studies of Franco Cagnetta. He saw 400

Münster 2006: 112. Loi 2001: 42 and 108. 402 Marci (2006: 267-268) has opined that Pigliaru’s sudden death gave a rigid character to some of his positions, and that he would probably have revised them if he had been able to continue his research. There is no denying, however, that his studies – which were held in almost sacred regard – had a crucial influence on cultural debate in Sardinia in the second half of the 20th century. 403 Pigliaru 2000: 14. 404 Ibid., 216. A critique of Pigliaru’s ideas is to be found in Loi 2001: 104-105. 405 See also Loi 2001: 104-105. 401

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the Barbagian shepherd literally as a survivor, a fossil of primordial human civilisation whose lifestyle had adapted to the inhospitable harshness of the mountain environment.406 On his arrival in the village of Orgosolo he found himself confronted with “indications of an extreme and incredible primitiveness”,407 noting that some shepherds lived in severe isolation and used a language in which human sounds were mixed with the clucking of chickens.408 The objects in everyday use were “so rudimentary that they might have been said to belong to aborigines”.409 Even the Sardinians’ much-vaunted hospitality was typical of “archaic times” and satisfied an impelling need in such a hostile environment.410 The archaic dimension was manifested in various ways. Such was the resemblance of old men to characters from the Old Testament that meeting them was like witnessing a scene from the Bible.411 In his journalistic investigation on the Barbagia, Giuseppe Fiori echoed a similitude evoked several times in previous sources when he described shepherds in the Nuoro area as “stuck in the age of Homer”.412 Cagnetta depicted Barbagian society as modelled on the pastoral family, in which every (male) individual was brought up to be 406

“For hundreds of years on the Supramonte the village’s most secret and dramatic life has been lived; it is like the temple, the Acropolis of the true man of Orgosolo: the shepherd and the bandit” (Cagnetta 2002: 51). 407 Cagnetta 2002: 56. 408 Ibid., 50. 409 Ibid., 58. 410 Ibid. “These shepherds’ hospitality, once their initial suspicion has passed, is the hospitality of men in great solitude who discover the existence of man on every new encounter. It is the hospitality of archaic times. It is the rediscovery of a lost respect of man for man, a lost solidarity. At the basis of this hospitality there lies not a convention but a solidarity of interests in a hostile natural setting: no human life would be possible in that brooding solitude if the shepherd failed to offer others the care which he himself will need some time.” (ibid.). 411 “Some of them wear the ancient male costume of Orgosolo, consisting of a roughly-sewn untreated sheepskin jacket (mastruca), sometimes on top of another jacket of rough wool; baggy white cloth breeches; boarskin shoes or thigh boots; as headgear, the shepherd’s hood (gabbanu) or the Sardinian black Phrygian cap. Others wear starched pleated shirts, usually wine-stained; soldier’s trousers consisting mostly of patches; boots; round velvet berets, torn and threadbare. Many resemble figures from the Old Testament: white hairs falling from their brows, ears and moustaches in soft flowing beards, neatly arranged in waves, which come halfway down their chests. In their hands they hold magnificent twisted crooks. A scene from three thousand years ago!” (Cagnetta 2002: 46). 412 Ibid., 74.

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a worthy (balente)413 shepherd and given training which was functional to that social model.414 His interpretation is based on an all-

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“It is above all in the upbringing of their children that the archaic and patriarchal character of shepherds’ families is fully manifested. A young boy in Orgosolo will generally go to primary school for two or three years, after which he is withdrawn and sent straight out into the country. There he forgets everything he has learned. Official statistics put illiteracy in Orgosolo at 60-70%, but considering this ‘return to illiteracy’ it is actually 90-95%. Distrusting state education, families prefer to educate their children themselves, and this consists of nothing more than training them in looking after the flocks, the work of the shepherd. The poor boy of Orgosolo, already dressed as an adult in long trousers and gaiters, his face set in a permanent fearful scowl of hatred for everybody, is a classic local figure. At the age of seven or eight he is forced to leave his family and fend for himself. The work of animal husbandry – interminable marches, nights spent facing storms, foxes and thieves, sleeping in the open come frost or snow – makes him a man before his time. If a sheep is lost, stolen or goes lame, he is beaten with fists, a belt, a stick; he is denied food and everything else he needs. He has to learn never to be distracted, not to be deceived, always to get his own back. If a sheep is missing, he can go and steal one. Men deride him and scorn him to toughen him up, to show him how to be a man, that is to say a proper shepherd. Brought up by nature and man to nothing but the stick and thieving, he keeps silent. He learns patience, waiting only to grow up so he can assert himself and get his own back. He must be a master, not a servant. The individual brought up in this shepherd society is isolated, almost zoological, seeing others only as a potential threat, an enemy. The only way of life he learns is to win or be beaten, to dominate or be dominated. He is the most ancient, most vibrant secret in Italy, southern Italy in particular; modern man, covered with centuries of civilisation, often hides deep down nothing but a poor shepherd. Character, self-confidence and self-reliance as much as family solidarity, generosity to others and feelings of brotherhood are the result of this ancient life and education” (Cagnetta 2002: 75-76). 414 Maria Giacobbe related her experience in the Orgosolo village school in the 1950s in her Diario di una maestrina. With one exception, all her six year-old pupils slept on the floor. The consequences of such a life without ease were enormous in terms of the conception of life they developed. Thus “there is nothing strange in the fact that the life of the bandit, with all its attendant difficulties, should fail to frighten them; in fact it preserves an aura of romantic heroism. We teach the Christian virtues: piety, acceptance, forgiveness; our pupils already know the law of extreme pride and honour and the Biblical law of an eye for an eye” (Giacobbe 2003: 122). So a child who burned his foot on a brazier might well not complain at all, as would be expected of a “real man” (ibid., 134). Uppermost in these children’s imagination were bandits. The renowned zio (uncle) Pasquale Tandeddu lived on in their memory as the bandit in his cave, rifle at the ready, proudly and indomitably awaiting the arrival of the Carabinieri (ibid., 152). One unruly boy hid under the teacher’s desk and said to her, “I’m a bandit!” (ibid., 110), following which Giacobbe wryly observed, “So the myth has

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embracing conception that includes all Barbagians without exception, and he makes ample recourse to commonplaces in support of his conclusions. He identifies the Orgosolo shepherd as a man “warlike and aggressive, intolerant, brave, of cunning and cruel intelligence”,415 as witnessed by his most characteristic social practices of the vendetta and armed raids (bardane).416 His innate tendency to acts of war is offered as proof of the survival in the Barbagia of primitive forms of behaviour traceable to man’s anthropological past as a huntergatherer.417 The inhabitant of Orgosolo is known all over Sardinia as an excellent hunter. Clever, astute, patient and tenacious, he stands out from all other Sardinians, especially in hunting boar and mouflon (now illegal) in accordance with methods descending from archaic practices. That the inhabitants of Orgosolo were probably a people of hunters and warriors may be discerned indirectly from the skill and the fame they have had in the past, and still enjoy, as horsemen. Anyone seeing them for the first time on horseback cries out in admiration. Anyone seeing them with their thin, sinewy legs wrapped around the horse’s girth, with neither saddle nor stirrup, clutching the mane in a flapping of leather and cloth, galloping off among crags and precipices, will immediately see that they are the best horsemen in Sardinia. The love they have for weapons (common to all shepherds but here more intense) is another indication. The best Sardinian marksmen – as witnessed by the bandit tradition – come from Orgosolo.418

Parts of Cagnetta’s argument, full of admiration for the shepherdhorseman-bandits of Orgosolo, rest on observations and conventional wisdom shared by the local population. One instance is the theory according to which the poor had their bardane and the rich had theirs, and the former were interpreted as a kind of compensation, a changed: first it was ‘zio Pasquale Tandeddu’, the bandit, now it’s Pietro Tandeddu, the schoolboy” (ibid., 189). 415 Cagnetta 2002: 84. 416 Ibid., 85; 99-105. Fiori (2001: 76) was of the same opinion. 417 “The Orgolese shepherd, on the other hand, while generally a more associative man, is more individual, basically warlike and aggressive, intolerant, brave, of cunning and cruel intelligence. These characteristics liken him to peoples of a ‘cycle’ preceding the pastoral phase, to the most ancient one known to European history: the ‘cultural cycle’ which ethnologists call that of the ‘hunter-gatherers’ or the ‘hordes’” (Cagnetta 2002: 84). 418 Cagnetta 2002: 85.

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redistribution of wealth within the community.419 A crime is thus transformed into an act of justice and the thief becomes a Sardinian version of Robin Hood, exactly as Sardinian bandits were described for centuries in literature. Vitiated by the lack of any detailed historical or socio-economic analysis, Cagnetta’s work stands as a stereotyped interpretation of violence in the Barbagia.420 Yet his picture was well received by a public which, though educated and informed, seemed to have no doubts about the archaic, closed and static nature of Sardinian society. In his preface to the French edition of Cagnetta’s book, Alberto Moravia said that his analysis of the Orgolesi recalled Lévy-Strauss’ studies of the Amazon Indians, a people “far removed in their customs and usages from modern life”.421 He endowed Cagnetta’s essay with a poetic status, on the strength of the sympathy shown for his “archaic human brothers, his pity for their history that has stood still, his reverence for the fossilised life conserved in the depths of the centuries like a prehistoric shell in an alluvial plain” (my italics).422 The reception accorded this book, then, also testifies to a forma mentis that accepted as undisputed fact the closed and unchanging nature of the Barbagian community, which would remain intact, living in symbiosis with its natural environment.423 Also apparent is the appreciation of civilised man for the raw nobility of Sardinian primitivism as an expression of purity and fealty to what is presumed to be an original cultural model. 419

Loi 2001: 88-89. Ibid. 421 From the preface by Alberto Moravia, now reprinted in Cagnetta 2002: 281-282. 422 Cagnetta 2002: 281-282. 423 “Before concluding, I would now like to say that the peculiar character of crime in Orgosolo is proved by the direct, pure and intact spirit discernable in the customs of the place and in its language. Compare the fine, pure and direct language of the Orgolesi with the slang used by any European or American criminals, compare the innocence and naivety of the life of Sardinian ‘bandits’ with the grim, mindless depravity characteristic of gangsters, and it is immediately apparent that their labelling as criminals is due above all to a presumptuous and hasty ignorance. We should be grateful for being able to feel through this work the purity of the Sardinian mountains, the raw innocence of that life, the healthy, poetic virginity of those landscapes. Along with the sympathy that drove him to seek the true features of a lost world, this re-evocation of Orgosolo life stands as the best and most endearing quality of his essay” (Moravia, in Cagnetta 2002: 284-285). 420

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Though backed up by field research and evidence of considerable depth, the pioneering sociological and anthropological research conducted in the 1950s and ‘60s effectively confirmed and breathed new life into a model of original Sardinian identity congruent with the pastoral society of the Barbagia understood as a static, closed world which would preserve its peculiar social institutions such as the code of honour, vendetta and armed raids.424 Not only were these elements attractive for discussion and sensationalisation in the press, they lent themselves above all to spectacular treatment on the big screen. It is not hard to understand why the film-makers of the time, drawing on the profile given to Sardinian news stories, continued to concentrate on narratives set in the pastoral world of the Barbagia and in particular on banditry. It was no accident that Cagnetta’s work inspired what is probably the most famous film ever set in Sardinia: Vittorio De Seta’s Banditi a Orgosolo. As will be seen in detail in chapter 3 this was the only film of its type to be well received by the Sardinian public, which acknowledged the merit of the director’s attempt to represent Orgosolo without judgement or explanations and with the greatest respect for the “object of observation” (the local community filmed in the narrow sense, all Sardinians by extension).425 In actual fact even De Sica’s Neorealistic approach was based on the idea of a primitive, archaic and static world, and thus on the same observational standpoint taken by Cagnetta.426 Further confirmation of the weight of the shepherd-bandit trope in the popular image of Sardinia is found in the media attention devoted to the chequered career of bandit Graziano Mesina. His biography formed part of La società del malessere, written by

424

Speaking of her experience in Orgosolo working in evening classes for illiterate adults, Maria Giacobbe recorded the cultural distance separating her from her charges: “men, often every old, used to a life of hardship, masters of the art of survival”, who for the first time “felt part of a civil society in which men are distinguished from animals not only because they can protect themselves a bit better from the elements but above all by their ability to understand and express the essence of things” (Giacobbe 2003: 42). That such primitivism could be an exciting experience for outsiders was proved by the writer herself when she noted that the tourists passing through Oliena went into paroxysms of joy at the sight of the archaic costumes and hand-to-mouth existence of the inhabitants, while the latter were irritated by such visits and let their feelings show in their reactions (ibid., 31). 425 Olla 2008: 145. 426 Ibid., 146.

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investigative journalist Giuseppe Fiori,427 which was adapted for the screen in Carlo Lizzani’s film of the same name (1969), at a time when a number of films on Sardinian banditry were being produced.428 It should also be remembered that a range of important contemporary writers put shepherds at the centre of their narratives, and these stories subsequently – in some cases much later – found their way onto the big screen: the shepherd Gavino in Padre padrone (Gavino Ledda, 1975) filmed by the Taviani brothers (1977), shepherd-soldier Saverio in Il disertore (Giuseppe Dessì, 1961), shepherd-bandit Zuanne Malune in the novel Sonetàula (Giuseppe Fiori, 1962 and 2000) and the pastoral world of Gli arcipelaghi (Maria Giacobbe, 1995), recreated on film by respectively Giuliana Berlinguer (Il disertore, 1981), Salvatore Mereu (Sonetàula, 2008) and Giovanni Columbu (Arcipelaghi, 2001). As will be seen below, an emblematic case is the novel Sonetàula, centred around a figure who is a true anti-hero but a shepherd-bandit all the same.429 The book’s author – who also wrote the above-mentioned La società del malessere – stated that he had drawn inspiration from three works representing the period in which an answer to the problem of underdevelopment in the Barbagia was sought in an analysis of the relationship between poverty, backwardness and crime: Cagnetta’s Inchiesta su Orgosolo (1954), Pigliaru’s La vendetta barbaricina come ordinamento giuridico (1959) and Analfabetismo e delinquenza (1955) by Gonario Pinna. The importance of the pastoral world in the cultural debate of the time and in the Sardinian collective imagination is demonstrated by the extraordinary popular success of Gavino Ledda’s 427

Another piece of investigative work by Fiori, Baroni in laguna, focused on the life of fishermen on the lake of Cabras, forced to work under feudal conditions. Although it aroused considerable interest, it did not find its way into the cinema until the 1980s, when Massimo Pupillo made Sa jana (1980), which was based on it. But by that time the dispute between the fishermen and the holders of the rights over the lake had been resolved by the Regional government. The film’s propaganda message regarding Sardinian identity formed part of a new phase in the debate on Sardinia, marked by a campaign for recognition of the Sardinian language and the claims of the Partito Sardo d’Azione, the party then in control of the Regional government. For an analysis of this film, see chapter 3, section Exoticism and Wilderness. 428 Sequestro di persona (Mingozzi 1968), I protagonisti (Fondato 1968), and Pelle di bandito (Livi 1969). 429 See Marci 1991a: 225-228.

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autobiographical novel Padre padrone (1975). The book was seen to represent a titanic struggle between civilisation and barbarism, poverty and affluence, primitive and modern, in which only the negative halves of these pairs are attributed to Sardinia and the shepherd. In a decade when the unprecedented investments made in the island’s economic development had failed to achieve the results envisaged but Sardinia had undeniably undergone a rapid and somewhat traumatic modernisation, the novel was pilloried for presenting yet another primitive and archaic image of Sardinia. This interpretation was confirmed by the book’s adaptation for the screen by the Taviani brothers, in which the protagonist’s story is set within a Manichean struggle between good (modern civilisation) and evil (archaic pastoral Sardinia). Book and film alike (and the latter probably encouraged a distorted a posteriori reading of the written text) were interpreted as Gavino’s attempt to break free from the poverty and ignorance of his origins by rejecting his father’s culture, acceding finally to modernity. Such an interpretation was consistent with what for centuries had been the European view of Sardinian society: primitive and peripheral, left behind by progress, inferior and in need of civilising. In actual fact Ledda’s book lends itself to an interpretation far removed from that conventional widom.430 In his desperate anxiety to learn of and know the world, Gavino himself stands as a negation of the trope of closure and immobility.431 He is continually in search of new routes to discovery; the destiny of an illiterate shepherd who becomes a university lecturer is an example of an open-minded people able to enter into contact with other worlds and other linguistic and cultural codes, to appropriate and personalise them without repudiating its origins.432 Like Gavino, the whole island is described as an entity undergoing a profound transformation, now part of the economic logic of modern life – witness references to the traumas of emigration and the existence of new forms of organised crime too easily hidden behind the term banditry. Indeed, even the traditional Sardinia embodied by Gavino’s father is marked by attitudes and aspirations to wealth no different to those considered typical of the “modern 430

For a reinterpretation of the novel see Salis 1994: 85-91. Salis 1994: 86. 432 See Marci 1991a: 303-307. 431

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bourgeois world”.433 Having become conscious of his condition, Gavino now sees little difference between the ‘lions’ (the affluent) and the ‘lambs’ (the poor) of which his father used to speak. In other words, behind the apparent representation of a Sardinia which fits the old trope, Padre padrone presents a revolutionary interpretation of Sardinian identity: rather than being an original, indisputable and unchangeable given, a sense of belonging is the result of a reasoned and informed act of will, able to function and interact in different worlds. For Gavino Ledda the man, being Sardinian is the product of a dynamic process, a choice, not an ineluctable destiny. The book’s revolutionary potential, however, was sidetracked into the disputes which followed its publication and the later release of the film, ending up in the well-worn tradition which saw Sardinia as the topos of the immobile land, forgotten by time and outside history. The shepherd at the centre of Padre padrone thus appeared as the contemporary incarnation – every bit as wild and primitive – as his far-off predecessors. The Sardinian Soldier An important variation of the Sardinian national profile in the 20thcentury collective imagination was the Sardinian soldier. Rooted in the remotest of ancient sources, the topos of the combative Sardinian was perpetuated in literature until its apogee in the First World War, when the island returned to the centre of attention on the strength of the heroic feats of the Brigata Sassari, the only regular army unit to draw its recruits entirely from one region, composed mostly of peasants and shepherds.434 Brigade regiments 151 and 152 were each 433

Salis 1994: 89. For the Brigade’s history and documents relating to it see Giuseppina Fois’ book Storia della Brigata Sassari, with an introduction by Manlio Brigaglia (Cagliari: Edizioni Della Torre, 19811, 20062). In the introduction, historian Brigaglia (2006: 12) points out on the basis of official sources that the island’s participation in the war cost it dear: 13.9% of Sardinian troops were killed, a proportion considerably higher than the national average of 10.5%. See a point made by Emilio Lussu, quoted by Fois (2006: 33), on the Brigade’s composition. It could be observed that most of the Italian army was made up of peasants and shepherds, but in this case the experience of fighting on the mainland was particularly severely felt by the Sardinians since it was the first time that most of them had to come to terms with their Italian identity. 434

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awarded the gold medal for valour, the deeds of the “intrepid Sardinians” were amplified by wartime propaganda and from that time on the Sassarini were surrounded by an aura of myth.435 The sources which dwelt on the Brigata Sassari (and on Sardinian soldiers in general) are significant for the purposes of this research; beyond the rhetoric and bombast typical of this type of documentation, they are indicative not only of how Sardinians were seen from the outside, but also of how Sardinians constructed an image of themselves through accounts of the fighting. Writings on the Brigata Sassari undoubtedly made an essential contribution to the formation of the 20th-century image of Sardinia.436 Giuseppina Fois gives three basic reasons for the remarkable success achieved by the Brigata Sassari.437 In the first place its renown was promoted by news arriving directly from the battlefront, in the form of soldiers’ private correspondence and official dispatches. Secondly, the popular Sardinian-language poets who celebrated the heroism and sacrifice of the Sassarini, and of the Sardinians in general involved in the fighting, reached every corner of the island and had a considerable influence on its public opinion.438 The Brigata Sassari thus became the symbol of the island’s valour and the suffering it was undergoing in the national interest. The collective and political selfawareness stimulated by the experience of the war was undeniable: suffice it to say that Emilio Lussu, one of the best-known and bestloved officers of the Brigade, called it “the armed representation of Sardinia”,439 and after the war that political consciousness was 435

The reasons for the award of the medals are reported by Salvatore Cambosu (2004: 157) in his Miele amaro. Brigaglia 2006: 24-25. There is no doubt that units of the Brigata Sassari were involved in the heaviest fighting on the Italian front, but aside from their merits in the field, the war was an educational experience for a large number of Sardinian peasants and shepherds who were for the most part illiterate and hitherto alien to political movements. The consciousness acquired following their participation in the war later materialised in the foundation of the Partito Sardo d’Azione, led by a hero of the Great War and the Brigata Sassari: Emilio Lussu. 436 According to Giuseppina Fois (2006: 29) the myth of the Brigata Sassari made an important contribution to the movement claiming autonomy for Sardinia. 437 Brigaglia 2006: 24. See Fois’ analysis in the same book (2006: 36). 438 Brigaglia 2006: 24; on Sardinian popular poetry inspired by the First World War, see Fois 2006: 74-79. 439 Quoting Pigliaru, Brigaglia noted that the experience of the war was an “underground school”, a “clandestine school” sui generis, typical of pastoral education – based on direct experience rather than study (2006: 16). According to Lussu (2006: 25), the war became “a repository of revolution”.

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translated into the formation of an autonomist party, the Partito Sardo d’Azione, one of whose founders was Lussu.440 Third, a fundamental role was played by war correspondents from the national newspapers, whose reports contributed to promoting the myth of the Sardinian fighting men in the national consciousness.441 One thing that emerges from the sources, irrespective of who produced them, is the idea of a Sardinian race distinct from the Italian people, a race attributed with the characteristics considered peculiar to primitive peoples; but what might appear as faults became virtues in the Sardinian soldier, whose nature turned him into a perfect fighting machine.442 From their first mention in dispatches following their conquest of the Frasche and Razzi trenches in November 1915, the men of the Brigata were lauded for their pride, solidity, discipline, bravery and spirit, all qualities considered typical of the Sardinian race.443 They were distinguished by the ferocity with which they fought, especially in hand-to-hand combat with knives, and by the profound sense of honour which drove them to take great risks so as to live up to the trust placed in them by their officers.444 In the opinion of Colonel Tallarigo, acting commander of the Brigade in 1917, at the root of the Sardinians’ courage was a profound sense of justice 440

Brigaglia 2006: 13. Fois (2006: 33-34) recalls that newspaper accounts gave an idealised image of the fighting, including that involving the Brigata Sassari. It is well known that the reports sent by war correspondents were subjected to censorship designed to promote national support for the war. 442 Fois 2006: 36-41. Fois notes that memoirs of the time overflowed with adjectives which put the Sardinian fighting man on an animal level – ferocious, primitive and with a natural gift for combat (ibid., 64-65). Quoting research carried out by Mario Isnenghi and Salvatore Sechi, she maintains that such an attitude betrayed the influence of “the racist phase of Southernism” (ibid., 65), while acknowledging that descriptions of the Sardinians’ fighting methods did contain some truth in that references to their expertise with knives in hand-to-hand combat were indicative of specific behaviour which could effectively be attributed to the Sardinians (ibid., 6566). 443 Fois 2006: 36-37. 444 Ibid., 36-37 and 65. In an article published in Il Giornale d’Italia on September 20th 1917, Achille Benedetti observed that “those typical Sardinian infantrymen” were “all men of steel, of ferocious fighting spirit, of inexhaustible resilience”. They terrified the enemy simply with their appearance: “little demons, with olive-skinned faces and black eyes glinting with animosity” (Fois 2006: 37). 441

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translated into action; for them the war was like “a grand collective vendetta to be consummated”.445 It was no accident that the colonel’s choice of simile referred to one of the island’s customs which confirmed the image of the wild and primitive Sardinian.446 That such a statement was equivocal is not open to question. In his reflections on the Southern question, Antonio Gramsci railed against such attitudes, arguing that similar plaudits for the exceptional qualities of the primitive Sardinians hid the true colonialist face of Northern Italy’s policy towards the South. This revealed the duplicity of wartime propaganda: in exalting the primitive Sardinian, the North asserted its cultural superiority and appropriated the right to exploit the South in the pursuit of its own economic interests.447 The upper echelons of the army and war correspondents were not alone in reinforcing the image of Sardinian identity, however – such appeals also came from inside. Attilio Deffenu, a young officer given the task of organising propaganda for the enlistment of his compatriots, observed that the Sardinian could not be assimilated to soldiers from other Italian regions.448 He was different: a creature kept in a primitive state by the isolation in which he lived, still able to feel 445

Fois 2006: 38. Ibid. Mention of the widespread view of Sardinian soldiers’ courage was made in Gamel Holten’s travel account (2005: 106), when she related an encounter with an army officer. 447 “It is well known what ideology has been given blanket dissemination by bourgeois propagandists among the northern masses: the South is the dead weight hindering more rapid progress in Italy’s civil development; southerners are biologically inferior, semi-barbarians or complete barbarians, by natural destiny. If the South is backward the fault lies not with the capitalist system or any other historical factor, but with nature, which has made southerners idle, incapable, delinquent and barbarous, tempering their cruel fate with the explosion of a few great individual geniuses who stand out like the proverbial palms in an arid, barren desert.” (Gramsci 2007: 118-119). See also Gramsci’s article published in Avanti on April 14th 1919, in which he lambasted the government’s bad faith in demanding sacrifices of the heroes of the Brigata Sassari without ever offering adequate compensation; on the contrary, the government planned to deploy them as a fighting unit against protesting workers: Idem 2008: 70-73, especially 72. Returning to the question of the Brigata Sassari in later articles, Gramsci stated that the peasants and shepherds of whom it was composed were by that time aware of the duplicity of the Italian state and would not allow themselves to be used in the suppression of workers’ protests. He defined the Brigata Sassari as the crucible of Sardinian revolutionary consciousness (ibid., 78-84, especially pp. 80-81). In this regard see also Marci 2006: 247. 448 Relazione sui mezzi più idonei di propaganda morale da adottarsi fra le truppe della Brigata, written by Deffenu in April 1918 and cited by Fois 2006: 222-226. 446

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a sense of honour which could drive him to the ultimate sacrifice, endowed with a concept of life which conserved the values of bravery, physical strength, disregard for danger and an unshakeable attachment to the land of his birth.449 The process of identification of the Sardinian people with the fighting man did not stop at the end of the war; on the contrary, there began a flood of memoirs and political writings on the Sardinians’ experience of the Great War. The most striking example of such authors is Emilio Lussu, a prestigious figure on the national political and cultural stage who became a celebrity symbolising the Sardinian character in 20th-century narrative.450 Lussu contributed personally to the construction of his own myth in that his writings convey a precise image of Sardinian identity and he recognised himself in the anthropological tradition of the true Sardinian. The process of identification between the man who existed in history and the cultural concept of the Sardinian character also lies at the basis of Lussu the ‘celebrity’ in his biography Il cavaliere dei Rossomori (1985) written by Giuseppe Fiori, who made frequent reference to Lussu’s own writings at a time when publications and quotations of and about him were already legion.451

449

In this regard see also Sotgiu 1990: 35-36. Obviously the political commitment displayed by Lussu – an anti-fascist, a staunch democrat, a member of the Constituent Assembly and a member of Parliament for decades – went well beyond the local and regional dimension, yet Sardinia and the Sardinian people form an essential part of his writings. In Lussu the Sardinian identity melds perfectly with the national and European dimension of his conception of politics. The references to him in the Sardinian cultural debate are innumerable. One example is Francesco Masala’s preface to the story Il cinghiale del diavolo in the edition recently published by Il Maestrale, [s.d.]: 7-12. Actively involved himself in the debate on Sardinian culture and language, Masala follows a series of anecdotes recounted by soldiers from the Brigata Sassari about their famous commander with a recognition of Lussu as a true Sardinian hero, defining him as a “Nuragic tribal chieftain” (ibid., 12) – the most important figure in the island’s Nuragic era, when it was organised not in a single state but in tribes free of any foreign domination. Lussu thus became the icon of a Sardinian people free to govern itself and live without having to relinquish its original identity. 451 On a number of questions regarding Lussu the man and his biography by Fiori, see also the analysis by Caboni 2001: 45-49. Lussu also wrote the novel Un anno sull’altipiano, which tells of the war experienced by a young officer in the Brigata 450

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The importance of being Sardinian in Lussu’s development is clearly revealed in the structure of Fiori’s biography, each of whose chapter titles is a ‘role’ played in his life’s adventure.452 The book opens with Il cacciatore (The hunter), followed by Il capocaccia (The huntmaster), chapters which describe Lussu’s childhood and adolescence in conformity with the upbringing of a true Sardinian. The opening pages recount his participation in a big game hunt, armed with a rifle when not yet ten years old. Killing his first boar that day, he earned himself the warm approval of those who had spent months teaching him to shoot. This was a sign that Lussu had what it took to become an accomplished marksman and hunter, as required by tradition. As an officer in the Brigata Sassari he was admired for his bravery and down-to-earth attitude towards the war, characteristics which endeared him to the footsoldiers and reduced the distance between officers and men, but also for his formidable aim, which enabled him to hit a coin in mid-air.453 The consistency of his upbringing with island’s cultural traditions was emphasised by Lussu himself in the comment he wrote on his own fictional story Il cinghiale del diavolo. He stated that he started writing it as an exile in 1938 when, having heard about the hunting expeditions of the king of France, he was put in mind of hunters’ stories from the woods of Armungia, his native village. This is as if to say that his memory of Sardinia was not just nostalgia but came into his mind for the first time after years of exile in the form of a village community’s most significant and characteristic collective ritual: it was thus a way of giving a mythical status to the culture to which he belonged, in which hunting and horsemanship played such an essential role.454 A member of the richest family in a mountain village dominated by an elite of landowners and stock-rearers, Lussu was at pains to point out that the worth of the local gentry was determined not only by breeding but by their ability as horsemen and marksmen, as well.455 At the highest level, the patrician class was Sassari: on the book’s Sardinian character see Marci 2006: 249, notes 476 and 477. On Lussu’s writings in general, Marci 2006: 249-256. 452 In this regard see also Marci 2006: 251-253. 453 Francesco Masala makes a number of references in his writings to Lussu’s shooting prowess. See his preface to the story Il cinghiale del diavolo, quoted above, p. 7. 454 Il cinghiale del diavolo, 24. In this regard see Masala’s preface, ibid., 9. 455 Il cinghiale del diavolo, 18.

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made up of stock-breeding horsemen-hunters, the descendants of an ancient warrior aristocracy.456 He placed himself in a millenary tradition which forged “shepherd-kings” and “great hunters” – whom he saw as sacred figures in which all the attributes of Sardinian identity were distilled – and defined himself an “old hunter from a barbarian environment.457 Among the hunters there emerged the figure of the huntmaster, the man entrusted with the most important decisions, greatly respected for his practical skills and moral rigour alike.458 So it is no coincidence that as an officer in the Brigata Sassari Lussu is described in the second chapter of Fiori’s biography with that title: for the footsoldier-shepherd-hunters under his command he was the perfect embodiment of the balente Sardinian, a true huntmaster.459 His whole life and all his political writings are in line with this conception of the archaic and noble Sardinian people: a convinced autonomist (never a separatist) and pro-European, though aware of the deep and traumatic changes sweeping his island, Lussu always identified the Sardinian shepherd as the most genuine model of his people.460 456

Lussu traced the history of Armungia in a narrative with an epic sweep, describing it as a village of free men. Its borders had always been safeguarded by its inhabitants – neither Romans, Saracens or feudal lords would ever be able to enter the territory of Armungia because they would be faced with a perfect defensive organisation led by a class of mounted shepherd-hunters well versed in the use of arms (Il cinghiale del diavolo, 19-20). 457 Il cinghiale del diavolo, 28. Lussu stated “I thus grew up in the realm of shepherdkings, and great hunters” (ibid., 41). See also Münster (2006: 95), who identified the Nuragic Sardinians as well as those of the 1950s as a race of shepherds. 458 Il cinghiale del diavolo, 34-36. 459 Fiori 2000: 28. Lussu’s commentary on his story Il cinghiale del diavolo concludes with the following words: “This archaic world of which I speak, patriarchal and barbaric, had a civilisation and a culture of its own […] It disappeared and has not yet been replaced by another, more advanced, civilisation, which would integrate it into the modern world” (Il cinghiale del diavolo, 46). Lussu was perfectly aware of the changes under way in Sardinian society, but the pastoral model of its identity still appeared to be his only point of reference. 460 One anecdote is worth recalling. When archaeologist Giovanni Lilliu, one of Sardinia’s most influential 20th-century intellectuals, published La civiltà dei sardi dal Neolitico all’età dei nuraghi (Turin: Nuova Eri Edizioni Rai, 1963; later editions were entitled La civiltà dei sardi dal Paleolitico all’età dei nuraghi), Lussu thanked him for the book’s deserved dedication to “the shepherds of the Barbagia”. Both men considered them to be the direct descendants of Nuragic society, which was the

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The Bandit – from Hero to Anti-hero As seen in the first chapter, late 19th-century literature contributed to the romanticisation of the figure of the shepherd and its identification with that of the bandit.461 Rather than being a real criminal, in the eyes of the local community the bandit was a man worthy of prestige, a positive model for the oppressed and a romantic hero able to inspire dreams and ambitions.462 The 20th century was also marked by a prevalently indulgent attitude towards Sardinian banditry: it was interpreted as the diseased fruit of need and injustice – an explanation which helped to obscure the real financial and criminal mechanisms behind such crimes. This romanticised vision was shared by Gramsci when he was a boy, but even as an adult he saw a clear distinction between different forms of banditry.463 In a letter written to his brother Carlo in 1928 he acknowledged the true criminal character of the bandits of the time compared with their predecessors, who were able to display generosity and greatness.464 The trope of a noble banditry as distinct from real criminal behaviour found its way into a number of late 20th-century writings, above all those dealing with the two most highest form of civilisation expressed by free Sardinians, a people subsequently destined to thousands of years of foreign domination. 461 Prominent examples are – as we have seen in chapter 1 – Enrico Costa’s novels Il muto di Gallura and Giovanni Tolu. 462 Marie Gamel Holten (2005: 42) thought that Sardinians who committed criminal acts were not deplorable but appeared essentially as tragic figures – like characters in sagas, they stimulated the imagination and captured the attention. Years later Thomas Münster (2006: 137-138) was still of the view that the Sardinian bandit was not a common criminal because his behaviour could be explained in terms of his code of honour. Like all Sardinians, he was basically trying to defend himself against injustice and as such could appear as a freedom fighter. Crimes bound up with balentia were considered not dishonourable but the acts of valiant men: a properly conducted theft was thus remarked upon like a successful hunting expedition (ibid., 60-61). 463 And it certainly matched a trope widespread in European culture. As influential a historian as Fernand Braudel (1995: 23-24) analysed Sardinian banditry in the sociocultural context of marginalised and backward areas, providing a form of confirmation of the “romantic” interpretation of such deviant behaviour. 464 “Crime in Sardinia used to be predominantly occasional and passionate in character, undoubtedly bound up with backward customs and popular beliefs which, though barbaric, did retain some features of generosity and greatness. Now there is the growth of technically organised professional crime carried out according to plans set by groups of men who commission them. Some of these men are wealthy, enjoy social position and are driven to crime by a moral perversion which has nothing in common with the traditional perversion typical of Sardinian banditry” (Gramsci 1965: 232, cited in Marci 1991: 123).

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renowned Sardinian shepherds of the period: shepherd-bandit Graziano Mesina and shepherd-turned-linguist Gavino Ledda. In his work of investigative journalism La società del malessere, Giuseppe Fiori devoted the opening chapters to a description of the microcosm of Nuoro: the role of an unpredictable climate in a land in itself harsh and unforgiving,465 the precarious conditions which drove migratory shepherds to a continual search for fresh pastures, sheep-stealing as a justifiable way of overcoming poverty,466 the backward living conditions in the Barbagia, and the feelings of mutual distrust which typified relations between the local population and state institutions.467 These elements formed the frame for the adventures of Graziano Mesina, the symbol of the Sardinian malaise. Although Fiori’s reconstruction of his life is punctuated by references to the rules and forms of behaviour which regulated Barbagian culture, he was the expression of a new banditry based on dangerous alliances between the shepherds and powerful men who had no criminal record but an appetite for riches which did not stop at illegality.468 Fiori also cited Gramsci’s contention (quoted above) that there were two distinct categories of banditry.469 In a similar vein, in Padre padrone Gavino Ledda noted the advent of new forms of crime which were different from traditional banditry.470 The question remains as to whether such a dichotomy is borne out by the facts. Recent research has confirmed the stereotyped nature of romantic banditry: a narrative fiction essential for the cultural construction of the Sardinian identity, but without a real historical basis.471 465

Fiori 2001: 69-72. Ibid., 73-74. 467 Ibid., 127-131. 468 Fiori (2001: 154) explained the mechanics of modern criminal banditry by showing that the actions of the shepherd-bandit were not independent – in at least two cases they were joined with other forces able to provide weapons and launder the proceeds of kidnapping. 469 Ibid., 152. 470 “At that time pure banditry as uninformed rebellion was giving way to mafia-style crime, committed for personal and sectarian interests. Gone were the social heroes of the freedom so dear to the shepherd. And banditry was already a stranger to itself and to the causes which had given rise to it” (Ledda 1975: 163), also quoted by Marci 2006: 262. 471 Loi 2001: 64-65. 466

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Yet the Sardinian bandit remained the standard character by which any discourse on Sardinian identity should be measured, as is proved by the novel Sonetàula, also written by Giuseppe Fiori, which depicts a traditional Sardinia but an island undergoing profound changes.472 Zuanne Malune, known as Sonetàula, wreaks revenge on a shepherd who stole one of his sheep, and rather than giving himself up to the Carabinieri he decides to go on the run, as any balente would do. Having thus begun his career as an outlaw he inevitably slides into a life of crime and ultimately, unable to escape his destiny, meets his death. Zuanne’s behaviour is consistent with the model of the shepherd-bandit and his education takes place in the sheepfold school under the tutelage of his grandfather, who coaches him in the fundamental values of their community. Punctuated by the rhythms of seasonal migration in the cultural space of the mountains, his fate is tragically dictated by the whims of the climate and the injustice of the Italian state, yet there is something that distinguishes this character from other Sardinian bandits. Sonetàula’s experience stands as the tragic choice of a young man without the strength to break with tradition and build himself a future different from the centuries-old destiny of the shepherd-bandit. Not the traditional sacrificial victim of an unjust world, he is responsible for his own fate but has neither the intelligence nor the flexibility to make decisions different from those of his predecessors. The novel thus questions the model of an unchangeable pastoral and bandit-centred Sardinian identity. In fact, the Sardinia it depicts is historically credible, caught up in the flow of events, a participant in history – including tragedies such as Fascism and the war – and a beneficiary of progress. While the world around him moves into the future, symbolised by the advent of electricity and the anti-malaria campaign, Sonetàula clings to the model of the shepherd-bandit and his inevitable tragic destiny. He is thus an antihero – he chooses the life of an outlaw even though he has an alternative, while the people around him evolve, adopt new rules of behaviour and become part of modern civil society. It is undeniable that the novel’s message breaks radically with the model of a closed, traditional and unmoving Sardinia. But it remains the case that Fiori’s decision to put a shepherd-bandit at the centre of a story based on the topos of the man of honour in a pastoral society stands as yet another confirmation of the predominance of the 472

Marci 2006: 263.

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anthropological model of the shepherd-bandit in the construction of Sardinian cultural identity, even in the second half of the 20th century.473 And confirmation of the durability of these tropes was provided in spectacular fashion by the success of the film based on the novel, directed by Salvatore Mereu (Sonetàula, 2008): a work based on the story of shepherd-bandit Zuanne Malune, the last tragic hero of a long line of vengeful and unfortunate shepherds. Among recent novels set in the pastoral world, Maria Giacobbe’s Gli arcipelaghi (1995) stands as an example of a questioning of the concept of banditry in a context consistent with the traditional pastoral world.474 The story is centred in the vicious murder of Giosuè, a child who witnesses the theft of livestock, and the revenge for his death carried out in accordance with Barbagian custom by his family, who arm and commission his twin brother Oreste for the purpose. The film of the book bears no trace of romanticised banditry – the violence is presented as the unhappy product of a society still bound to the law of an eye for an eye. All the villagers are somehow involved in the story by virtue of their adherence to a code of behaviour which justifies complicit silence and honour killings. But the observance of custom cannot be ascribed simply to the heritage of an archaic culture, since the decision to act outside the law is explained not by poverty or misfortune but by an inability to reject the rule of the strong – an inability based on self-interest and a passive unquestioning acceptance of given morality. The lack of any romantic halo is confirmed by the placing in the story of an number of signs which distinguish it from stock tales of vendetta and honour. Giosuè’s 473

It is interesting to note that 1969 saw the publication of Antonio Cossu’s novel Il riscatto. Dealing with the theme of banditry and kidnapping in terms anything but epic, the book is highly critical of Sardinian society in the 1960s. On this novel see Marci 2006: 270-275. 474 Giacobbe 2001. Its story is bound up with a similar episode experienced in the post-war period by the writer’s family. Although she did not dare tell it at the time, she was reminded of it by reading of a man acquitted of the rape and murder of a child in Hamburg and killed in court by the girl’s mother immediately after the verdict was announced. Those events have been related by Baumann 2007: 228-229. Giacobbe’s novel was adapted for the cinema in Giovanni Columbu’s Arcipelaghi (2001), which won him the Sacher prize for best director and saw Pietrina Menneas, in the part of the mother Lucia Solinas, pick up the best actor award (see Baumann 2007: 221).

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killer, for one, is a man who will not stop at stealing a friend’s livestock in a society that considers a man’s word and relationships of trust as sacred.475 Accompanied by two other villagers, he commits the crime out of a desire to get rich, not because of any real need. The bandit, therefore, is not a hapless fugitive of the law thrown into disgrace by the loss of his flock, but a common criminal, aggressive, coarse and vulgar, who has no respect for anyone, friends included.476 Another sign is that the vendetta is organised by two women, the mother and grandmother of the murdered boy. In the absence of balentes men in their family, they take it upon themselves to make good the offence as laid down by the unwritten law of the community to which they belong and of which they are faithful custodians: they piece together the mechanics of the murder, seek witnesses to it, plan the details of the vendetta and invent an alibi for Oreste. Though strongly imbued with maternal feelings, these are women who do not shrink from using their own flesh and blood to avenge the insult suffered. Lastly, he who is compelled to commit the act of homicide is a mere boy, who jeopardises his future to carry out a task imposed on him by his mother and by the community’s moral code. The Sardinia depicted in Gli arcipelaghi is thus marked by deep contradictions. Far from being the timeless, mythical and noble island of the shepherds, it is a place where at the root of evil lie greed and self-interest, as in any other part of the world. The book’s analysis of evil is set in a story similar to a Greek tragedy, as testified by the careful choice of character and place names,477 yet even here the characters correspond to the trope of a primitive people made up of vengeful men (and women) of honour convinced that they cannot rely on real justice (the justice that should be provided by the proper authorities: the state, the courts, the Carabinieri). Even this novel thus presents a binary discourse in which the pastoral world, though no longer heroic, pathetic or romantic, is still a counterpoint to an elsewhere physically located beyond the sea, identifiable with the civilised and modern mainland Italians. 475

This important feature is not reproduced in the film version. Giosue’s killer is one Petru s’istrangiu – Pietro the ‘stranger’, a man from another village. 476 In traditional Sardinian society the bond of comparia was an important factor. It was a custom that was beneficial to two contracting parties of contrasting social extraction. The well-off party provided protection to his poor counterpart in return for the latter’s loyalty and labour (Baumann 2007: 238). 477 Ibid., 229-230.

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Alternative Models A review of the literature describing Sardinia in the 20th century reveals the basic similarity running through all the narratives. Set in rural or pastoral areas, the stories revolve mostly around shepherds and sometimes around peasants, but at least until the 1980s there were very few stories set in any other landscapes or social contexts.478 Of these exceptions, some emblematic works were made into films. Franco Solinas’ novel Squarciò (1956) was the first story to stand outside the Sardinian narrative tradition.479 Its protagonist is a clandestine fisherman plying his trade in the islands of the Maddalena off the coast of north-east Sardinia – a complete novelty in terms of both character and setting. However, a closer look reveals some similarities to the traditional form.480 Squarciò has decided to fish illegally to escape poverty; thus engaged in a daily struggle to provide a decent life for his family, he resembles the many shepherd-bandits who live the life of an outlaw. In addition, the descriptions of the Maddalena archipelago, the author’s native environment, abound with images and adjectives reminiscent of the majestic landscapes of the Barbagia. The story and character of Squarciò in a way represent an interesting variation of the trope of the bandit-ridden pastoral Sardinia. It is regrettable, as observed by Giuseppe Marci, that Solinas’ attempt to render an original view of the island won no converts, and has remained to this day the only story of its kind.481 This very fact, however, stands as further confirmation of the strength of the pastoral representation in absorbing all the forms in which Sardinia was depicted, even in the 20th century.

478

As will be seen in the following chapters, this homogeneity in the Sardinian repertoire is reflected in the choice of stories for adaptation to the cinema. 479 The novel’s original style made it particularly suitable for adaptation as a film screenplay, for which Solinas received considerable acclaim (see Marci 2006: 266). 480 “There is something epic and adventurous in him, the taste for adventure and disregard for danger that distinguish him” (Brigaglia 1958: 57), quoted by Marci 2006: 266. 481 Marci 2006: 266. As will become clear in chapter 3, the story of Squarciò lost its Sardinian character in the film version. It was turned into the vehicle for a political message in support of the workers’ movement in line with the strategy of the Italian Communist Party, of which director Gillo Pontecorvo was a member, as was the book’s author Solinas, who also wrote the screenplay.

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Coastal Sardinia came to the fore again a few years later in Giuseppe Fiori’s investigative work Baroni in laguna (1961), which described the life of fishermen on the Sinis peninsula on the island’s west coast. The men and their families were struggling under the limitations on fishing rights in the area, known locally as Mar’e Pontis; their grievances led to a full-blown protest campaign conducted in alliance with local peasants. Fiori’s work provided a realistic insight into a world which had hitherto featured in travel literature above all on the strength of the renowned beauty of the women in Cabras;482 indeed the only Sardinian writer to have set a story in the area constructed his plot around that very theme in La bella di Cabras.483 The fishermen on the Sinis peninsula were presented by Fiori as the victims of an unjust system which oppressed them and prevented them making an honest living – in this they resembled Squarciò, compelled to fish illegally to support his family. The publication met with considerable interest but, as in the case of Solinas’ novel, failed to fire the imagination of Sardinian writers and did not find its way onto the screen until much later, when the dispute between the Cabras fishing community and the holders of the fishing rights in Mar’e Pontis had been resolved through the intercession of the Regional government. And the 1960s, as we have seen, were also the decade in which Sardinian banditry returned to the national spotlight at a time when the island was attaining international repute as a tourist paradise. It was not until the 1980s that the agricultural-pastoral setting and the figure of the shepherd-bandit were brought into serious question; the two men who effected this change are probably the most influential contemporary Sardinian writers: Salvatore Mannuzzu and Sergio Atzeni. Mannuzzu’s Procedura (1988) and Atzeni’s Il figlio di Bakunìn (1991) are both set in a land far removed from that traditionally narrated in literature and re-created in cinema.484 The first depicts the urban and coastal environment in the province of Sassari in the north of the island, and the second is set in the mining area in the south-west. What they present is a Sardinia at last urban and modern, populated by judges, prosecutors, miners and Fascists, a multi-faceted 482

Fiori 2001: 28. Costa 2007. 484 The novel Procedura was behind the film Un delitto impossibile (Grimaldi 2001) and Il figlio di Bakunìn was made into a film of the same name by Gianfranco Cabiddu (1997). 483

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and changing human landscape. Without lapsing into folklore, they reveal people being involved in the general flow of events, a population for whom history moves at the same pace and with the same consequences as in the rest of the world. Although the difference in style between the two works makes them difficult to categorise together, their publication represents a phase of radical rethinking of Sardinian identity. They testify to the awareness of the end of an epoch dominated by a mythical and epic idea of Sardinia – the one embodied by Deledda’s writings. With these authors Sardinians realise that their history cannot be reduced to the icon of a pastoral people forever at odds with the outside world; there arises the understanding that the island’s inhabitants have evolved, for better or for worse, and have always entered into relations with the peoples with which they have come into contact throughout their long history. The lesson provided by Mannuzzu and Atzeni has opened up new potential for interpreting the concept of Sardinian identity and, as will become clear, has played a crucial role in reshaping the imagination of present-day Sardinian cinema. Women Physical Appearance and National Character In the narratives of 19th-century travellers the attention devoted to female figures translated into descriptions which betrayed the primitivist, archaistic perspective dominating every discourse on Sardinia and its inhabitants.485 Accounts written in the early 20th century followed the same pattern; there are abundant references to Sardinian women’s beauty and to their principal role as wife and mother in a society which confined them to the home and forced them to hide as much as possible from the prying eyes of outsiders.486 485

See chapter 1, section Women. Some examples: Wagner (1908e: 60) dwelt on the beauty of the women in Cabras, amply documented in previous sources (see chapter 1, section Women), defining them “long-lashed Madonnas”. Marie Gamel Holten (2005: 58) admired the beauty of the women in Oliena. Women were also depicted as the objects of male desire in a number of Deledda’s works. One example is the description of Maddalena in Elias Portolu (Deledda 1971d: 37-38 and 42, cited by Guiso 2005: 98). Wagner (1907: 8) identified the dark complexion and below-average height as typical characteristics of 486

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Emerging with particular clarity from such accounts is their grace and dexterity in household tasks, but also their undeniable sensuality, enhanced by the colours and forms of the traditional costume, which allowed a glimpse of the bosom despite otherwise artfully concealing their figure.487 The nobility of the feminine model is also recognised in a form of rigidity in their posture and demeanour. Wagner, for one, was happy to recall “the women and girls of Nuoro, returning home from the fountain with graceful steps, the classically shaped amphora (sa brocca) on their heads, or singing and teasing each other as they do their washing at the fountain, rubbing the clothes on the flat rocks”.488 To D.H. Lawrence Sardinia revealed itself as an ideal place for the natural harmony between the sexes. Though different, men and women there complemented one another and exemplified a model of primitive humanity uncorrupted by civilisation, one of which Lawrence thoroughly approved. He saw in Sardinian women a vitality and wildness which made them enterprising, spontaneous and fascinating, while tenderness seemed alien to them.489 As mentioned earlier, writers’ observations on the landscape, considered to be mirrored in the Sardinian character, contributed to the construction of a precise image of the national spirit and, by extension, of a female profile. One example is the rock formation towering over the cemetery outside Nuoro; its shape is reminiscent of an old woman, head bowed, curled up in an armchair: “as if nature wished to show us a symbol of Sardinian women, but saw the clearest mark of their main social role as wives and mothers in their characteristic grace. A typical description of women in line with the traditional profile is provided by Münster (2006: 55) in his reference to the wife of a “Sardinian father and shepherd” forced by her husband to sing the song of vendetta. 487 On a visit to the house of the mayor of Villapútzu, Wagner (1908d: 42) was struck by his housekeeper’s bodice and her bosom, visible under her see-through blouse. The women in Fonni were noted for the whiteness of their skin, and their costumes were strikingly similar to nun’s habits (Wagner 1908c: 269). See also Crawford Flitch’s description of the women in Desulo in 1911: 244, quoted in this chapter, section Character: National Costume. 488 Wagner 1908b: 246. 489 Lawrence 2009: 60. Speaking of a young waitress in the inn at Siniscola, Lawrence (2009: 152) observed: “The younger was in attendance. She was a full-bosomed young hussy, and would be very queenly and cocky. She held her nose in the air, and seemed ready to jibe at any order. It takes one some time to get used to this cocky, assertive behaviour of the young damsels, the who’ll-tread-on-the-tail-of-my-skirt bearing of the hussies. But it is partly a sort of crude defensiveness and shyness, partly it is barbaric méfiance or mistrust, and partly, without doubt, it is a tradition with Sardinian women that they must hold their own and be ready to hit first”.

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strong, hard women, as much daughters of the land as are the rocks”.490 Despite the unmistakable signs of change in costume discernible in the accounts of the time, the women described by travellers were always those wearing traditional clothes, and as such recalled the archaic model of beauty and virtue extolled so enthusiastically by Father Bresciani.491 It is an archetype perceptible in the parade admired by Crawford Flitch during the festivity of San Costantino (Santu Antine) in Desulo, in which his rendering of the festive variety of the costumes is interspersed with hints of the physical and moral traits of the national character: The crowd on foot pressed up the ascent to the church until the piazza was crowded with kneeling figures. There were the costumes and faces special to a hundred different villages of the two provinces: the golden-faced women from the Campidano, with yellow handkerchiefs round their heads and snowy linen half-drawn across their opulent bosoms; women of Oristano, wide-skirted, half-veiled, dressed in rich browns and blacks; the fierce daughters of Barbagia, flashing in the barbaric blood-red and crimson of Tonara, Aritzo, Fonni, and Nuoro; women of Goceano, pallid and with the large sad eyes of Arabs; beautiful girls of Orane and Bosa, with glowing faces swathed in ample wimples. There were mysterious figures half hidden by a dark hood that covered the head and fell to the waist; bride-like apparitions, glistening with golden embroidery and brocade and fluttering with veils; children with close-fitting bonnets, like elaborate and expensive dolls; boys in blue tunics diapered with red diamonds, like medieval jesters.492

Bearing comparison with the wealth of detail and colour in the above passage is the originality and striking imagery of a description by the same author, in this case of a widow. Nineteenth-century sources had already made mention of women forced into mourning by the sudden 490

Gamel Holten 2005: 40; 43. An example is provided by Gamel Holten (2005: 46): “The bright colours of her costume shone in the sun. She wore a reddish-brown pleated skirt with a bright-red silk hem. A short multi-coloured silk bodice gathered her white embroidered blouse, while a host silver buttons jingled on the sleeves of her red jacket”. 492 Crawford Flitch 1911: 258. 491

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and violent death of their husbands, sons, fathers or brothers. Their grim presence was the unmistakable mark of a world dominated by primitive instincts and barbaric traditions, but in Crawford Flitch’s description widowhood takes on a monstrous character hitherto unrecorded, one redolent of Edgar Allan Poe’s horror stories and at first sight incompatible with the ‘picturesque’ renderings previously mentioned: There is a tragic figure which one sees in all Sardinian villages – the widow. She belongs to a race apart. She wears the habit of mourning all her life. Dressed from head to foot in black, she walks among the troops of women and girls in their gay scarlet costumes like a perpetual emblem of death. […] Her face rarely wears the expression either of sorrow or despair, but only the blankness of one for whom there is no future. Generally she is old, terribly old, almost dehumanised by the frightful dishonour of age. I remember one who sat all day on a balcony of a dilapidated courtyard. She had the face of a ghoul – greenish skin stretched tightly over a framework of bones, and red sores where the eyes should have been. She squatted like an idol, moving only to twirl the spindle which she let drop from the balcony and then jerked up again with a regular, mechanical action. All day her posture remained the same, until evening overtook her in her abandonment – still counting out her residue of time by the rhythm of the falling flax.493

As the British traveller explicitly points out, the widow’s entirely black attire seems to act as an ever-present warning of death able to stand equal to the pervasive colour of festive costumes. The blackness displayed by a face bereft of all human feeling transports the reader to a tragic world dominated by a desperate, empty vision of life. Such a conception of existence was anything but alien to the Sardinian cultural universe. It is to be found in the literary and artistic symbolism of the early 20th century, as in the ashes Anania finds in the amulet given to him by her mother in Deledda’s famous novel Cenere494 and in the face petrified by grief of Ciusa’s Madre dell’ucciso (1907), kneeling in the traditional ritual mourning pose.495 In literary discourse images of women dressed for mourning were usually accompanied by descriptions of attitu (the ritual 493

Ibid., 241-242. Deledda 1981b: 257. 495 See Paulis 2006: 194-195. 494

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mourning of the dead), passed down in considerable detail by Della Marmora and in particular by Bresciani.496 Exclusive to women and charged with symbolic acts, the rite confirmed to travellers that the spirit of the Sardinian people was still tribal and savage. Contributing to this impression was the fact that the lament – a task exclusively performed by women – usually comprised an exhortation to revenge when the departed had died a violent death; it then fell to men to carry out what the grieving women called for.497

496

“When first entering the presence of the deceased they hold their heads bowed, hands crossed, faces pinched and eyes lowered and proceed in complete silence, filing past the coffin as if they had not happened to notice it or that there was a dead body in it. Then, lifting their gaze as if by chance and seeing the departed lying there, they burst into piercing shrieks, beat palm upon palm and emit strange and grievous laments. Once this cruel sorrowing has started some tear out their hair, rip their teeth into the white handkerchief they each have in their hands, scratch and punch their cheeks, they work themselves into wailing and shouting, moaning and choking sobs, losing themselves in copious weeping. Others throw themselves on the coffin or fall to their knees, others collapse to the ground, roll on the floor, cover themselves in dust; as if in mighty and desperate grief others clench their fists, roll their eyes, grind their teeth and with defiant faces seem to threaten heaven itself. After such wild abandon, the grieving women, exhausted, bruised and dishevelled, sitting or squatting here and there on the floor, are suddenly reduced to a profound silence. Sighing wordlessly, wrapped in their cloaks, with their hands together and fingers clasped, they lower their heads and fix their eyes in contemplation of the cold body on the bier. Then one of them, as if touched and lit up by a sudden overwhelming spirit, comes to life, jumps to her feet, shakes her whole body, turns purple in the face and with a spark in her eyes turns to the deceased and intones a fast-moving canticle. First she sings the praises of the family, starting with the closest relations and going back from father to father until she has completed the faithful memories of all the kin in the lineage; after that she comes to the virtues of the deceased, heaping great praise on his wisdom, worth and compassion. These funereal poems are declaimed by the hired mourner as if in song, with rhythm and rhyme and with warm affection, accomplished imagery, choiceness of words and rapid flights of fantasy. She finishes every verse with a sorrowful wail, crying ‘Ahi, ahi, ahi’. And the whole chorus of the other women takes up the cry and repeats as if in echo, ‘Ahi, ahi, ahi’” (Bresciani 2001: 433-434, reproduced in Cagnetta 2002: 106-107). 497 Cagnetta 2002: 109. Two typical examples of attitu designed for vendetta cited by the anthropologist are as follows: “Ohi fizos meos caros / pranghidelu ‘e tottu / leades s’iscupeta / chi b’ana a babbu mortu” (Oh dear children of mine / mourn him one and all / pick up your rifles / for they have killed your dad) (ibid.); “Sas lacrimas a nois lassade / a bois su piantu non cumbenit. / Sa mancia chi hat fattu a s’eridade / solu su sambene sou la trattenit” (Leave the tears to we women / crying does not become you.

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In the same period in which Crawford Flitch was writing, Grazia Deledda described the mourning ritual in particularly dark terms in Colombi e sparvieri, speaking of a woman whose loose hair was covered in ashes, at the centre of a black circle of women “as pale and macabre as witches”, who “howled around the body, banged her head on the walls, threw herself to the ground and shrieked like a woman possessed”.498 Such disturbing scenes recalled pre-Christian cultures, tribal rites and gothic atmospheres, but they also appeared in texts written in the second half of the 20th century. A fascinating description of the visually impressive mourning ritual, in which similarities with Greek tragedy are seen through the trope of the archaic and primitive South, is to be found in Carlo Levi’s Tutto il miele è finito.499 On a windswept day, everything in the house of the deceased was shrouded by the chants of the mourning women, whose faces, “bowed under their veils” were “of stone and tragedy”; the ritual was essentially composed of “ancient gestures, repeated since the depths of time, a community of things and beings”.500 Outside the front door waited “about thirty women, huddled together like sheep, or the chorus of a tragedy, or a dark flock of birds perched on a solitary tree; black and brown, wide skirts, shawls around their faces, flapping and fluttering in the wind”.501 On the arrival of the doctor who was to authorise the burial, “the flock of black and brown women began to chant in chorus their prayers for the dead, in the Sardinian way”, joined by other women with long black crucifixes swinging in the wind, which also “blew their skirts, veils and shawls into fleeting, undulating shapes, as of ghosts or of fork-bearing furies carried by the storm”.502 It is interesting to note that there is a detail occurring twice in Tutto il miele è finito which is indicative of the mixture of symbolism and beliefs which contribute to the representation of women in the Sardinian imagination. The point in question is where Levi calls Orune, the crow he took back to the mainland after his journey to

/ The stain the killer has brought to our family / by blood alone be expunged) (ibid., 110). 498 Deledda 1981c: 552. 499 Levi 2003: 96-98. 500 Ibid. 501 Ibid., 96. 502 Ibid., 98.

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Sardinia, “the daring and secret bird-woman of Sardinia”.503 The raven, like the crow, carries great symbolic and mythological weight, and its significance has always been highly ambivalent;504 possibly because of its shiny black plumage, it is a sinister creature, an omen of misfortune recalling the mystery of the night, of darkness and of hidden things but it also symbolises the beginning of things (the darkness of the mother’s womb or the blackness of the earth in which the seed germinates) and may be connected with rebirth.505 In literature Sardinian women are likened to birds in a range of contexts and with differing meanings, but the likeness is particularly telling in the case of one of the most emblematic and sinister characters in contemporary Sardinian literature: the avenging mother Lucia Solinas in Maria Giacobbe’s novel Gli arcipelaghi (1995).506 Wrapped in her black shawl, she resembles “a big bird of ill omen” after appearing to her son Oreste,507 whom she had armed so that he would avenge the

503

Levi 2003: 61. See also chapter 2, section Modernity Unfulfilled. On the attributes considered peculiar to the crow see Cattabiani 2000: 305-308. Ibid., 293. 505 Ibid., 294-294. The sinister force of the crow is also expressed by its characteristic cawing sound; and it should be remembered that the crow is an omnivorous bird whose habitual diet includes carrion: ibid., 295. 506 There are also positive likenesses, such as the women leaning out on their balconies in the streets of Cagliari, admired by Della Marmora and dubbed “turtledoves” (see chapter 1, section Women: Physical Appearance and National Character) and “the full-petticoated peasant woman, then the red goes flash-flash-flash, like a bird showing its colours” (Lawrence 2009: 60). In Giuseppe Dessì’s novel I passeri (first published as a series in the journal Il Ponte in 1953 and in book form two years later) the female protagonists are also compared to turtle-doves (see Baumann 2007: 111-113). 507 Giacobbe 2001: 217. Lucia’s son Oreste describes her as follows: “I had just finished dressing and was getting ready to go down to the surgery when through the window I saw her crossing the square. Wrapped from head to foot in her black shawl, she looked like a big bird of ill omen” (Giacobbe 2001: 217). The sinister symbolism of the black shawl is found in another of the book’s images. Busy collecting statements which would be favourable to her son, with a resolute movement Lucia Solinas “put her shawl back over her head and returned to the door. There she stopped and, with eyes glowing in the dark like the eyes of a demon, or an animal, added:– And of course this evening you haven’t seen me. In fact you haven’t seen me at all, and you won’t see me, since the wolf tore the lamb to pieces and the hawk massacred its prey” (Giacobbe 2001: 139). 504

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death of his brother Giosuè, as a hawk.508 This ferocious and tragic connotation is forcefully reproduced in the film based on the novel, and also in other films featuring the tragic figure of a mother dressed in black following the violent death of a loved one. Despite the recurrence of examples of grieving mothers in 20thcentury Sardinian culture, the discourse on women conducted by authors over the 19th and 20th centuries seems to focus on the more positive aspects of womanhood and motherhood, where in the traditional island universe the two terms seem to be essentially conflated. This is the case in Deledda’s stories, yet one of the most striking features of her female characters is their attempts to rebel against tradition and define their own social and cultural space; in so doing they are inevitably shunned by their community and thus symbolise the crisis of the world in which Deledda set her novels. As has already been observed, the desire to break out of their traditional role is expressed in images in which heroines are in a liminal position: close to a door or facing a window, ready to fly the coop, like CosimaGrazia at the top of a cliff from which she sees the sea for the first time.509 Alongside elements specific to Sardinian culture, Deledda’s work is also marked by the tropes connoting the pernicious side of femininity found in late 19th-century European literature, whereby “love comes about because men let themselves be bewitched by the

508

Giacobbe 2001: 164-165. Ibid., 165: “Mamma had already packed a bundle with a change of clothes and some bread and cheese for the journey. She put it in my hands and took me to the yard gate, the one leading directly into the fields. There she gave me a hug. I caught her smell, and for a moment it seemed that her black shawl had turned into two huge bird wings. ‘The hawk!’ I thought. It wasn’t the person there I was thinking of, I was thinking of the bird, the hawk. Mamma was hugging me and I, stupid that I was, instead of thinking of her hugging me, distracted myself with other thoughts. Since I don’t know when, certainly since I was very young, because I couldn’t even remember it, Mamma hadn’t hugged me”. In a previous passage, during a dream Oreste likens his grandmother to a hawk – indeed the two women had meditated the vendetta together (see Baumann 2007: 242): “But then Grandma arrived, black and swift as a hawk, with her shawl open and flapping like two wings, and she picked me up and flew away, crying ‘The lamb! Leave the lamb alone! Isn’t it enough what you did to the other one?’ And I felt safe, because Grandma was protecting me and showing that she loved me. Under the wings of her shawl I had nothing to fear.” (Giacobbe 2001: 164). For a critical interpretation of the female characters in the novel Gli arcipelaghi see Baumann 2007: 226-246. 509 Paulis 2006: 303-305.

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devilish element”.510 In Colombi e sparvieri the women of the real world are “dressed in coarse cloth and soft velvet, as if they represented day and night together, but without scruples, love and hate but without perversions”,511 in accordance with the female dichotomy of good and evil found in the Decadent movement and in several of Deledda’s novels.512 In Deledda’s deep religious vision, however, the woman’s main role remained that of wife and mother. This vision must also have been important to her contemporary readers, as is clear from her correspondence with Maxim Gorky.513 In a letter to her he was at pains to emphasise the role of women as “Mothers of Mankind”, stating that the time was nigh when the mother, the symbol of life and love, would become the heroine of novels, drama, and tragedy.514 Half a century after the dispute over Sardinian women’s alleged ignorance of literature in the pages of the journal Vita Sarda (1893) and Deledda’s essay on her sister islanders (1893), another major writer devoted his attention to the theme of Sardinian women.515 In an essay published in the book Le donne italiane, Giuseppe Dessì propounded a subjective but highly interesting image of the fairer sex.516 He wonders first of all why Sardinia has never produced any great men, since the two most famous figures in the island’s history are Eleonora d’Arborea and Grazia Deledda.517 He sees none of the harmony between the sexes observed by Lawrence, opining instead 510

Guiso 2005: 99. A witch-like role which in the context of Sardinian culture seems to be confirmed, according to Dolores Turchi’s theory, by the presence of priestesses with prerogatives akin to those of a witch-doctor (Turchi 2001: 366; see also Guiso 2005: 99). 511 Deledda 1981c: 543. Guiso 2005: 100. 512 Guiso 2005: 101. 513 Ibid. According to Deledda (1981c: 567), mothers were also an indispensable resource for a bandit, since he “must have only his mother; all other women are his enemies” (quoted in Guiso 2005: 98). 514 Guiso 2005: 112. 515 The dispute was triggered by criticism written by Sardinian journalist Pompejano, producing a fierce reaction on the part of an anonymous female reader living on the mainland (probably Deledda herself). On this entire question see Angela Guiso 2005: 105-108. See also chapter 1, section Women. 516 Dessi 1949: 37-42. 517 Dessì 1949: 38.

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that the island’s society “is formed of two parts which do not amalgamate, like a medal made with two different metals”.518 He has little time for the “pride” and “virile dignity” attributed to men in a consolidated literary tradition, asserting that everything good in Sardinian society seems to have been produced by women: “everything that depends on women functions properly, everything depending on men functions badly”.519 Just as Deledda had stated that a woman’s treasure is not her beauty but her hands, Dessì observes that the quality of the products of domestic labour (especially weaving and the making of bread and cakes) is remarkably high, and as such the proof of women’s worth.520 According to him, while men build ugly houses, women turn them into comfortable, civilised homes with their textiles and rugs; women are highly adept at transporting delicate cakes in baskets on their heads on bad roads – constructed, of course, by men.521 In contrast to female excellence, then, stands the inadequacy of the male sex: Sardinian men are unheroic because of their ancestral fear of the sea.522 Women weave like Penelope, but their men bear no resemblance to Ulysses:523 Women so faithful, so constant, so brave, so resilient in the face of solitude were made to be the wives of men who were not afraid of the sea and of open spaces, the wives of great navigators. I imagine them sitting at their looms, but at the centre of continents and oceans, points of departure and points of arrival. Poor disappointed wives of heroes!524

Dessì adds another element important for judging the worth of Sardinian women. While nuragic civilisation represents the most glorious period in the island’s history, in which the builders of the nuraghi – men – were able to show their ability, that period also expresses their limitations, since they left no trace of writing. This is because they have always nurtured a complete detestation for the 518

Ibid. Dessì 1949: 37; 38. 520 Baumann 2007: 34. Dessì 1949: 38-39. The same viewpoint is to be found in the play Eleonora d’Arborea, also by Dessì 1964 in which women are repeatedly likened to bees on the grounds of their industriousness. 521 Dessì 1949: 38-39. 522 Ibid., 40. 523 Ibid. 524 Ibid., 41. 519

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alphabet, considered as “space, like the sea”; women, by contrast, do not hate water and are usually able to read and write.525 Dessì is also convinced that nobody has ever given due consideration to women’s contribution in general “to civilisation in the creation of symbols which later became ideograms, then hieroglyphs and finally letters of the alphabet”.526 The same goes for Sardinia, where men have not been able properly to appreciate or develop the ideographic language devised by their women in the production of embroidery and decorations.527 In conclusion, the female sex has been the civilising force of a people otherwise destined for eternal barbarism. But on more careful scrutiny of Dessì’s words, women excel above all in the skills bound up with a traditional, and therefore patriarchal, way of life, one in which women were the queens of their domestic spaces but slaves to their men. That this dichotomy was still alive and well on the island is made clear by Maria Giacobbe’s recollections of her experience as a schoolmistress in the Barbagia after the Second World War. She records being received at the home of a male colleague by his wife, an elderly lady dressed in local costume who shows herself only to serve dinner in silence and make up her bed – a creature as invisible as the many other wives depicted in traditional literature.528 The pages of Diario di una maestrina, fruit of the reflections of a modern emancipated woman but one particularly sensitive to the heredity of cultures of origin, outline the profile of women still prisoners of a hard and poor world, subjected to the trials of childbirth, day-to-day difficulties and hatreds played out in vendettas and traumatic bereavements. This is why she told her pupils to read Jacopone da Todi’s Pianto della Madonna, in the conviction that it had something to say to people for whom the sorrow of death is everpresent, manifested in mothers’ funeral laments.529 The work she

525

Ibid. Ibid., 42. 527 Ibid. 528 Ibid., 21. 529 Ibid., 62. In this regard Giacobbe observed, “Many times my girls had heard, wideeyed with emotion, the women next door, rocking slowly on their low stools by the cold fireplace as they sang the praises of their lost sons and the bitterness of their 526

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assigned to her schoolgirls in the village of Fonni, in the heart of the Barbagia, led them to rediscover the life and traditions of their forebears and take cognizance of the desperate conditions of poverty and backwardness that in some quarters still obtained.530 Yet Giacobbe also registered unmistakable signs of the changes taking place, including how conditions varied from one village to the next. The women and girls in Bortigali, for instance, were more modern than those in Fonni;531 decades ago they had abandoned traditional costume in favour of “tawdry black or bottle-green knee-length dressing gowns”, and called “zulus” the inhabitants of a neighbouring village who still dressed in the traditional manner; to satisfy their desire to be fashionable they preferred to take the train to Sassari to shop for clothes rather than buying in Nuoro, which they had decided was too parochial.532 Traces of an archaic feminine world are also to be found in Franco Cagnetta’s anthropological research on Orgosolo, which is entirely in keeping with the traditional character of that Barbagian village.533 In Cagnetta’s account, in their physical appearance as in all

sorrow. Their friends and relations around them made a chorus with their soft laments” (ibid.). 530 “In the old days women were not as they are now, they all wore rough woollen cloth. Men would wear a leather jerkin, ‘sa berrita’, on their heads, an embroidered leather belt and loose breeches of white cloth instead of trousers. Old people still dress like that. Men and women went barefoot. Their houses were like the huts of early humans – no furniture, not even beds: they slept on the floor. Some poor people still live like that. Then there were no cars or buses, nothing of what modern life gives us. When people had to go somewhere they went on foot, only the richest travelled on horseback. Wheat was ground with a millstone pulled round by a donkey” (Giacobbe 2003: 79). 531 Ibid., 98. 532 Ibid. “Like the other women in the village she does not wear costume, which was replaced decades ago with tawdry black or bottle-green knee-length dressing gowns. The Bortigalese are very proud of their ‘civilised’ attire and speak with contemptuous detachment of the women in Silanus, a few kilometres down the road, who continue to wear traditional costume as ‘zulus’” (ibid.). 533 Cagnetta 2002: 43. See also ibid., 71: “The position of the man, who performs the principal economic function of seeking pasture, herding the flocks and collecting their produce, is pre-eminent. The position of the woman, who performs the secondary economic function of housework and agricultural labour (kitchen gardens) is subordinate. When children are born the sons and daughters remain with their parents, subordinated. Among the children the hierarchy favours the order of birth and the male sex.”

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other respects Orgolese women bear witness to the archaic and oriental – and thus exotic – vocation of Sardinian society: To anyone with some experience, the women in Orgosolo are easily recognisable among all those in Sardinia. Their faces are almost always pretty, dark and delicate despite being rustic, with soft black eyes whose depth makes the pupils seem twice their size. Their gaze is sullen, intense and burning; it has a strange, primitive force. Rather taller than the average Sardinian woman, the Orgolese are slim and agile in sitting down and rising from the ground without the aid of their hands. Tending to age in the face and to a certain roughness, at thirty they become hard: their faces wrinkle and collapse, their bodies stiffen and lose their shape, as happens to young African women. In their everyday dress the women in Orgosolo are no longer distinguishable from those in other Sardinian sheep-herding villages, but they are distinguished by greater care in their appearance, severe dignity and a majestic gait. They usually wear a dark skirt, brown or black, with dozens of pleats down to their feet, as is common in Spain; a blouse buttoned at the neck and wrists; a loose coarse wool cloak, brown or black, or a short dark cape with long fringes, as is common in Spain; almost always barefoot, occasionally sandals; a scarf covers the head and is brought round the side of the face under the nose to cover the lips and chin, as is common in Africa. With their ability to stand still with classical elegance, the impassive dignity of their gaze, their way of walking briskly while the body remains immobile, they almost appear to be living statues, living monuments to an ancient world. Should you happen to see an Orgolese woman in the now little-worn traditional village costume, enthroned outside a door or at the top of a flight of steps, Orgosolo is revealed to you in all its mysterious millennial profundity. The costume is sumptuous, theatrical, almost unreal. Over a loose dark skirt coming down to the feet are three aprons: one of coarse red wool finished at the hem with a green silk ribbon; over that is placed a smaller one, identical to it; and then a third one, even smaller, also of red wool, embroidered with gold, blue and green silk thread in violently dramatic designs representing flames and vegetable arms whose stylisation recalls the decorations on ancient Jewish candelabra. Above the aprons is a white blouse, pronounced at the chest with stays, closed at the neck and wrists with large gold spiral-shaped buttons. Over the shirt are two bodices: one loose-sleeved in red wool embroidered with multi-coloured silk thread

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in leaf and lozenge designs which at times recall the clay tablets of Babylon; the other is black, funereal, hemmed with a green silk ribbon, narrow at the waist, sleeveless and worn over the first. The most remarkable part of the entire costume is without doubt a roll of coarse-woven silk of a dark yellow colour – a kind of ancient Egyptian papyrus – placed on the head and wrapped round the face in such a way that only the eyes and nose protrude, as if from remote depths. Despite the combination of such heterogeneous elements and their manifest origination from such diverse ancient civilisations, the costume has a unity of its own, a fusion achieved in Orgosolo, and as a whole it seems to precede Israel, Babylon and Egypt, as if to indicate a common world of primitive and obscure Mediterranean aborigines. All over the village one sees women, in ancient costume or modern clothes, sitting in the streets or in constant movement around the fountains, with amphorae on their heads, carried with the utmost elegance. They are to be seen hurrying, breathless and always busy, never walking for pleasure. It is the first and profound mark of those people.534 (my italics)

The profile of Sardinian women emerging from Cagnetta’s analysis is surprisingly rich in similarities to the literary tradition, starting with the description of the “strange” and “primitive” force in the gaze of Orgolese women, whose “mysterious profundity” evokes the trope of timelessness peculiar to the island world.535 There are also many references to the exotic, exemplified in physical resemblances and certain customs of Sardinian women in relation to their eastern Mediterranean and African counterparts. One of the details, the headscarf wrapped round to cover the lower part of the face, calls to mind certain passages from travel literature and Deledda’s novels and above all the portraits painted by early 20th-century artists, such as Biasi, who put on canvas the fascination with the exotic which they had discovered on their pilgrimages to north Africa.536 Equally revealing is the vocabulary used to describe the women’s posture and demeanour (hard, severe dignity, majestic gait, stand still with 534

Cagnetta 2002: 43-45. Ibid., 43. 536 Altea and Magnani 1998. Here are two references to the exotic East from Deledda’s writings: a woman sitting on the ground by her basket, her legs crossed in the Arab manner and hands together in her lap below her black overskirt, with a “stately” face (Deledda 1981c: 584); a barefoot servant with her face covered like an Arab (Deledda 1971f: 399). See also Eberhardt 2002: 88. 535

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classical elegance, impassive dignity, living statues, living monuments to an ancient world), recapturing the idea of the Sardinian people’s original and simple nobility that had underpinned Deledda’s work and the campaign of cultural nationalism.537 The references to the classical world and details of the costumes, strikingly likened to the ancient East (Egyptian papyrus, Babylonian tablets, Jewish candelabra), recall nothing so much as Bresciani’s observations on the Homeric and Biblical qualities of Sardinian society. Lastly, certain terms from the language of art bear witness to a link with the 19th-century tradition of thought whereby a character or a scene from traditional Sardinian life, as the expression of a world uncorrupted and faithful to its origins, was configured, to use Goethe’s words, as “a work of art”.538 While a strain of literary tradition has thus continued to identify the Sardinian woman above all with her role as a mother and a guardian of traditional culture, in a recent book devoted to the analysis of a series of heroines in 20th-century Sardinian narrative Tania Baumann reaches the opposite conclusion, denying the existence of a single female model and a real trope of Sardinian women.539 She argues that the sheer multiplicity of female characters negates the myth of an unchanging Sardinia and that of mother-Sardinia so dear to tradition.540 She does acknowledge, however, that female characters have a common denominator in their symbolic significance, in that through them writers have developed their personal visions of Sardinian identity and their relations, often traumatic, with their origins.541 This is a conclusion in keeping with the views of those, such as Giuseppe Marci and Nereide Rudas, who see the problematic 537

There are are examples in the novel Marianna Sirca: the heroine is described as “silent and grave” (Deledda 1981f: 798) and “calm, almost rigid” (ibid., 904); and the woman with the stately face mentioned in the previous note (Deledda 1981c: 584). 538 Of many possible examples, here again are two: Deledda’s Columba appears like a “painted image” in her wedding dress (Deledda 1981c: 584); the women enclosed in the “frame” of their shawls (Deledda 1971b: 345). For an analysis of this trope in the representation of rural life in European culture, see section Character below. 539 Baumann 2007: 357. 540 Ibid., 358. 541 Ibid.

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relationship with the land of origin as the driving force of Sardinian narrative. According to this view writers have somehow sublimated in their work the desire for national self-assertion of a people whose cultural identity has been continually threatened by foreign domination, and literature has offered a response to the need to assert their identity.542 Using the methods of her own field of research, psychiatrist Nereide Rudas reached similar conclusions, confirming the predominant role of the island itself in Sardinian narrative and, by extension, of the mother figure as the female archetype in the island’s cultural universe – with its symbolic counterparts of island and motherland – as a projection of the classical mother-son dyad.543 In Rudas’ view the traditional woman is first and foremost a mother, as is evident in many distinct periods in Sardinian civilisation.544 In support of her thesis she offers an intriguing analysis of Francesco Ciusa’s statue Madre dell’ucciso and of a number of novels whose plots revolve around emblematic mother figures such as Mariangela Coi (Il disertore) and Donna Vincenza (Il giorno del giudizio), defined by Salvatore Satta as the mother of her children “before they were conceived”.545 Drawing on the results of research into Sardinian prehistory, Rudas states that the omnipresence of the mother figure is to be ascribed to the fact that the roots of a pre-nuragic matriarchal society are still alive. Thus she explains the success of this subject of Sardinian art, from the Madre dell’ucciso of Urzulei, a bronze figurine from the nuragic period to Ciusa’s Madre dell’ucciso.546 She goes on to say that Ciusa’s sculpture may be seen as an expression of public rather than private grief, a manifestation of feelings of motherhood and orphanhood developed by Sardinian culture as a symbolic projection of its political subordination.547 This would also explain the intimate relation between motherhood, nostalgia for origins (as expressed, for instance, in the novel Cenere) and the theme of 542

Marci 1991: 17. Ibid., Rudas 2004: 82; 52; 48; 162. In this regard Rudas (2004: 199, note 7) makes reference to the theory of maternal attachment developed by John Bowlby, who on a visit to Sardinia said that in the island’s culture he had found exemplary corroboration of his hypotheses on the exclusive mother-son relationship. 544 Ibid., 201. 545 Satta 1979: 50; quoted by Rudas 2004: 201. 546 Rudas 2004: 197. Rudas (2004: 199) points out that Francesco Ciusa was unaware of the existence of the Urzulei figurine, which confirms the importance of the theme of motherhood in Sardinian society. 547 Ibid., 198. 543

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transience (the idea of ephimeral death in Il giorno del giudizio) in the Sardinian cultural universe.548 In her view even the Carte d’Arborea can be read as a “great family novel”549 in that behind the intrinsic falsehood of the papers lies the collective will to trace a glorious genealogical history.550 This is the context, as will be seen below, in which to understand the fascination exerted by the figure of Eleonora d’Arborea as an archetype in the island’s intellectual community.551 In the variety of female characters created by the imagination of Sardinian authors, the literature of the second half of the 20th century has provided a number of remarkable mother figures who give full expression to the complexity of the island’s cultural universe and its contradictions. As Tania Baumann has shown, Donna Vincenza in Il giorno del giudizio probably stands as the highest form of synthesis of an island bound to its traditional values whereby the female function is played out entirely, and with tragic results, in the role of mother in the home.552 But by virtue of the way she is depicted in Satta’s posthumously published novel, that very same character represents a withering criticism of that cultural context and its (false) principles and reasserts the supreme value of motherhood.553 Among the literary characters subsequently re-created on screen, special mention should be made of Mariangela Coi in Giuseppe Dessì’s Il disertore, whose femininity coincides with her motherhood and, by extension, the function of guardian of the collective memory554 – a function expressed in the unbreakable bond between the mother and her deserter son, as though the umbilical cord had never been cut. The story’s physical setting is representative of traditional Sardinian culture (a mountainous pastoral environment, the shepherd’s hut) and is posited as the dialectic opposite of what is modern. The reflection on Sardinian identity is therefore sublimated in the character of this mater dolorosa. The idea that the island has resisted the expropriation of itself by foreign occupiers, thereby 548

Ibid., 58. Ibid., 69. 550 Ibid., 76. 551 Ibid., 77. 552 Baumann 2007: 175-196. 553 Ibid., 351. 554 On this character and on the film as a whole, see chapter 6, section Il disertore. 549

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developing a consciousness of the indispensability of its cultural identity, is expressed in the novel, according to Rudas, by the silence that reigns over the whole story and in particular shrouds the character of Mariangela. It reveals the metaphor of a Sardinia which, in order not to lose its identity, in order to survive in the face of danger and overwhelming forces, has been driven to shut itself away in defence, to hide and bury itself. It has been forced into silence. But silence is not the absence of words. What has been repressed re-emerges or may re-emerge in the symbol that speaks, as in Dessì’s book.555

Eleonora d’Arborea as a Symbol of National Identity The symbolic re-creation of the feeling of national identity in the sublimation of the mother-son relationship is also revealed in the cultural representation of one of the most important figures in Sardinian history, who happens to be a woman. Of all the island’s daughters celebrated by intellectuals, writers and poets in pre-20thcentury literary discourse, pride of place undoubtedly went to Eleonora (1340-1404?), sovereign of the Kingdom of Arborea, also cited by travel writers as a shining example of the valour of the Sardinian people.556 This interest is further confirmed in 20th-century sources.557 Gamel Holten described her as “wise” and Münster observed that she was a greatly revered figure.558 Deledda had already made mention of her in a number of her writings. She dedicated her poem Vertex (1893) to her following the publication of her essay ‘Eleonora d’Arborea’ in the journal Ultima Moda on June 22nd 1890.559 The Anonymous Reader (probably Deledda herself) involved in the polemic published in Vita sarda on Sardinian women’s alleged ignorance of literature also cited Eleonora as a model of feminine fighting spirit when she remarked “here I am running the risk of being called the New Eleonora, but never mind!”.560 555

Rudas 2004: 269. See chapter 1, section Women: Eleonora d’Arborea as a Symbol of National Identity. Pili 1991: 136-196. 557 Bechi 1997: 127 and foll; Crawford Flitch 1911: 276. 558 Gamel Holten 2005: 94. Münster 2006: 133. 559 In number 19 of Vita Sarda (15th October 1893, pp. 6-7) Deledda published the poem Vertex; about the essay Eleonora d’Arborea see Guiso 2005: 107-108. 560 Guiso 2005: 107. 556

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The texts (prose, opera libretti, plays, historical novels, academic research and articles for popular reading) devoted to this character multiplied during the century and she is still at the centre of attention of contemporary writers and scholars.561 By way of an example, mention is made here of two 20th-century works whose value lies as much in their intrinsic worth as the standing of their authors. The first is the long essay Eleonora d’Arborea by Camillo Bellieni (1893-1975), a key figure in the 20th-century political debate on Sardinian culture and one of the founders of the Partito Sardo d’Azione. From the first pages of the book, published in 1929, emerges the outline of an Eleonora “dark-faced”, “mysterious, half wrapped in black, leaving to view only her shining eyes, with their vigilant, determined gaze”.562 A “dark queen” who has nothing in common with the figures of the blonde blue-eyed Madonnas immortalised by Provençal poetry and the dolce stil novo, she rather resembles “warrior women” and bears traces of the “Oriental” trope,

561

See Pili 1991. Pietro Camboni Alba, Eleonora, principessa d’Arborea: dramma in 5 atti (Cagliari: Stab. Tip. Giuseppe Serreli, 1908); Franciscu Dore, Su triunfu d’Eleonora d’Arborea (Calaris: G. Serreli, 1910), subsequently in anastatic reprint (Cagliari: 3T, 1980); Giuseppe Fanciulli, La spada di Eleonora. Romanzo della Sardegna eroica (Milan: Ravagnati Unione Tipografica, 1933). Articles include: Mercedes Mundula, ‘Eleonora d’Arborea’, Ariel: rassegna di alta cultura, 1937, 2: 57; popular literature: Sardus, ‘Affidata a una donna la libertà dei sardi: Eleonora d’Arborea, moglie, madre, giudice, soldato’, in Almanacco di Cagliari, 1970, 5; G.M. Maricosu, ‘L’ultimo bandito sardo: Eleonora d’Arborea: una rievocazione arrabbiata’, La Nuova Sardegna: settimanale, 1971, 30: 3. Among the most original contributions is that made by Nilde Iotti, historic leader of the Italian Communist Party and longserving President of the Chamber of Deputies in the Italian Parliament: ‘Eleonora personaggio di grande rilievo nella storia di Sardegna, dell’Italia e nella storia della donna’, Quaderni Oristanesi: bollettino bibliografico dell’editrice Sa Porta, 1982, 23: 49-53. Among more recent texts mention should be made of the (re)publication of Bianca Pitzorno’s historical novel Vita di Eleonora di Arborea: principessa medievale di Sardegna (Camunia, 1984; Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 2010) and the play by Salvatore Sinis, Il Giudicato di Eleonora d’Arborea: dramma in tre atti (Oristano: S’Alvure, 2007); lastly, an article written for the wider public: Irma Sanciu Obino, ‘Eleonora giudicessa silfide sfregiata’, Almanacco gallurese, 2006: 285-286. On the figure of Eleonora in the popular imagination: Da Re and Angioni 2000: 81-100; Da Re 2005 and 1997. 562 Camillo Bellieni, Eleonora d’Arborea (Cagliari: Il Nuraghe, 1929), now republished Bellieni 2004: 12; 11.

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as witnessed by the veil hiding most of her face in a way similar to the Berber-looking women depicted in Biasi’s paintings.563 Despite the scarcity of sources the author feels able to “see in her the determined and powerful figure of a Sardinian domina, the resolute and authoritarian act, the proper demeanour of a sovereign”.564 The only worthwhile comparison is with other warrior queens such as Kahena, the Christian Berber chief who led the resistance of her “proud tribes” when they took refuge in the hills until she died in combat.565 The comparison with the African sovereign is by no means coincidental, given the traditions common to the two civilisations,566 but it is tempered by the image of the matron reflecting the memory of the “moral solidity of the Sardinian people” which was at the centre of the cultural promotion campaign in the second half of the 19th century. Continuing in his portrait of Eleonora, whom he considers “a female figure relevant to today’s Sardinia” rather than a vague shadow from the past, Bellieni lists expressions and connotations recurring in portrayals of the island’s women: the “simplicity of a mother in a patriarchal family, busy with her everyday duties”, combined with the “severe appearance” of the domina and the “intimate severity of demeanour peculiar to the Sardinian woman”.567 He underlines the importance of motherhood, defining it as “above all the mother jealous as a wild animal, ready to sink her teeth into whoever touches her offspring”, a condition which he traces to the existence of a probable long-gone matriarchy.568 Eleonora did not choose to become a “commander of armies and peoples, warrior and lawgiver”, but was driven by the harsh reality of the events which overtook her family to take on the role traditionally assigned to a man, though Sardinian law did contemplate the accession of a woman to the throne.569 In any event it was an “outstanding princess”, a “warrior queen” and a “wise 563

Ibid., 12. Ibid. 565 Ibid. 566 References to the Eastern origins of the Sardinian people are also to be found elsewhere in the text: Bellieni speaks of “Hamitic-Semitic characteristics” to which “the Sardinian people are directly connected” (Bellieni 2004: 63). Reference to the mountains as a centre of resistance recalls the trope of the Barbagia as the land of Sardinian resisters (chapter 1, section Tropes of Land: The Barbagia). 567 Bellieni 2004: 14; 13; 30. 568 Ibid., 14. 569 Ibid., 24; 31. 564

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lawgiver” who felt the Sardinians’ overwhelming need to be united and free of all foreign domination.570 In conclusion, in Bellieni’s Eleonora there is a confluence of characteristics typical of both sexes, some traditionally feminine (the vocation for motherhood, compassion) and others masculine (strength, a combative character, legislative wisdom), fused in a perfect and exemplary synthesis of the worth of the Sardinian people; indeed, what we see emerging from this narrative is not so much a medieval individual as the living embodiment of the ethnos that still in the 20th century was trying desperately to be recognised as a nation. This interpretation is clearly corroborated towards the end of the book, where Bellieni, with the few brushstrokes required by an old master, describes a meeting of the Corona de Logu, the assembly of principal figures in the Giudicato d’Arborea (Kingdom of Arborea) presided over by Eleonora. Around them armed men are arrayed, and above all “the throng dressed in dark wool, like a vast black stain, listening in silence” to their queen. The sovereign’s words are followed by the assent of the Assembly as “the black-clad throng listens and keeps silent”.571 Bellieni’s words evoke the image of a Sardinian nation, as severe and simple as the coarse wool it wears, united in a communion of intent and values,572 identifying itself in the shining guide that is Eleonora. This image reflected the undisguised desire for Sardinian unity and selfgovernment which was Bellieni’s political ideal, an ambition destined to be denied by the inexorable consolidation of Fascism. A decade after the publication of his Le donne sarde (1949), writer Giuseppe Dessì also turned his attention to Eleonora, making her the subject of a four-act play.573 It gave him the opportunity to 570

Ibid., 62; 102; ibid.; 70-71. Ibid., 100. 572 In his choice of details Bellieni clearly draws on stock images of Sardinia: traditional orbace wool is coarse and stiff, metaphorically reflecting the harshness in the Sardinian character; the colours in his description (dark wool, black stain, blackclad throng) recall their sobriety. Some of the scene’s immediacy derives from the acoustic references, which render the feeling of harmony and nobility characterising the occasion: Eleonora’s voice “is heard precise and clear”, the voices of the nobles “are deeper and more subdued”, while the throng does not speak, it “listens and keeps silent” (all quotations from Bellieni 2004: 100). 573 Giuseppe Dessì, Eleonora d’Arborea (1964), a historical drama in four acts. For an analysis of this work see Bullegas 2000: 252-258. 571

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return to the general theme of women and to reiterate his positive view of the female of the species – likened to industrious bees – compared to the male sex, and to express his vision of Sardinian history.574 His heroine is an amalgam of the characteristics of a mother and those of a sovereign leading her people, as canonised in tradition, from a perspective in which men and women are different by nature and each have their distinct tasks. This makes it clear why Eleonora, who has come into a role of power and leadership usually assigned to a man, appears as a double figure, a fusion of what is masculine (power, wisdom, strength) and feminine (motherhood, compassion) in the Sardinian imagination. Her masculine side is revealed in the authority her character exerts over her subjects: more than once she is referred to as a “small woman” who with one “small hand” commands respect.575 In the second scene of the third act, as she is about to address those present from the middle of the hall she bids them be silent with a single movement, just as she did in Bellieni’s depiction of the assembly of the notables of the Giudicato d’Arborea (the Corona de logu) described above.576 It is interesting to note that the above scene is preceded by a choral moment in which those present manifest their desire to oppose the demands of the Aragonese and defend Sardinian freedom. The culmination is reached in a man’s song, exhorting all the people to fight and never give in to the enemy. Eleonora immediately explains to her councillors that the legal code instituted by her father, King Mariano, has to be expanded.577 To the doubts voiced by some of them as to the advisability of changing the law of the land at such a delicate juncture Eleonora responds in a way which reveals the quintessentially political – in addition to juridical – significance of her design. Extending the laws of the kingdom precisely when the king of Aragon intends to reduce the Arborea to vassals amounts to asserting the sovereignty of the Sardinian dynasty and the principle of selfdetermination for the Sardinian people.578

574

Bullegas 2000: 255. “Meanwhile the following scene occurs: at a gesture from Eleonora, silence falls in the hall – a religious silence around a small woman who raises her small white hand” (Dessì 1964: 112; see also ibid., 127). 576 Ibid., 112. 577 Ibid., 104-108. 578 Ibid., 107; 110-111. 575

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The identification of the figure of the giudicessa Eleonora with the Sardinian people clearly takes shape following an exchange with her husband Brancaleone Doria who, released by the Spanish after a long period of imprisonment, reproaches her for the decisions she has made: “Why did you not heed my advice instead of listening to these knaves? These sheep-herders? … Can you not see that these people are different from me, from you?”.579 Eleonora is unbowed in the face of such accusations, and her reply is resolute: “You are different. I am as they are”.580 Her words stand as an unmistakable confirmation of the existence of a Sardinian identity and its right to political selfassertion. Towards the end of the story, however, when the fate of the Kingdom of Arborea is sealed, Eleonora loses all her power and her regal demeanour, appearing as a simple woman assisting plague victims in a lazar house. Despite Father Lorenzo’s exhortations to return to lead the Sardinian people and see her son again, she observes disconsolately, “This is a time of kings and queens, and I am not queen”,581 implying that military defeat has cheated her not only of political leadership but of her role as a mother, the function that Sardinian culture traditionally perceived as the essence of womanhood. The loss of freedom suffered by the Sardinians as a result of their defeat by the Aragonese is symbolised by the negation of Eleonora’s maternal role. The fate of the unfortunate heroine is thus identified completely with that of Sardinia, whose children have been denied the right to be free in their own land and are left as orphans – a condition of political subordination which, as already observed, continued to obsess the Sardinian imagination in the 20th century.582 It clearly emerges from the above outline that the figure of the woman has been and continues to be a primary vehicle for reflection on identity in Sardinian culture. In foreign writers the representation of the female sex is part of the viewpoint that identifies the island with an archaic society, so the woman continues to be the personification of a primitive life, outside time, and precisely for this reason fascinating 579

Ibid., 120; quoted by Bullegas 2000: 257. Dessì 1964: 121. In another exchange Eleonora accuses Brancaleone of being different to her when she says “You do not love this land” (ibid., 122). 581 Ibid., 170. 582 Marci 2006; Rudas 2004. 580

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and exotic in her insuperable detachment from the canons of modernity. In Sardinian authors, apart from the influence of archaism, the representation of women is an effective instrument to express the main, and most obsessive, theme in Sardinian literature: the relationship between the writer and the island, that is to say the mythicised sentiment of orphanhood felt by the Sardinian people towards a homeland for centuries subjected to foreign domination.583 Character The Festivity as a Theatrical Display of Identity Starting with Vittorio Angius’ novel Leonora d’Arborea (1847), the rustic festivity – often connected with a novena and a pilgrimage – became a recurrent narrative element in Sardinian literature at a time when Europe was steeped in romantic ideals and enamoured of an idealised vision of rural life devoid of the real problems which beset it.584 In the context of the Romantic movement, this representation went hand-in-hand with the values propagated by contemporary cultural nationalism: the rural world was depicted as a fabulous golden age in which community values still held sway and were visible in every manifestation of collective life.585 From this standpoint popular festivities took on the appearance, to use Hegel’s words, of “a living work of art” to which a quintessential national character was attributed;586 such characteristics were echoed in the writings of European travellers and in Sardinian art and literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.587 Accounts from the early 20th century chimed with earlier versions, noting their resonance with Sigismondo Arquer’s Sardiniae historia et descriptio, whose description of the main characteristics of popular festivities emphasised their significance in the life of the community.588 583

Marci 2006; Rudas 2004; Baumann 2007. Paulis 2006: 209. On the idea of the festivity as a “model of the anti-everyday” and an occasion on which normal standards of behaviour were overturned, see Paulis 2006: 211-212. 585 Paulis 2006: 209. 586 Ibid., 213. 587 Paulis (2006: 214) recalls the topos of the festivity as a work of art in Enrico Costa’s novel Paolina. On the topos of the festivity a work of art and a national manifestation in Sardinian painting: ibid., 215-216. 588 Chapter 1, note 423. 584

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The importance of the idea of the festivity as a theatrical display of Sardinian identity – a mise-en-scène evoking the archaic origins of Sardinian culture, eliminating the distance between past and present to such an extent that what actually goes back centuries is perceived as current – reached its apogee in Deledda’s writings, where the depiction of festivities and novenas play a crucial part in the construction of the image of traditional Sardinia as the “living fossil of a memorable past”.589 This is particularly evident in the novel Canne al vento (1913), in which a description of choral singing is used to formulate the image of the Sardinian people as full of suffering, the victims of the outrages of history in search, like the Jews, of their own promised land.590 Several tropes are fused in this depiction: the idea of the symbolic unity of the Sardinian race, its antiquity and its Biblical character – all ennobling features in the context of cultural nationalism and in keeping with, among other things, the image of the Sardinian people fashioned by Padre Bresciani in his Dei costumi dell’isola di Sardegna.591 The archaic character and central importance of feast-days as a national feature were not lost on other 20th-century authors. Crawford Flitch remarked upon their ancient origins (and, by extension, their perpetuation of an archaic way of life on the island)592 and on the 589

Paulis 2006: 218. See in particular ibid., 220-226, the analysis of “the festivity as a privileged scenario in Deledda’s narrative”. In her novel Elias Portolu, for instance, Deledda (1971d: 32; 35) describes the pilgrimage to the church of San Francesco in Lula and the celebrations held in the church premises given over to accommodate the novena participants, which was known as the cumbissia. For an analysis of the scenes of celebration and dance in the novel, see Paulis 2006: 221-224. 590 “It was like the distant murmur of the sea, the movement of the forest at eventide: it was a whole ancient people walking, walking, singing the innocent prayers of the first Christians, walking, walking on a gloomy road, enraptured with grief and hope, towards a place of light too far to reach” (Deledda 1971b: 238). See also Paulis 2006: 226 and 235, note 86. 591 Paulis 2006: 232. 592 “The most vivid picture of the traditional Sardinian life is to be seen in the country feste” (Crawford Flitch 1911: 307). Contributing to their air of antiquity is the music emitted by archaic instruments: “In the heat of the afternoon the clamour of the festa died down. From the shadow of wagons and rock came the languid melody of launeddas – the wooden pipes which are the primitive instrument of Sardinia – and the lugubrious wail of accordions” (ibid., 261). The author has more to say on the antiquity of Sardinian music and dance (ibid., 293).

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importance of the convivial aspect of the celebrations.593 Dwelling at length on the feasts of San Pietro at Desulo and San Costantino (Santu Antine) at Sedilo, in Barbagia, he concluded his account with a calendar of the main festivities observed in Sardinia.594 Marie Galten Holten noted that the observance of religious festivals was as widespread in Sardinia as in the rest of Italy, but that islanders took particular pleasure in the celebrations – a detail to be found in writings on Sardinia from Arquer onwards.595 In the descriptions provided by 20th-century travellers such as those cited above, the various stages of the festivity – procession, psalms, music and the ever-present dance of the ballo tondo – are charged with symbolic meaning, enacting a theatrical display of Sardinian identity. The first sign of a powerful symbolic impact is the portrayal of the festive event as a fusion of the human presence and the surrounding landscape. In Lawrence’s detailed account of the procession for the feast of Sant’Antonio da Padova in Tonara, the crowd forms a supple multi-coloured body which moves slowly across a valley to an isolated church in an unspoilt landscape as the sound of male voices singing in alternation with women’s acts as a counterpoint to the silence reigning all around.596 According to the principle of the 593

“After all, the real business of a Sardinian feast is feasting. It is the rite that is most carefully observed. It is a gastronomic orgy such as only men whose appetites have been whetted by a year’s abstemious living are capable of” (Crawford Flitch 1911: 261). The same idea reappears later: “At intervals this sober rhythm of life was broken by moments when the smouldering fires of the heart shot out into flame – the Homeric orgies of the festa, the wild torch-lit nights of drinking, dancing, and song, the sudden frenzies” (ibid., 248). A family celebration featuring dancing and the obligatory banquet roast is described by Wagner 1908d: 43. 594 The festivity of Santu Antine is renowned to this day above all for its horse race (S’Ardia). For a description of the race and the celebrations, see Crawford Flitch 1911: 262-265. About the main festivities see also ibid., 308-309. 595 Galten Holten 2005: 78; 83. “The Sardinians are people in no hurry, who love festivities and are able to turn into happy occasions what more civilised people would call hard work […]. The Sardinians love the saints too and the feasts observed in their honour, which they always celebrate with ritual fervour” (ibid., 82). Galten Holten describes the performance of religious pilgrimages (ibid., 83) and the good cheer characterising the novena participants during the entire festivity, from the beginning of the journey to the place of pilgrimage to their return (ibid., 84). See also Arquer, chapter 1, section Character: A People in “Perpetual Celebration”. 596 Lawrence 2009: 116-119. Ibid., 116: “We descended into a deep narrow valley, to the road-junction and the canteen house, then up again, up and up sharp to Tonara, our village we had seen in the sun yesterday. But we were approaching it from the back. As we swerved into the sunlight, the road took a long curve on to the open ridge

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popular festivity as a “living work of art”, the procession is a kind of “pictorial composition in movement”: the gaze shifting to focus on the various components of the procession, the real movement of the crowd along the route to the church, the chromatic experience of the costumes matching the landscape and the auditory experience of the singing combine to create a multi-sensorial artistic experience in which the aesthetic beauty of the scene is fused with the morality of those participating in it. The girls dressed in traditional costume are “[w]onderful little girl-children, perfect and demure in the stiffish, brilliant costume, with black head-dress! Stiff as Velasquez princesses!”597 It is in the ballo tondo, however, the “Sardinian national dance”, that the performance of identity reaches its climax, as in the feast of San Costantino in Desulo:598 It was a grave, silent dance. At a first glance the dancers appeared to be almost motionless. Then I saw that the left foot of the dancers slid to and fro, and the right crossed over it and tapped the ground twice or thrice. Very slowly the whole ring revolved. No one spoke or even smiled. Encircling the rigid figure in their feet to tread, the dancers had the air of worshippers. The dance reverted to its ritual origin. Perhaps from that subliminal reservoir, unplumbed by the waking between two valleys. And there in front we saw a glitter of scarlet and white. It was in slow motion. It was a far-off procession, scarlet figures of women, and a tall image moving away from us, slowly, in the Sunday morning. It was passing along the level sunlit ridge above a deep, hollow valley. A close procession of women glittering in scarlet, white and black, moving slowly in the distance beneath the grey-yellow buildings of the village on the crest, towards an isolated old church: and all along this narrow upland saddle as on a bridge of sunshine itself.” 597 Lawrence 2009: 117. In Colombi e sparvieri too the day of celebration to mark the end of a dispute between the people of two villages is set in a landscape displaying the attributes typical of the Sardinian character, where the idea of a living work of art is echoed in the synergy between man and nature. Thus “the calm, almost austere, mountain springtime and that grand landscape bordered by the sea were a fitting background for the picture populated by beautiful people” (Deledda 1981c: 528; my italics). 598 Wagner 1908d: 40. Susanna Paulis (2006: 215) notes not only that in 19th- and th 20 -century Sardinian literature the ballu tundu was defined as the “national dance” by Marcello Cossu (La bella di Osilo, 1879), but that this characterisation reflected the author’s patriotic sentiments. In the novel Gli Anchita e i Brundanu (1882) his brother Gavino Cossu considers the dance as one of the most characteristic expressions of the nation’s distinctiveness (ibid.).

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consciousness, in which the memories of the race are stored, the spirit of an ancient religion emerged and compelled the body to the performance of rites the meaning of which the intelligence had long ago forgotten. The mystic midnight dance had a mesmeric influence.599 (my italics)

The ritual origin evoked by the dance goes back to the remote past: as if in a trance, the dancers ably repeat moves embedded in their collective memory, unintelligible and inexplicable in terms of modern reason.600 In the perfect shape of the circle which unites all participants in continuous movement of varying rhythm, the dance becomes an icon, a symbol of belonging to a united and unique collectivity. Here too the ritual is performed in perfect symbiosis with the surroundings: it is night, the realm of the oneiric and the unconscious, the physical and symbolic space in which the epiphany of Sardinian identity is enacted and through which the event takes on a mythical, fantastic dimension. The dance is described in terms which reflect the Sardinian national character, in that the gravity and rigidity distinguishing the dancers mirror the equilibrium and unshakeable morality of the islanders, just as they are depicted in paintings and texts from the same period.601 The characteristics of Sardinian dance recorded above are present in many of Deledda’s writings, as in Colombi e sparvieri (1912), where “the women and men dancing outside the church” were “serious, almost tragic” and “seemed still to be performing a religious rite”.602 In other cases the sacred character of the dance and the 599

Crawford Flitch 1911: 270. According to Max Leopold Wagner the sight of the ballu tundu accompanied by the sound of the launeddas gives the onlooker the sensation that the present melts away (“Wenn Sonntags nach der Messe alle Burschen und alle Mädchen in ihrem reichen Feststaate auf dem Kirchplatz sich zum nationalem Rundtanz, zum ‘Ballu tundu’ scharen und zum Klange der uralten Doppelflöte aus Rohr in rhythmischem Schritte tanzen, fühlt man sich der Gegenwart entrückt”): Wagner 1908d: 40. 601 In Enrico Costa’s novel Paolina the dance is marked by a “dignified seriousness” (Paulis 2006: 215). Painter Filippo Figari spoke of the “moral solidity” of the Sardinian people, a concept reflected in the iconography of people dancing the ballo tondo in paintings of the period (ibid.). Gamel Holten (2005: 48) noted that three shepherds she had encountered wore “their singular costume with a certain dignity”. 602 “The women and the men were dancing outside the little church; serious, almost tragic, they seemed still to be performing a religious rite” (Deledda 1981c: 528). In the story the dance is held on May 15th 1895 in the little church of Madonna del Buon Consiglio in Tibi to celebrate the peace which ended the disamistade between the 600

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physical and moral appearance of the dancers are combined with observations on the event’s primitiveness and the synthesis between man and nature: the “circle of the ballo tondo” is likened to a “sacred dance” of primitive men and the song which accompanies it sounds like the wind in the forest.603 The culmination of the symbolism of the ballo tondo in Deledda probably comes in Canne al vento, where the dance is compared to a “magic thread” which closes itself in a circle and provokes the dancers (who at this point in proceedings are all women) into “a composed excitement”604 – the combination of ardour and self-control which was considered the Sardinians’ distinctive characteristic.605 inhabitants of Oronou and Tibi. When the traditional dance is performed at a wedding, Deledda (1981c: 544) uses the same adjectives to describe it: “In the courtyard they danced to the tune of a choral chant. Fingers intertwined, the women and men skipped, serious and almost tragic, around the group of singers who, joined face to face with their hands on their cheeks, seemed to be telling a secret” (my italics). 603 “As I continued to dance I felt her side brush mine, while the sonorous and monotonous choral chant which led the dance reminded me of the wind in the forest. I had the impression of being on a moonlit mountain, among fantastic rocks and fossilised tree-trunks, and that all of us forming the circle of the ballo tondo were primitive men gathered for a sacred dance after which each of us would carry off his woman and go wild with her in the lunar landscape, hiding in the caves, kissing in the shade of the oaks, living by his instinct and his desire” (Deledda 1981c: 547; my italics). In Elias Portolu there is reference to “sonorous nostalgic songs which seemed to be impregnated with the solemn sadness of the heath, of the night, of solitude” (Deledda 1971d: 49). On the nature of the dance, recalling the ancient pre-Christian world and its fusion with the landscape: “it resembled an orgy, a Bacchanalia fantastically lit by lentisk fires burning in the courtyard and by the moon descending rose-coloured in the spring sky” (Deledda 1981c: 546). 604 “A magic thread seemed to join the women, giving them a composed and ardent excitement. The thread began to bend, slowly forming a circle” (Deledda 1971b: 219). On this fragment, see Paulis 2006: 225. 605 The fusion of the people with the landscape, and primitiveness and sadness, are also elements characteristic of Deledda’s descriptions of Sardinian song: the choir in Elias Portolu is described as “sad” (Deledda 1971d: 49). The synthesis between man and nature is featured on the same page: “And those sonorous nostalgic songs, which seemed to be impregnated with the solemn sadness of the heath, of the night, of solitude, rose up and spread through the noises of the crowd, filling the air with dream flowers” (ibid.; my italics). On this, see also Paulis 2006: 224. In La madre (1920) a religious chant is intoned by an old villager: “a primitive and monotonous chant, as ancient as the first prayers of men in barely inhabited forests; as ancient and monotonous as the beating of waves on the lonely shore” (Deledda 1971f: 507).

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Though village festivities evolved over time with other customs and in recent years the ballo tondo has often become a museum-piece performed for tourists wishing to discover the genuine Sardinia, traditional Sardinian dance continued to be described with the same features in the latter part of the 20th century, evoking images which recall controversial writings such as Paolo Orano’s Psicologia della Sardegna. According to Thomas Münster the ballu tundu is the negation of European dance because it is the expression of an archaic, primitive culture, resembling the dances of nomadic North African tribes in terms of the trance-like state induced in the dancers. Unlike those dances, however, it does not last until the complete exhaustion of the participants but stops when it reaches its climax – when all those present, young and old alike, have been drawn into it. Münster explains this difference by referring to the “sense of proportion”,606 typical of the Sardinian character. This is yet another instance of the idea of the Sardinian dance as a sign of the antiquity, primitivism and exoticism of the island’s culture, and here its people are depicted as sober, severe and self-controlled, despite the apparent frenzy of the dance.607 National Costume and Sardinian Identity European travellers wrote a great many descriptions of traditional Sardinian costume and were unanimous in considering it an authentic legacy of the past, a view which echoed those of a long series of scholars of things Sardinian.608 The most authoritative dissenting voice among Sardinian scholars was that of Enrico Costa; though acknowledging the undeniable influence of foreign populations in the island in the course of its long history, at the end of the 19th century he propounded the indigenous – and therefore national – character of Sardinian costume as a unique and specific product of Sardinian culture.609 Rejecting the idea that it had remained identical to that of the origins of the island’s culture, Costa argued that the national costume so admired by 19th-century travellers, especially the sumptuous feminine attire, could not be traced back further than the 17th century, since authoritative sources such as Sigismondo Arquer 606

Münster 2006: 109. Ibid., 108-110. 608 Costa 1913: 12-27. 609 On the indigenous character of Sardinian costume: Costa 1913: 34-35. 607

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and Giovanni Francesco Fara (1543-1591) testified to the sobriety of Sardinian dress before that time.610 In support of his contention he adduced a range of documentary evidence testifying to a rapid change undergone by traditional costume during the 19th century whereby it had begun to be supplanted by garments more modern and in greater conformity with European designs.611 Costa’s thesis had the merit of being based on a philological and documentary reconstruction, but it also reflected the national ambition which inspired all his writings: he thought that the island’s costume, though not as ancient as generally thought, continued to be a peculiar and specific manifestation of the Sardinian people.612 His position found no supporters among travellers and other writers, who persisted in seeing the costume and the language as marks of Sardinian archaism.613 Indeed, most 20th-century sources presented a glowing image of traditional dress, judging it to be superior to modern clothing. This is explained by the strategy of extolling all forms of popular expression adopted by the movement of cultural nationalism, especially at the turn of the century, when the advent of modernity intensified the feeling that the traditional world was being lost.614 As a phenomenon invested with national symbolic

610

Ibid., 27-29. Ibid., 30-33. Costa was convinced that the rich feminine attire would be driven to disappearance by the inexpensiveness of new fabrics compared with the cost and workmanship of the traditional dress (ibid., 39). Wagner (1908d: 40) noted that the inhabitants of the Campidano plain in the south of the island confined their use of traditional dress exclusively to special occasions. The adoption of modern town clothes was of course more rapid in urban areas. Lawrence observed that in the south of the island traditional costume had been replaced by a grey-green uniform (the First World War had recently ended) and the Italian khaki suit (Lawrence 2009: 65). Describing a wedding procession, Münster (2006: 111) noted that the younger men there wore brown narrow-ribbed corduroy suits instead of the traditional costume. In a bar crowded with shepherds dressed in brown corduroy, Levi noticed a man “extravagantly dressed”, “an exotic, colonial and warlike translation of the shepherd’s costume” (Levi 2003: 111); a man who was “inside and outside” the pastoral world to which he belonged (ibid., 112). 612 Costa 1913: 34. 613 See also Pancrazi 1934: 215-218: he describes Sardinian women leaving the church of Desulo. 614 Paulis 2006: 242. 611

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meaning, costume thus became an important element in the promotion of authentic Sardinian culture.615 The value of costume was determined primarily by its (alleged) antiquity. The sight of a Sardinian in traditional dress evoked an imaginary journey back in time to the origins of mankind.616 One such case was the rich female property-owner near Cagliari visited by Carlo Levi so that he could admire her ancient jewellery and costumes – despite its simplicity, the figure she cut was regal in character. Walking by her side, Levi felt as though he was escorting “an archaic queen through the village of her subjects, the old queen of a Mycenaean village or a tiny Greek island, walking proud and benevolent along a rough road”.617 The woman proceeded “at a pace which had the step and the measure of another time”.618 A similar impression was made by the old bandit Battista Corraine who, dressed in the traditional shepherd’s costume, “looked like a monument to time, a stone gazing with eyes that were alive” so that “for him death does not exist, nor time”.619 Alongside the archaic dimension of traditional costume was another feature: the moral nobility of the wearer. The increasing competition presented by modern dress produced a full-blown crusade in defence of the aesthetically and functionally superior traditional costume, worn by people who were simple and less developed but certainly worthy of greater respect because of their distinctive intrinsic moral value.620 Thus the exaltation of Sardinian costume was expressed through the representation of the primitive: man living in the state of nature conserved the purity and nobility of spirit which modern civilisation had inevitably lost. Exemplary in this regard is the praise repeatedly heaped on traditionally-dressed Sardinians in Sea and Sardinia; on his first encounter with a peasant Lawrence bursts 615

In Sardinian art and literature this process took place with an evident time-lag compared to similar developments in other cultural contexts (Paulis 2006: 237). 616 “There came in three peasants in the black-and-white costume, and sat at the middle table. They kept on their stocking-caps. And queer they looked, coming in with the slow, deliberate tread of these elderly men, and sitting rather remote, with a gap of solitude around them. The peculiar ancient loneliness of the Sardinian hills clings to them, and something stiff, static, pre-world” (Lawrence 2009: 134). 617 Levi 2003: 45. 618 Ibid. 619 Ibid., 109. 620 On the functions of traditional costume from a theoretical viewpoint see Paulis 2006: 233-236.

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into fulsome celebration of such unspoilt virility, lamenting its virtual extinction in continental Europe.621 Traditional costume was seen to have the same ennobling effect for women. The ladies in Sassari who had abandoned it in favour of horrible imitations of Parisian designs looked ridiculous,622 while they would appear Junoesque if they replaced their hats with demijohns of wine or baskets of corn, as their peasant counterparts did. Another factor common to all the descriptions provided by 20thcentury travellers is the astonishment provoked by the variety, colour and sumptuousness of feminine costume in particular, considered inexplicable in the light of the widespread poverty in which the islanders lived.623 The sight of Sardinians in costume always aroused great interest, bringing to mind picturesque scenes and performances on the strength of the “local colour” it embodied.624 Colour too, however, passed through the distorting lens of primitivism: the prevalence of certain colours in the costume worn by the women in Desulo was explained by the attraction exerted by primary colours on primitive peoples.625 In descriptions of processions or groups of women, the colour combinations of the costumes and the landscape gave the impression of standing before living works of art, confirming once again the idea of national character mirroring the landscape as a

621

“How handsome he is, and so beautifully male!” (Lawrence 2009: 56); “How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression. – And how perfectly ridiculous it is made in modern clothes” (ibid.). See also ibid., 57. A train journey gave Lawrence the occasion to emphasise the coarse, vigorous and determined appearance of traditionally-dressed Sardinians, entirely unwilling to bow to the modern world and so attached to their long caps that they seemed part of their egos (ibid., 82-84). Male virility is set in contrast to feminine appearance and behaviour, so that the meeting of the sexes has a wild flavour to it which leaves no room for sickly modern conventions (ibid., 60-61). 622 Gamel Holten 2005: 114. 623 Münster (2006: 77) noted the contrast between the richness of the costumes and the poverty of country people. Later generations further enriched their clothing (ibid., 78). Gamel Holten (2005: 110) had more to say on the beauty of Sardinian costume. 624 Gamel Holten 2005: 18. 625 On the women of Desulo, “[t]heir gay clothing gives the town the appearance of being perpetually en fête. The primary colours are primary in a double sense, for unquestionably they have a wholly irresistible attraction for primitive peoples” (Crawford Flitch 1911: 242).

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foundation stone for the construction of national myths.626 An example of the synergy between people and landscape was found in the procession of Sant’Antonio di Padova at Tonara, where Lawrence dwelt at length on the alternation of whites, scarlets, blacks and greens in the costumes, culminating in the description of the “whitewashed, bare church” where the kneeling women “with the colour and their black head-cloths looked like some thick bed of flowers, geraniums, black-hooded above”.627 The flower image had already been used by Crawford Flitch in describing the entry of the Bishop of Oristano in Desulo, and by Deledda in Canne al vento. 628 In the latter case women are depicted on their way to Mass as “composed, rigid, their faces set”,629 attributes which detail the solemnity of the figures in costume and thereby converge in the image of the primitive but noble Sardinian race at the centre of Deledda’s poetics.630 This method of identity construction was also visible in the work of the most prominent 20th-century Sardinian painters, in particular that of Antonio Biasi.631 The statuesque depiction of characters typical of the primitivist vision of the early 20th century was also a feature of travel literature. In addition to the solemnity of the procession at Tonara noticed by Lawrence, the women of Desulo described by Crawford Flitch moved with natural grace and a “curious 626

On the relation between costume colours and the landscape, see also Paulis 2006: 247. 627 Lawrence 2009: 118. 628 “We rode down the valley road until we came to a turning where the hill-side slopes down to the highway in a series of rocky terraces. There the women of Desulo, dressed from head to foot in crimson, were massed like a solid bank of human flowers” (Crawford Flitch 1911: 235). Colour makes another appearance immediately afterwards. During a description of the bishop’s mounted escort, the Confraternity of the Rosary came into view: “A dense parti-coloured multitude followed after, and out of the voluminous dust came the sonorous chant of Ave Maria” (ibid., 236). On the bright colours of traditional costumes, see also Gamel Holten 2005: 46. Deledda 1971b: 287. 629 “Giacinto watched the women on their way to Mass, composed, rigid, their faces set, pale in a frame of hair shining like black satin, their bare doe-like ankle-bones, their fine flowered slippers: sitting on the church floor in their red corsets, almost completely covered in embroidered scarves, they gave the impression of a field of flowers” (Deledda 1971b: 287; my italics). 630 Other examples of statuesque figures – described as idols, made of wood or metal, rigid and fixed – including the one in Marianna Sirca (Deledda 1981f: 773; 775), are thoroughly analysed by Paulis 2006: 244-245. 631 On differences in the depiction of women in costume and in dance scenes in late 19th- and early 20th-century Sardinian painting, see Paulis 2006: 241-243.

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hieratic attitude”,632 fixed in culturally recognisable and codified poses traceable to archaic rituals.633 Advancing in single file towards the church of San Pietro on top of a wooded hill, the sight of them aroused the feeling that “the marble breed of women on a Grecian urn had suddenly taken body and life”.634 The richness of the costumes, rather than a simple explosion of colour, took on a symbolic significance by virtue of the near-sacred demeanour of the women, as sober and modest as those observed leaving church one Sunday by Max Leopold Wagner: they wore their sumptuous traditional costume but kept their eyes down and their hands hidden beneath their aprons, as required by tradition, emanating a general air of composure and modesty despite the dazzling vortex of colour in which they stood.635 Solemnity is also a characteristic ascribed to male figures, but it carries a different connotation, corresponding to a vision in which women are primitive because they are closer to nature than men, but at the same time are possessed of virtues such as grace, meekness and kindness – peaceful attributes conducive to education and civilisation; males are identified with a wild and primitive nature which must be conquered and civilised by these exclusively female virtues. Thus, whereas Sardinian women in costume are primitive creatures but graceful and demure636 the traditional shepherd’s clothes reveal “a rich 632

Lawrence 2009: 116. Crawford Flitch 1911: 244. He speaks of the “careful and measured motion of the women of Desulo” (1911: 244), adding that “[t]hey hold their bodies erectly, without stiffness” (ibid.). 633 “They have all the qualities which delight the eyes in the motion of a wild animal – the alertness, the unconscious pride, the free play of muscle, the hint of reserves of strength. Moreover, in Desulo – I do not know that it is true of other villages – they combine this natural grace with a curious hieratical attitude – arms folded across the breast and hands clasping the elbows – in which, I think, is a memory of longforgotten rites. On the feast of St. Peter, at the summons of the church bell, all the women climbed up to the little forest church above the village, and as I saw them passing one by one across the grassy clearing of the woods with this solemn, gliding motion, it seemed as if the marble breed of women on a Grecian urn had suddenly taken body and life” (Crawford Flitch 1911: 244; my italics). A previous passage records the solemn gait and “almost tragic aspect” of women wearing black shawls (ibid., 242). 634 Crawford Flitch 1911: 244. 635 Wagner 1913-1914: 11. 636 These qualities were decisive in forging women’s character, tempering their primitive features and thus distinguishing them from the barbaric nature prevalent in

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and barbaric splendour” which renders their wearers “nearly perfect specimens of the human animal – erect, defiant, all muscle, blood, and bone, a hidden energy plainly perceptible in every line of their statuesque repose” (my italics).637 In conclusion, the depiction of Sardinians in costume was consistent with a primitivist perception. As mentioned earlier, however, the decline in the use of traditional dress coincided with the attempt by intellectuals and artists, made somewhat later than by their continental counterparts, to recover and enhance the image of Sardinian identity. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that this decline was already clearly perceptible in Deledda’s writings, despite the abundance in them of admiring descriptions of traditional costumes. Though the author herself was wont to be photographed in Sardinian costume, she spent some of the royalties from her first novel on a highly fashionable silk dress and ostrich-feather stole, revealing a desire to break free from the rules of the ancient world which she would continue to evoke in her work.638 Having lost its practical daily function, Sardinian costume retained, and still retains, a strong symbolic value. Relegated to festive occasions, to the innumerable village festivities in which small groups of folklore enthusiasts wear it, it continues to act as an icon of Sardinian identity, and the pictures of traditionally-dressed Sardinians embellishing tourist brochures and travel magazines still serve as one of the most original and picturesque

men. In this regard, see the description of the gait of the women in Desulo provided by Crawford Flitch (1911: 244), who compares their motion to that of a wild animal, graceful yet solemn. 637 Ibid., 246 and 246-247. Susanna Paulis (2006: 248) observes that women’s natural condition placed them diametrically opposite the modern world, but their character and demeanour made them the positive embodiment of primitivism, in contrast to male violence and barbarity. This would explain the importance in Deledda’s narrative of the female figure shut inside her world (the household), fascinating in the splendour of her traditional costume. 638 On this and other examples of traditional dress having to give way to modern clothes, see Paulis 2006: 249-250. Deledda 2007: 264: “I’m waiting for a village costume because I don’t like the Nuoro dress, and I want to be photographed wearing costume. You know, I’d really like to be dressed in costume! My mother wears it, and I don’t understand how rich Sardinian girls abandon it for modern clothes once they’re married; it’s completely silly”. Modern fashion seemed to have conquered the Nuoro ruling class on the periphery of Europe, and with her first earnings Deledda (1971c: 782) followed suit (see Paulis 2006: 249).

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attractions to sell the brand of Sardinian authenticity in the globalised world.639 Sardinian Identity Stories set in Sardinia are marked by features considered peculiar to the island’s civilisation, and they give shape and substance to the concept of Sardinian identity.640 Being almost invariably the same features, they constitute a stock of icons of the island and its society. Among those mentioned so far is the kitchen, considered not only the heart of the home and family, but also the place which gives expression to the Sardinian conception of community life. It is the scene of the rituals of women’s work – which variously recall customs archaic, Homeric and Biblical – and of the cycle of existence and the communication of family and national values.641 Rather than a simple living area, then, it is a topos of Sardinian identity. Equally loaded with symbolic meaning is the ritual mourning of the dead (attitu), whose archaic, primitive and strange character was repeatedly remarked upon by travellers,642 and the Sardinian passion for weapons and hunting, unequivocal signs of a savage people still bound to a life close to the state of nature. Like many others, these elements were essential in the construction of a discourse on the Sardinian people. This section contains an examination of two such elements which, though cited by previous sources, seemed to attract greater attention in the 20th century and featured, to different effect, in the cinematic image of Sardinia: the nuraghe and the Sardinian language. With its unmistakable truncated conical silhouette, the nuraghe is without doubt the most characteristic and significant feature of the island’s landscape – a presence so pervasive that even the least

639

For theoretical references about traditional costumes, see Paulis 2006: 233-236. See also chapter 1, section Character. Of fundamental importance in this regard is Padre Bresciani’s Dei costumi dell’isola... (2001: 323-346) which dwells at length on Sardinian customs, including the domestic sphere and especially funerals (ibid., 395488). 641 Wagner 1908b: 246-247. Idem 1913-1914: 7-8. 642 See Smyth 1828: 195-196; Tyndale 2002: II, 34; Bresciani 2001: 460-488; Wagner 1908b: 249; also this chapter 2, section Women. 640

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observant visitor could hardly fail to notice it.643 It is not difficult to understand the curiosity about a civilisation shrouded in mystery, unexplained by any written testimony yet unavoidably evoked by the ubiquitous towers redolent of the beginning of time. In pre-20th century sources the subject of the nuraghi was often approached in the same way:644 their characteristics were described with varying degrees of accuracy, and then attention was focused on two key questions – who built them and for what purpose? Sometimes vitiated by obvious mistakes and inventions,645 when read one after another the descriptions tend to follow the same pattern: the authors quote each other and are usually uncertain as to the identity of the builders and their intentions.646 The starting point is usually a body of classical sources which are considered to provide an account of the first settlement of the island and consequently the identity of the builders. As part of a cultural context which at that time was even less easy to interpret, the nuraghe remained a mysterious object whose function was variously postulated (sepulchral, religious, military, etc.) but never definitively confirmed. Giuseppe Manno, influential 19th-century Sardinian politician and man of letters, considered the nuraghi to be the cultural product of the island’s first inhabitants, identifiable with the civilisation that 643

Nineteenth-century sources speak of 4,000 specimens, but present-day archaeological surveys put the number of nuraghi at 8,000. 644 An analysis of paleo-ethnological studies written between the 16th century and the 1940s has been published by Lilliu 1981: 487-523. 645 Speaking of the nuraghe di Santu Antinu, Valery (1837: 89) describes a big tower of black stone containing 72 rooms piled on top of one another, connected by a spiral staircase. Tyndale (1849: II, 152) was highly critical of this statement. 646 Among the most cited classical sources, mention should be made of the one that ascribed the construction of the nuraghi to mythical Iberian military commander Norax, after whom they were allegedly named. Della Marmora (1840: II, 120) noted that the Jesuit priest Madao considered them to be the “antediluvian work of giants”; according to Maltzan (1869: 280), Madao (Dissertazione storiche apologetiche critiche delle sarde antichità, 1792) thought that the nuraghi were antediluvian constructions to which Norax subsequently gave his name. Others dismiss such a hypothesis, not considering that verbal similarity a sufficient reason for establishing the origin of the nuraghi (Fues 1780: 33). Valery (1838: 306) was one of the few writers to rule out their function as burial chambers or mausoleums of Sardinian heroes. Drawing on Valery and Della Marmora, Delessert (1855: 99) focused closely on the nuraghe of Santu Antine. Noting the existence of a range of theories, Forester (1858: 383) claimed to have read widely on the subject and consulted an authoritative Sardinian antiquarian as well as the works of Della Marmora. Despite this, he was unable to go beyond the conclusion that there was no really satisfactory explanation.

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developed on it and therefore an icon of the Sardinian people.647 The first traveller to show a profound interest in the subject was probably Della Marmora, as witnessed by the meticulousness of the field research he published in his book Voyage.648 Despite a painstaking analysis of the sources, however, he was unable to resolve the longstanding enigma of their purpose.649 He was forced to admit that he was unable to decide whether they had been used as tombs or places of worship, but followed Manno in attributing them to the island’s original inhabitants rather than later colonisers.650 Since subsequent authors relied greatly on Della Marmora’s research, they tended to concur with his conclusions.651 Likewise Tyndale, who devoted a chapter of his book to the nuraghi and the burial “de is Gigantes”,652 explicitly acknowledged his debt to Della Marmora and came to the same conclusions: these “extraordinary monuments” were temples used for worship and sacrifice, and may also have been used for the temporary storage of graven images or burial of the remains of sacrificial victims and prominent people.653 Regarding their paternity, in them he recognised traces of the earliest known Canaanites.654 647

Giuseppe Manno, Storia di Sardegna, volumes I-IV (Turin: Alliana e Paravia, 1825-1827), reprinted under the same title in three volumes edited by Mattone 1996. The latter edition is the one used in this research. The reference cited is found in Mattone 1996: I, 47. 648 The second volume of Voyage contains a chapter devoted entirely to the nuraghi, describing individual specimens and including a list of them organised according to their location (Della Marmora 1840: II, 36-116). 649 Della Marmora 1840: II, 117-159. 650 Manno 1996: II, 99-100. Della Marmora (1860: I, 236-237) returned to the subject of the nuraghi in his Itinérarie, reiterating his previous case. They are held to have been built by the Phoenicians and their leader Norax, founder of the town of Nora, from which their name also derives. The nuraghi were temples for sun worship and the tombs of leaders, shepherds and priests. He (1860: I, 369-370) also explains the origin of place-names such as Nureci, Nuragus, Nurallao, Nuraminis, Nurachi, Nurra and Norra as deriving from the root “nur” = fire; not the fire of volcanoes but of the fire worship he maintains was practised on the flat roofs of the nuraghi. 651 See Bresciani 2001: 237-238; Maltzan 1869: 280-281. 652 Tyndale, 1849: I, 109-147. The fourth chapter of the second volume is given over to the description of some nuraghi, including San Costantino, Oes and Boes, with planimetrics and references to Valery and Della Marmora (Tyndale 1849: II, 152160). 653 Tyndale 1849: I, 139. 654 Ibid.

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Tyndale concluded that although Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, cyclopic and Pelasgian ruins were more numerous and stylish, more renowned and better documented, none of them possessed “that charm of mystery which, as a halo, emanates from, and enshrouds those of Sardinia”.655 Bresciani shared his predecessors’ doubts, admitting that if Della Marmora was unable to reach a definitive conclusion regarding the purpose of the nuraghi, he could do no better.656 Though Thomas Forester adopted a similar position,657 he was sceptical about attempts to see similarities between the nuraghi and monuments described in the Old Testament, as exemplified by Bresciani.658 The evocative power of these buildings was bound up with their prehistoric origin, which matched the concept of Sardinian primitivism. The insistence with which some theories on the origins and use of the nuraghi were reiterated, apart from the limited nature of historical knowledge at the time, probably reflected an implicit propensity towards a mythical-heroic interpretation of the world they represented, which was thus idealised. Such a view prevailed even when archaeological research made some progress, as witnessed by the reception given to the first edition of a study on the nuraghi 655

Ibid., 139-140. Bresciani 2001: 237-238. He noted that the most authoritative scholars, such as Della Marmora, thought that the nuraghi had been built by the Phoenicians (ibid., 236). 657 Forester (1858: 382): “It needed only that we should lift our eyes to the rude but shapely cone before us, – massive in its materials and fabric, and yet constructed with some degree of mechanical skill, – to come to the conclusion that the Nuraghe are works of a very early period, just when rude labour had begun to be directed by some rules of geometrical art. But, in examining the details, we find little or nothing to assist us in forming any clear idea of the period at which they were erected, or the purpose for which they were designed. There are not the slightest vestiges of ornament, any rude sculpture, any inscriptions. Of an antiquity probably anterior to all written records, history not only throws no certain light on their origin, but, till modern times, was silent as to their existence. Successive races, and powers, and dynasties have flourished in the island, and passed away, scarcely any of them without leaving some relics, some medals of history, some impress on the manners and character of the people still to be traced.” 658 Forester (1858: 387): “Whatever were the purposes of the Nuraghe, almost all writers on Sardinia consider these ancient structures of Eastern origin. Father Bresciani attributes them to Canaanitish or Phoenician colonies, which migrated to the west in early times; and he takes great pains, but, I consider, without much success, to establish their identity, or, at least, their analogy, with the religious or sepulchral erections, – the altars, and ‘high places’, and tombs, – of which notices are found in the Old Testament.” 656

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written by Sardinian canon Giovanni Spano;659 considered by Von Maltzan660 to be a work of fundamental significance, his analysis discarded previous hypotheses regarding the function of the nuraghi in favour of their use as living accommodation.661 While some writers made use of this text without any acknowledgement, others ignored it entirely, happy to rehash previous analyses without any further research.662 In the early 20th century there was no sign of any decline in the curiosity surrounding those silent witnesses to a people extraneous to the parameters of modern civilisation. Contributing to this was the 659

Canon Giovanni Spano is regarded as the founder of modern Sardinian paleoethnology on the strength of his study Paleotnologia sarda, ossia l’età preistorica segnata nei monumenti che si trovano in Sardegna (Cagliari: Tipografia dell’Avvenire di Sardegna, 1871), in which he applied the material age classification system of Stone, Bronze and Iron to prehistoric archeaology on the island: Mattone 2002: 66. 660 Maltzan 1869: 276. 661 Maltzan (1869: 281) accused Della Marmora of bowing to majority opinion, asserting that the nuraghi were tombs. But everything changed (ibid.) for the German writer with the publication of the first edition of Spano’s book (1854), though many writers decided to adhere to his theory without citing its source (ibid.). Maltzan wryly observed that nobody had ever thought that the nuraghi could have been used for habitation, whereas all the data available should have led to such a hypothesis, not least the work of Fara, who had recorded their contemporary use as living accommodation by shepherds. (ibid.). Edwardes (1889: 174-18) also considered Spano’s conclusion to be the most plausible, and took it up in a short story of his. Schlöezer (1926: 32-37), reviewed the various theories regarding the island’s first inhabitants and the builders and functions of the nuraghi, citing, among others, Ettore Pais and Canon Spano. 662 Perhaps because they were unaware of Spano’s research, various travellers continued to think that the nuraghi had been used as tombs for tribal leaders; one such case was Boullier (1865: 54) who made reference to the theory of the Phoenician origins of the structures (ibid., 55). Corbetta (1877: 169), after citing the scholars on the subject and confessing how difficult it was to establish the origins of the term “nuraghe” (ibid.), took Maltzan’s position on the identity of their builders (ibid., 173). But unlike the German – who explicitly named Spano as an essential source – he declared his ignorance as to their function (ibid., 173-177), leaving “undecided the question, which perhaps will be resolved, or perhaps not” (ibid., 177). After the customary review of the sources and theories on the function of the nuraghi, Roissard de Bellet (1884: 115-116) concluded that it was difficult to decide whether they were tombs or temples (ibid., 116), adding that they remained highly interesting but inexplicable constructions (ibid.).

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presence of other megalithic constructions such as the “tombs of giants” and the domus de janas (homes of the fairies), which added (and still add) to the prehistoric appearance of the Sardinian landscape.663 It should also be remembered that the design of the Sardinian shepherd’s hut (pinnetta) recalls the habitations in nuragic villages, reinforcing the theoretical bond between prehistory and the pastoral world, giving the latter the status of the true Sardinia.664 Immersed in a wild natural habitat a long way from habitation (alias civil society), the pinnetta represented the attempt on the part of the shepherd as a primitive man to have a refuge in which to find shelter in a life entirely conditioned by nature. Nuragic civilisation thus broke out of the temporal confines of prehistory to assert itself as a mark of Sardinian identity, corroborating the discourse on primitivism and archaism that had stood for a long time as the unifying thread of every Sardinian narrative. It continued to play this role as the century progressed, joining the repertoire of tropes typifying Sardinia and the Sardinians. In travel literature the sense of mystery surrounding the nuraghi – “conical apparitions of stone upon stone”,665 colossi going back to the beginning of time666 – continued to be projected upon the island as a whole, contributing to a revival of the topos of an archaic, mysterious and unknown land.667 Nuragic buildings evoked the memory of

663

On prehistoric Sardinia, see the review by Lilliu 1988. Edwardes was of the view that the shepherds’ huts might be traced back to the builders of the nuraghi (1889:146); Wagner (1908f: 74-75) called them “miniature nuraghi” (“Miniaturnuraghen”); see also Wagner 1997: 56. 665 Vittorini 2009: 73: “None of the nuraghi I have seen hold any internal interest for me. Rather they are a mysterious presence in the countryside; I have felt their fascination and been drawn to their conical apparitions of stone upon stone. It is no more than the inhuman fascination of certain crosses I have seen on the road to Nuoro – immense, gallows rather than signs of God – or certain little cemeteries hedged with prickly pear in vermillion flower.” 666 Münster 2006: 85. 667 Gamel Holten (2005:94): “in its crude primordiality and with its great stones, the nuraghe is well integrated in the wild landscape; the colours and atmosphere of the nuraghe are in harmony with it. [...]. It is remarkable that something so enigmatic can still exist on earth and that scholars can do no more than postulate as to its origin and not reveal it”. Crawford Flitch (1911: 305): “Of all the countries of Western Europe, Sardinia is the richest in prehistoric remains. The most remarkable are the nuraghi, pyramid-like structures which I believe are not known to exist in any other part of the world, although they bear a certain resemblance to the talayots of Menorca”. “Their 664

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Sardinians as eternal freedom fighters and the strength of a land able to remain intact, despite the many invasions it had suffered.668 This was accompanied by a burgeoning discourse emphasising the national value of the nuraghi and their integral role in the iconographic identity of the Sardinian landscape.669 Like the bronze figurines produced by their builders, they embodied an idea of primordiality and timelessness which encapsulated the essence of the Sardinian people, and at the same time a period of self-government fated to end tragically with the succession of colonising invasions which would engulf the island.670 In this respect nuragic civilisation was perceived as an exceptional era of progress, prosperity and freedom, the only one in Sardinian history, worthy of the label of “the island’s golden age”.671

origin and their use are wrapped in mystery” (ibid.). Crawford Flitch gave no clue as to their precise function or the people who built them (ibid., 306). 668 While reiterating the lack of incontrovertible evidence regarding the nuragic civilisation, Münster (2006: 86) had little time for most of the theories in circulation, considering them to be driven by a desire to lay claim to a heroic, but evidently implausible, past (ibid., 92). For one thing, how was it possible to believe that the nuraghi were the tombs of heroes when there were literally thousands of them? (ibid.). Münster (2006: 95) also said that the builders of the nuraghi were a shepherd people, like the Sardinians of his time, who had no concept of statehood but the fondness for freedom that is particularly deeply rooted in the Sardinian people (ibid., 98). According to Jünger (1999: 229) it was as if Sardinia had slumbered for centuries on the periphery of history; even though it had suffered many invasions and occupations, it had managed to preserve itself intact. Describing nuragic villages located near the coast, but not inhabited by fishermen or sailors, as part of a system of fortifications to defend the interior, Le Lannou (1941: 96-99) had already opined that the whole of Sardinian history had been characterised by a pressing and constant need for defence. 669 Münster (2006: 85) was of the view that nuraghi should be declared as national monuments so that they would be protected instead of being destroyed or altered, as was often the case. 670 Jünger 1999: 227. Jünger underlined the spiritual depth expressed by the workmanship that had gone into the nuraghi and bronze statuettes (ibid., 23), representing a world of naive and primitive forms (ibid., 24), already ancient at the dawn of history (ibid., 151). From his words emerged a Sardinia marked by the dimension of timelessness, rendered bizarre and unique by, among other things, the nuraghi (see ibid., 208-211). 671 The term was used by Jünger (1999: 227). The shape of the nuraghe recalled a world outside history, immersed in dreams (ibid., 222). His considerations were made

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Jünger’s characterisation was informed by the archaeological advances being made at that time, such as the discovery of the nuraghe complex at Barumini by Giovanni Lilliu, who perceived the era of the nuraghi as the key period in Sardinian history, calling it the “fine age of the nuraghi”.672 Such discoveries coincided with the development of an intense political debate on Sardinia’s future in Italy and Europe. The struggle for autonomy, regionalism, and Sardinian nationalism were just some of the questions characteristic of a time as rich in hopes and projects as it was in shattering disappointments.673 Aside from the political and economic strategies to resolve what was known as the “Sardinian question” (la questione sarda),674 mention must be made of the importance, and the sometimes traumatic consequences, of modernisation in the second half of the 20th century, which compelled Sardinia to rethink and reinvent itself in an international context of profound transformation. It is no coincidence that Giovanni Lilliu, the most influential scholar of his generation, was also deeply involved in Sardinian politics as a member of the Christian Democrat party, in constant dialogue with other leading figures on the island’s cultural and political stage such as Emilio Lussu and Antonio Pigliaru. This intertwining of historical research and political activity was particularly significant because it produced the construction of a narrative on the Sardinian nation which immediately captured public attention and has remained at the centre of cultural debate to this day.675 Evidence of the close ties between historical research, politics and the identity debate is to be found in some of Lilliu’s writings, where nuragic civilisation acts as the unifying theme for the in the context of a heated debate on modernity; see Mauro Pala’s preface, L’eternità dell’attimo arcano, in Jünger 1999: 7-11 and Sanna 2008: 111-134. 672 The term is to be found in many Lilliu’s works. For a summary of Lilliu’s life and work see Mattone (2002: 7-126). As Mattone notes (ibid., 33), already in his article ‘Significato della più antica civiltà sarda’, published in L’Unione Sarda (April 5th 1944), the archaeologist saw the nuragic age as the only “sparkling and aware” time in Sardinian history. 673 For a summary of post-war Sardinian history see Cardia 1998: 715-774; Ruju 1998: 775-992; Soddu 1998: 993-1035. 674 Of fundamental importance in this regard is Giovanni Maria Lei Spano, La questione sarda (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1922), with a reprint edited by Manlio Brigaglia (Nuoro: Ilisso, 2000). 675 The italics used here echo the title of Homi Bhabha’s renowned study Nation and narration.

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construction of a clear idea of Sardinia; this vision also informed his activity in the political arena.676 Furthermore, the two most influential works on Sardinian identity in the second half of the century were both published in the same period: 1959 saw the publication of Antonio Pigliaru’s La vendetta barbaricina come ordinamento giuridico and four years later Giovanni Lilliu published the first edition of his book La civiltà dei Sardi dal Neolitico all’età dei nuraghi.677 Despite the great differences between them, the single idea underpinning both works comes clearly to the surface: the identification of pastoral civilisation with the original, authentic Sardinia; a closed, inaccessible world, the hard nucleus of a people endowed with its own civilisation and identity, compelled by history to defend itself without respite against foreign invasions. From Lilliu’s interpretation of the archaeological data there emerged a warlike pastoral civilisation which had obvious features in common with 20th-century Sardinia,678 itself usually identified with shepherds – not to mention bandits. Recognising the supremacy of the architectural and sculptural expression of nuragic society, Lilliu stated that content and style of such artistic forms were “warlike” and that they reflected a simple soul with straightforward feelings such as that of shepherd-soldiers.679 The nuraghe-shepherd pairing was thus recognised as the essence of Sardinian civilisation. In addition, Sardinian civilisation was held to have developed a conscious national identity, as witnessed by the Monte Prama statues, dated by Lilliu to the 8th century BC (548-549), an expression of a “Sardinian system”, a world “singular and different, extraneous to the Greek and the classical”.680 This, he argued, was because the statues belonged to a society which was

676

See the collection of Lilliu’s writings La costante resistenziale (2002), edited by Antonello Mattone. 677 See this chapter, section Sardinia in European Literature after 1900, note 29. 678 Lilliu 1988: 575 observed that nuragic civilisation was composed not only of shepherds but of peasants, fishermen and sailors, but that its basic structures, such as its tribal and patriarchal organisation, were derived from pastoral society. 679 Lilliu 1988: 483. 680 Ibid., 549.

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anti-classical (as a matter of fact rather than any polemical intention on my part), and peripheral (up to a point) geographically but not in the substance of what it succeeded in expressing aesthetically. We have before us the superior fruit of a national proto-Sardinian ethnicethical-historical condition, neither subordinate nor dependent, comparable to that of other neighbouring and communicating Mediterranean areas which were fully civilised.681

From this standpoint the crucible of Sardinian tribes and peoples usually identified with the term “nuragic Sardinia” represented the culmination of the civilisation expressed by the islanders as an independent nation. To it were attached the tropes which for centuries had distinguished every narrative on the Sardinian people: the importance of pastoral society, the icon of the Barbagia, the model of the Sardinian fighting to defend his freedom, the people which has undergone foreign occupations without ever being truly conquered.682 An ethnic-cultural model summed up in the formula advanced by Lilliu of the “constant of Sardinian resistance” (costante resistenziale sarda):683 the innate tendency of the Sardinian people never to be entirely subjugated by foreign oppressors and to assert their identity and diversity. Within this vision is a powerful and indissoluble link between the island’s “golden age” (nuragic society) and the modern one, characterised by a laborious search for redemption and a struggle against the new colonisers (big companies and the tourist industry). Also clear is the reason for Lilliu’s dedication of La civiltà dei sardi to “the Sardinian shepherds”.684 He had no doubt that “through the centuries shepherds have been the bearers of the name of Sardinia, of autonomy and of what is today, in constitutional and political terms, the Region”.685 681

Ibid. Lilliu (1988: 578-579) underlined the historical role of ancient nuragic structures in the pastoral society of the island’s interior. The discourse of the construction of the Sardinian character from the nuragic model also applies to women, described by Lilliu (1988: 576) as follows: “In this society the woman brought a touch of kindness and grace, but also of dignified and severe composure, at times of solemn and mute tragedy; as the Sardinian woman does to this day”. Contemporary Sardinian women carry with them the moral legacy and character attributes of their nuragic ancestors. 683 This term first appeared in Costante resistenziale sarda (1971). Pages 41-56 are reproduced in Lilliu 2002: 225-237. 684 In a letter to Lilliu, Emilio Lussu expressed his appreciation of the author’s decision to dedicate his book to the Sardinian shepherds. 685 Lilliu 1988: 579. 682

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Having taken its place in the collective imagination as an unsurpassed model of the Sardinian people, nuragic civilisation thus crossed the borders of prehistoric chronology to project itself into the present.686 In Lilliu’s perception, however, the state of freedom peculiar to the nuragic age had a weakness: internal divisions among Sardinians, which lay at the root of the island’s ruin.687 At that time the island was indeed “a contradictory sum of many Sardinias”,688 a condition which prevented the Sardinian people from achieving statehood: “Sardinia never became a nation, despite in substance having the conditions and the physical and moral wherewithal to do so”.689 This was the most important task Lilliu assigned to the generations to come: achieving the unity of the Sardinian people, an essential condition for taking control of its destiny.690 Over the years, of course, this interpretation has come in for a good deal of criticism, according to which it neglects Sardinia’s other facets and in extolling its nuragic history assigns a position of absolute supremacy to its pastoral society.691 It also has to be said that the underlying reason for its success, apart from the undoubted quality achieved by Lilliu’s studies on Sardinian history and archaeology, is to be sought in the collective need for self-assertion on the part of an entire community which had for centuries felt cheated of its birthright, reduced to a perennial object of criticism; a community which with Lilliu’s interpretation could at last tell its story, projecting a positive and noble image of itself in a narrative definable as a countermemory.692 Mutatis mutandis, Lilliu’s militant vision, nourished by a

686

Jünger 1999: 227. Lilliu (1988: 579): “In the many Sardinias which were constituted in the nuragic age lies the basic explanation of the fall of the ancient ‘national’ civilisation, of the unfinished ‘Sardinian nation’”. 688 Ibid., 578. 689 Ibid. 690 Ibid., 579. 691 An analysis of the theory of the “constant of resistance” in Angioni, Bachis, Caltagirone and Cossu 2007: 96-97. 692 Speaking of the processes whereby collective memory is constructed, Ann Rigney (2005: 13) has said “‘memory’ has tended in practice to become synonymous with ‘counter-memory’, defined in opposition to hegemonic views of the past and associated with groups who have been ‘left out’, as it were, of mainstream history”. 687

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sincere and deep-seated humanism,693 was somehow connected to the national claims of the 19th-century Sardinian elite which had tried to promote the island’s history and traditions to show the worth of the Sardinian people, one which in the second half of the 20th century was still considered peripheral and under-developed but proud of its diversity, just like the primitive and picturesque population depicted by the first travellers from beyond the sea. The exaltation of the island’s nuragic history thus corresponded to a strategy of defence (and revenge) adopted in other territories which had been subjected to long periods of exploitation and colonial rule.694 The way in which Lilliu took nuragic society as the ideal model of Sardinian identity lends itself to further consideration. In the first place it is clear that in focusing on that model, even without any written evidence, he was able to bring to bear a historical testimony with a highly visible presence on the island, in stark contrast to the chronic lack of written sources and records usually bemoaned by scholars of things Sardinian. In addition, the nuraghe became a living memory, something around which Lilliu constructed a memory of the Sardinian people – meaning that the memory did not coincide with what had been but was able to interpret shared aspirations, feelings and projects. From this standpoint nuragic sites were not only places conserving tangible traces of a given past to be studied and classified according the artefacts found on them, but were to all intents and purposes lieux de mémoires (sites of memory), in that they took on a meaning imposed on them by the observer, restoring ‘visibility’ to a people hitherto all but absent and generally disregarded by historical sources.695 The role performed by the memory of nuragic civilisation thus re-created was not so much a nostalgic or romantic one, it served rather to substantiate a political claim, as shown by the synergy between history and designs for the future characterising Lilliu’s many writings. Lastly, the process just described seems to correspond to the strategy used in the construction of the collective memory that has been defined as “cultural scarcity”:696 the obsessive appeal to the nuragic age, forcing attention to focus on that period as the essence of

693

See Marci 2006: 278. Leerssen 2007f: 341. 695 On the concept of sites of memory see Nora 1997. See also Rigney 2005: 18. 696 On this concept see Rigney 2005: 16. 694

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Sardinian identity, tended to obfuscate the memory of other historical periods, thus becoming absolute and all-encompassing.697 Another factor considered essential in the symbolic construction of a people’s identity is its language. For a long time the prevailing theory was that Sardinian was an archaic language; the adjective in this case expressed a desirable quality because it implied the highest degree of resemblance to Latin, the mother tongue.698 Only recently has this assumption been questioned – going beyond specific considerations on Sardinian, a number of scholars have cast doubt on the validity of the term ‘archaic’ as applied to a language.699 While Sigismondo Arquer had confined himself in Sardinia brevis historia et descriptio (1550) to a well-ordered presentation of the island’s linguistic varieties without falling into the trap of establishing a hierarchy based on their proximity to Latin, in his De corographia Sardiniae (1585) Giovanni Francesco Fara (1543-1591) identified Logudorese as Sardinian’s noblest variety – first because it had remained the closest to Latin and second because of the work of literary ennoblement being carried out at the time by Girolamo 697

As observed above, in recent years Lilliu’s vision has come in for considerable criticism, yet there remains a collective need for a narrative on Sardinian identity able to oppose the dominance of a historical tradition which has portrayed the Sardinians as a defeated people without a history. This has led to a search for other significant periods in the island’s past which could be given a symbolic meaning equivalent to nuragic society. One example is the attempt to rewrite Sardinian history by Umberto Cardia, a leading political figure on the island. In his book Autonomia sarda. Un’idea che attraversa i secoli (Cagliari: CUEC, 1999), Cardia – a leader of the Italian Communist Party, regional councillor, then a member of the Italian and European parliaments – ascribes the historical failure of the Sardinian nation to the failure of the Giudicato d’Arborea (a medieval state located in central and western Sardinia, ruled by an indigenous dynasty) to unite the entire island as a nation-state. It is interesting to note that in his preface to the book Lilliu emphasises the agreement among historians with regard to the theory of the “constant of resistance”, the Sardinians’ perennial tendency to safeguard their identity despite their condition of political subordination, while acknowledging the existence of differing positions regarding the precise time at which the progression from ethnic nation to nation-state was interrupted. In so doing he confirms the attempt by contemporary Sardinian historians to construct a narrative of the Sardinian nation according to the principle of cultural scarcity, attributing an exclusive and absolute meaning to a given historical concept or period. 698 For the construction of Sardinian linguistic archaism see Paulis 2006: 352-364. 699 Paulis 2006: 353.

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Araolla.700 Thanks also to the influence of the Church, which after the Council of Trent began to promote catechisation in the vernacular, Logudorese – enriched by elements of Italian, Latin and Spanish – began to be used as the language of officialdom, preaching and poetry, in a European context favourable to the use of vernaculars and marked by a debate on the archaic virtue of the various neo-Latin languages.701 Since archaism appeared to be the index of a language’s prestige, as the expression of a people considered isolated and impenetrable, Sardinian lent itself very easily to be put forward as the archaic language par excellence. This explains the strategic intent to select and enhance only the conservative features of Logudorese, as well as the further attempt to clean it up and bring it as close as possible to Latin carried out by scholars such as Matteo Madao (1723-1799).702 As a result of these strategies Logudorese, or rather its literally register, acquired the status of the Sardinian national language, while in practical terms the island continued to be multi-lingual.703 This state of affairs retained official approval well into the 19th century, partly on the strength of two works published by Giovanni Spano (1803-1878), the Vocabolario sardo-italiano e italiano sardo (1851-1852) and Ortografia sarda nazionale, ossia grammatica della lingua logudorese paragonata all’italiana (1840). They had the effect of confirming the historical cultural value of Sardinian and recognising Logudorese as its official national version at a time when competition between the various regional cultural identities was being heightened by the political developments that were soon to culminate in the unification of Italy.704 700

Paulis 2006: 356-357. Arquer (2007: 30-32) devoted a chapter of his book to the question. In De sardorum lingua he pointed out that a number of idioms were spoken on the island, citing the recitation of the Padre nostro in Latin, Sardinian and Castilian. On Girolamo Araolla see Marci 2006: 81-83. 701 Paulis 2006: 357-358. 702 The theory of Sardinian’s archaism was based on certain conservative features of the language, failing to take account of the innovative elements it also exhibited. Marci 2006: 117-118. On Madao’s role see also Dettori 1998: 1168-1171. 703 Paulis (2006: 363-364). For a full account of the development of language and literature in Sardinia, see Marci’s thoroughgoing reconstruction (2006). It should be remembered that the policy of Italianisation launched by the House of Savoy, which promoted the use of Sardinian to counter the influence of Castilian, gave greater prestige and visibility to the local language. On the linguistic policy of the Court of Savoy see Dettori 1998: 1159-1166, especially 1168-1169 on official Italianisation and the relationship between Italian and Sardinian. 704 Marci 2006: 206.

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All the island’s intellectuals may have agreed on the archaism of its language, but the primacy assigned to Logudorese ran counter to the conviction that the area which had retained the greatest independence from outside influences was the Barbagia which, by extension, should also have been the area whose language was closest to Latin.705 Nonetheless, the celebration of Sardinian’s archaism continued unabated, as observed above, well into the 19th century, when its most renowned and authoritative exponents were Grazia Deledda and Max Leopold Wagner who, as champions of the Barbagian “heart of Sardinia”, also wished to propound its linguistic primacy. Identifying the Nuoro area as the island’s archaic, primitive and most genuine centre, Deledda’s Sardinia provided the German linguist with a model of a conservative society faithful to its origins, the one whose language was least subject to outside influences.706 On various occasions Deledda emphasised the archaic nature of the Sardinian spoken in the island’s interior, and as Wagner did likewise it seems reasonable to suppose that the world depicted by Deledda offered Wagner an essential reference point for his linguistic research.707 On close scrutiny his studies reveal a number of preconceptions consistent with the viewpoint seen thus far: an absolute preference for the Barbagia as the area culturally and linguistically most genuinely archaic, a marked lack of interest in the island’s northern dialects because they were more influenced by Italian and therefore less authentic, and a similar indifference towards urban areas in general on the grounds of their detachment from the original spirit of the Sardinian identity.708 In his view Sardinian, like any language, was a reflection of the spirit of its speakers. This was demonstrated by 705

Paulis 2006: 356-360. Indirect confirmation of the linguistic isolation of the Barbagia is provided by the young Deledda. In a letter to Angelo De Gubernatis (1893) she (2007: 44) explained the limits of her Italian by recalling her isolated life in her father’s house, where communication was always in dialect and there was no chance to discuss art or literature. 707 Paulis 2006: 367-375. For an introduction to Wagner’s scientific work see Paulis 1996: 26-28. 708 On the question of how the Sassarese and Gallurese dialects stand with respect to Sardinian see Paulis 1998: 1208-1217. 706

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distinctive characteristics such as the total preponderance of rustic culture in the formation of the lexicon and the extreme rarity of affective forms (pet names, endearing diminutives), which in his view was consistent with the islanders’ reserved and diffident character.709 The Sardinian language, culture and identity thus formed a coherent whole, as he reiterated in a later study entitled La lingua sarda. Storia, spirito e forma, completed in 1946 but not published until 1950. He confirmed the primacy of the Sardinian spoken in the Nuoro area and the idea that a people’s language and spirit reflected each other.710 And still faithful to the approach which had distinguished all his prodigious efforts, though aware of the benefits that modernisation was about to bring to the Sardinian people, in 1958 Wagner put on record his regret for the inevitable loss of the remarkable linguistic and cultural heritage of the Barbagia, long kept intact by its inaccessibility. While Deledda may rightly be said to have inspired Wagner,711 it should not be forgotten that the influence he underwent was no different to that acting on other intellectuals and travellers who wrote about Sardinia at that time; though often less accurate and competent than Wagner, they shared the same mythicised vision of an archaic, primitive and virile Sardinia in contrast to a modern Europe falling into decadence.712 The contrasting pairing of primitivism and modernity – as mentioned in the first chapter – was projected onto the island in the irreconcilable dichotomy between coastal and urban areas on the one hand and the mountainous interior on the other; that dichotomy was expressed in a long series of pairs of opposed concepts which were compatible with the trope of the Barbagia as the true Sardinia. On a superficial reading Deledda’s texts provided confirmation of the primitivist analysis of Sardinian society,713 and

709

Paulis 1998: 1204-1206. Ibid., 1207. 711 Paulis 2006: 374-375. 712 In this regard consideration may be given to writers such as Maria Gamel Holten and D.H. Lawrence. On the similarities between Deledda and Lawrence see Unali 1992: 267-275. 713 According to the analysis conducted by Susanna Paulis (2006), especially in chapters 9 and 11, in a number of ways Deledda’s narrative constituted a break with model of the mythical and timeless Sardinia, yet even the more sophisticated European readers proved more receptive to the features which confirmed the trope of the primitive and archaic island. The reason Deledda was awarded the Nobel Prize 710

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Wagner’s ‘archaic’ perspective was fruit of the same tree, proving to be perfectly consonant with the ‘archaeological’ approach then prevalent in Romance linguistics.714 Although it involved a scale of relative value among the island’s dialects, Wagner’s interpretation recognised Sardinian as a neo-Latin language, thus questioning the very idea of a national language so dear to the scholars engaged in promoting Italy’s linguistic unity.715 On the other hand, by classifying Sassarese and Gallurese as varieties of Italian on the grounds of their similarity to Tuscan dialects, he implicitly undermined the principle that held Sardinian to be the islanders’ one national language. In actual fact the position of Sardinian in the neo-Latin language system, in particular its definition as a national language and its relationship with Italian, was the subject of a markedly ideological dispute which began in the 18th century and continues to this day.716 As regards the precise placing of Sassarese and Gallurese, Giulio Paulis observes that authoritative scholars have recently tried to get round the inconvenience of their closeness to Italian so as to confirm the island’s linguistic unity.717 Massimo Pittau, for one, has gone so far as to say that their Sardinian character must be sought in geographical, political and cultural features where it is obviously not borne out by strictly linguistic factors.718 The cultural background to the 20th-century language disputes was dominated by the Deledda-Wagner model of Sardinia in a period marked by a deep-rooted “feeling of autonomy”,719 expressed by icons such as the Brigata Sassari and the Statute of Regional Autonomy and then from the 1970s drawn into a new phase of the battle being fought by institutions and individuals to defend the Sardinian identity and language following the resumption of the international debate on

was also to be sought in the quality of her poetic re-creation of the island’s primitive and archaic world. 714 Paulis 1998: 1199-1221. 715 Paulis (1998: 1208-1217) provides a broad reconstruction of the debate. 716 Ibid. 717 Ibid., 1210. 718 Ibid. 719 Marci 2006: 238.

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minorities and minority languages.720 This phase culminated with the promulgation of the Regional Law No. 26 of October 15th 1997 on the Promotion and Enhancement of Sardinian culture and the Language of Sardinia [Promozione e valorizzazione della cultura sarda e della lingua della Sardegna (LR 15 ottobre 1997, n. 26)], a measure of obvious ideological and symbolic meaning based on the concept of cultural and linguistic identity.721 Thus far, however, it has done little to breathe new life into the Sardinian language, which is spoken only at home and by an ever-shrinking minority – apart from the poetic tradition, which in any event is prevalently an oral one. In linguistic terms the 20th century was characterised by the contradiction between the exaltation of Sardinian as the archaic national language, a reflection of the Barbagia as the true Sardinia, and the island’s irreversible Italianisation, which gradually reduced the number of Sardinian speakers on it but above all, starting from the 1970s, compelled writers to come to terms with its linguistic wealth and complexity. The literary scene thus comprises not only authors who have chosen Italian in order to reach the wider public, but those who have taken up the challenge of the misturo, the mixing of languages as a sign of the multi-faceted character of Sardinian identity, to seek new forms of expression. Exponents of this trend include the author of Po cantu Biddanoa (1987) Salvatore Lobina, who defined his work as “a novel whose three narrative levels each correspond to a language: the Sardinian of the narrator (unified Campidanese), the Sardinian of the characters (broad Sarcidanese) and educated people’s Sardinian (a slightly more civil Sardinian)”.722 Others, such as Francesco Masala, though varying their use of languages, have resorted to Sardinian to write ideological works, driven by the political aim of asserting the identity of a people for centuries denied, victims of the oppression of a succession of

720

Paulis 1998: 1219. In this regard Giulio Paulis (1998: 1220) speaks of “identity rediscovered”. On the arguments for and against the 1997 law, see ibid., 1220-1221. 722 On Lobina and his literary production see Marci 2006: 293-298, as well as a conference and interview held at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Cagliari on December 17th 1990, published in Marci 1991b: 67-80. The quotation is from the conference and interview published ibid., 71, also referred to in Marci 2006: 297. 721

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conquerors.723 Others again have tried what is known as regional Italian and extreme linguistic experimentation, garnishing their texts with words from the most disparate languages (Swahili, Portuguese, German and Kikuyu) – one of the most famous examples is the anthropologist Giulio Angioni.724 In the second half of the 20th century the literary developments described above lived cheek-by-jowl with the tropes of Barbagia and the archaism of the Sardinian language which continued to act in the collective imagination as a resistant layer – to use an adjective dear to Giovanni Lilliu – and are now being relaunched in the globalisation process by the requirements of the tourist industry, driven by the need for (alleged) authenticity and ever in search of new exotic (artificial) Edens within easy (low-cost airline) reach. Yet, as observed above, probably the most significant factor is the burgeoning in the island’s literary panorama of writers who have explicitly questioned the icon of the Barbagia and the cultural, and by extension, linguistic primacy of Nuoro and Logudorese. Among them particular mention should be made of Sergio Atzeni, who decided from the outset to recount the urban world and the city of Cagliari in particular, giving exposure in literature – the language dimension par excellence – to Cagliaritano, considered to be the most contaminated and least noble form of Sardinian and as such an obvious negation of the idea of linguistic archaism and the cultural supremacy of the Barbagia.725 In line with the principle of multiculturalism and the concept of mobile identity, Atzeni portrays an island marked ab antiquo by language codes in coexistence, with no hierarchy, constantly influencing and fusing with each other. In this vision Cagliaritano, a mongrel variation of Sardinian, not only becomes a model of a multi-linguistic (and multicultural) Sardinian identity, but gives a voice to a periphery which, in a post-colonial perspective, reclaims its past in its 723

Marci 2006: 268; 285-286. A summary of Francesco Masala’s ideological position is to be found in the lecture he gave on January 11th 1991 at the University of Cagliari, transcribed in Marci 1991b: 81-85. 724 On Giulio Angioni see Marci 2006: 289-291. 725 When it was pointed out to him that memory was the overriding theme in his work, Atzeni snapped back “Literature is the country of language. What’s done in literature is manipulation of language for the purpose of communication”, in Marci 1999a: 3940. On these points see Lavinio 2001: 65-79 and Marci 1999b: 115-145.

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entirety.726 In so doing it also identifies itself with the history and culture of the powers which dominated it and their linguistic legacies, without value hierarchies or preconceived classification criteria, in order to enter into dialogue, finally free of any inferiority, with the other languages in the world.727 Conclusion The repertoire of 20th-century texts analysed in this chapter confirms the general circulation of the portrayals of Sardinians and Sardinia observed in the previous century. The model of Sardinian identity emerging from it is centred on the topos of the Barbagia and the shepherd-bandit, symbols that appear to be obligatory in every description of the islands and its inhabitants, even if this means neglecting other geographical and anthropological factors and ignoring the broad and radical changes that had come about in the meantime. The work of foreign and Sardinian writers alike is shot through with the trope of Sardinia as a place antithetical to modernity, a mythical and fantastic projection of otherness, a mysterious and primitive land outside time and history, but as such the object of wonder and appreciation in the conviction that it has conserved its original authenticity. Continuing to hold sway over all these writers is the authority of Deledda, whose poetic image of Sardinia asserted itself as the undisputed model of Sardinian identity. This explains the absolute predominance of the pastoral anthropological model centred on the cultural superiority of the mountain area around Nuoro. The literary protagonist of writings on Sardinia remains the man of honour, the natural heir of the ancient fur-clad rebels known as the Sardi pelliti, freedom fighters against all foreign occupiers, ancient and modern. The topos of the Sardinian soldier, established following the mythicisation of the Brigata Sassari in the First World War, is a variation of the same shepherd-hunter-bandit trope, simple and primitive but of outstanding courage.

726

Pala 2001: 111-132. On the importance of the comparison with other post-colonial writers such as Chamoiseau, see Marci 2006: 286-287 and Marci 1999a: 103-113. See also Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant 1999 and Wa Thiong’o 2000. 727

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Thus, while in the 20th century the island underwent a remarkable and in some respects traumatic historical acceleration, on a literary and cultural level the predominant model of Sardinian identity remained centred on primitivism and the 19th-century topos of the South. What is most striking is the blanket diffusion of these forms of representation, embracing fiction and essays alike, forming common ground even for authors highly dissimilar in terms of world view, style and interests. The trope of the pastoral Sardinian interior remained fundamental even for authors who set out to question and analyse their roots while eschewing tropes. Deledda’s writings had captured the imagination of an international readership basically because they were interpreted as ‘proof’ of the island’s barbarism, and only later did critics (Tanda, Marci, Susanna Paulis) lay bare the discontinuities and innovations they contained. Meanwhile, popular fascination for the traditional image of Sardinia continued to outweigh attention for the signs of change and novelties contained in certain writings, as incontrovertibly proved by the international success of the 1975 novel Padre padrone, interpreted above all as a confirmation of the topos of an archaic Sardinia. In the 1980s, with authors such as Sergio Atzeni and Salvatore Mannuzzu, there were signs in Sardinian literary production of an attempt to reassess the whole tradition, which did not preclude efforts to find a new path towards different ways of representing the island and its people which would more closely reflect their complex reality. At a general level, however, it should be pointed out that with the passing of time interest in the island has progressively narrowed in scope; most writers attempting to re-create the Sardinian experience in literature are now local ones, writing in Italian, while accounts of journeys to the island by Italians are no longer to be found. Despite this shrinkage of interest in the subject, however, Sardinian-born authors have shown a desire to go beyond an absolute, dichotomistic and unchanging vision of Sardinian identity. It is above all Sergio Atzeni who offers a way of reinterpreting Sardinian history and a new portrait of the island. What emerges most clearly in his work is the trope of a complex, multi-faceted, multi-ethnic and open society far removed from that dominated by the icon of the Barbagian shepherd. This is the result of a cultural development that shows elements of contact with the evolution recorded in communities which

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had lived for centuries in a state of political and cultural subordination.

3. Sardinian Tropes on Screen

The ‘Ethnographic Spectacle’ Following the analysis of the various forms in which Sardinia and its people have been represented in literature, attention is now turned to the cinema. The films considered here are based on written texts, or at least offer a portrayal of Sardinian society which matches the stock of literary images described in the first two chapters. At the beginning of the 19th century film-makers were able to choose from a vast range of images waiting to be re-created with the powerful means of this new art form. It now remains to be seen how they set about it. Like the literary texts that came before them, most films present a canvas of narratives, characters and events frequently repeated; a number of ‘objects’ (animate and inanimate alike) have also appeared with almost obsessive regularity from the birth of the film industry to the present day. The cinematic corpus on which this study is based thus displays an indisputable homogeneity in terms of the range of screenplays and settings chosen. Rather than being the result of a lack of imagination or a simple need for the standardisation of imagery, important though this component is in cinematic communication,1 such homogeneity is a sign that films have developed a univocal and coherent discourse on Sardinian identity and have consistently exhibited it on screen. Mutatis mutandis, the same pattern may be discerned in literature. In travel writings, for instance, the narrative line reproduces the route followed by the traveller-author; in the pause at the end of each stage of the journey the suspension of events coincides with a description of characters, places, objects and situations. It is in his descriptions that the writer captures the reader’s attention by focusing on something which is original, interesting and extraordinary because it bears witness to the cultural divide between the viewpoint of the 1

Degler 2007: 295.

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writer (and thus of the reader) and what silently takes shape on the written page. Aside from the peculiarities of individual works, journeys in discovery of Sardinia are fairly homogeneous, since the writers decided to visit places already explored or comment on what had already been discussed by previous authors. Even in the cases where a writer differs from and corrects a preceding source, he is nonetheless taking the reader on an itinerary already consecrated by tradition. The relationship in literature between narration and description corresponds in the cinema to that between the fundamental components that are narrative and spectacle, each of which contributes to communicating a film’s message.2 In essence cinema transmits information to the spectator through the synergy between narrative and spectacular elements built into the mise-en-scéne which capture the attention and arouse a strong emotional reaction in the spectator.3 In recent years a heated debate has developed among cinema scholars regarding the meaning of the term spectacle; in this study the concept is understood to mean “something that is on display, that is eyecatching, out of the ordinary”.4 This may refer both to scenes made with special effects and to the use of state-of-the-art technology, as for instance in many blockbusters,5 and to the various components which go to make up the mise-en-scéne. Spectacle may also take the form of the physical appearance or personality of a character, and also the set, costumes or even single objects which serve to carry the film’s message.6 It should be remembered that in essence the cinema is a “matter of making images seen”;7 what is seen on the screen is never 2

Lavik 2008: 173: “There is no necessary opposition between narrative and spectacle” (emphasis in original). See also King 2000: 2 and Pyle 2003: 279-281. 3 Lewis 2012: 56. See also ibid., 60. 4 Lavik 2008: 170. 5 See King 2002: 184 and Lavik 2008: 171. An important factor connected to the idea of spectacle is novelty (Lavik 2008:172). What in the past may have been considered innovative, revolutionary and extraordinary in cinematic techniques no longer arouses the same reaction, and with the current proliferation of technological advances the effect of novelty and surprise are much less durable. 6 Lewis (2012: 181-182; 189-190) distinguishes two forms of spectacle, which he calls “object spectacle” and “event”. The former comprises bodies (human or otherwise) but also objects: ibid., 202. Two examples of object spectacles famous in cinema history are the transatlantic liner Titanic and Star Trek’s USS Enterprise: ibid., 205-206. 7 Léger 1973: 21, quoted by Gunning 2005: 381.

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there by chance – on the contrary, its exhibition signals a passage from narrative to spectacle in that it is the image itself, with its evocative and symbolic weight, which dominates the scene.8 This implies that not only what appears on the big screen, but also how it is presented, stands as a decisive means of communicating with the spectator and is one of the most potent and distinctive resources at the disposal of the cinema.9 The cinematic corpus in this study displays repeated recourse to certain subjects and characters around which stories are constructed (narrative) and the almost inevitable presence of certain images (spectacle) which help to make visible – in the literal sense of the term – the Sardinian character.10 These come into the category of spectacle because their appearance on the screen triggers an attraction in the spectator and stimulates the identification of what is seen with the cultural concept of the Sardinian character. Showing some things rather than others, every Sardinian-set film is thus the product of a visual and aural selection designed to transmit a specific idea of the island world to an audience whose existing knowledge enables it to decipher what appears on the screen. A significant example of the how the discourse on Sardinian identity is triggered in films is the organisation of the background, meaning the natural and anthropised landscapes used to reflect the vices and virtues of the Sardinian people.11 The physical environment is usually highlighted at the beginning of a film, when all the information is provided for the contextualisation of the events to follow, but it continues to figure during the entire story. This is because the cinematic composition of the landscape never takes the form of a neutral image but is used to communicate the film’s

8

“[T]he shift from narrative to spectacle is predicated on a slippage between the event as fiction and the image as construction”: Jacobs and De Cordova 1982: 301. 9 Lavik 2008: 172: “Our fascination with spectacle […] is instant, here and now. Spectacles hold some kind of autonomous attraction, independent of their narrative function. Of course, they may or may not serve some story purpose, but that is irrelevant to the definition of the term”. 10 See also Lavik 2008: 170-171; King 2002: 181 and 184. 11 Smith 1999: 152.

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viewpoint.12 The same principle applies to the settings, situations and single objects used to give form to the space in which the film unfolds. From Sardinian-set films there thus emerges a homogeneous and consistent stock of elements whose function is essentially symbolic rather than narrative, in that they establish direct contact with the audience and are independent of the development of the plot. The hypothesis is that they, reworked for the purposed of spectacle, are the carriers of the film’s message. Since most of the films in the corpus have an ethnocentric viewpoint, translated into the re-creation of the Sardinian world as an exotic land, inhabited by primitive men with bizarre customs who populate a territory awaiting discovery, the cinematic image arising from this perspective is configured as an ethnographic spectacle:13 a representation of the Other as an anthropological rarity, in terms of his way of being and his behaviour and in terms of the reality which surrounds him. This ethnographic spectacle informs the various components of the mise-en-scéne, making them carriers, visual modulations evoking national character.14 The selection of the location, the composition of the scene, costumes, furnishings – every factor becomes a function of the construction of a discourse based on the idea of the primitive and the exotic.15 In telling a story, every film thus draws a detailed map of images that make up a Sardinian ethnographic spectacle. This explains why certain elements – the choice of the Barbagia as a setting, the predominance of the figure of the bandit, the exhibition of Sardinians dressed in traditional costume, the depiction of a village festivity – become indispensable devices for the exhibition of such a vision of Sardinian identity. Sardinian-set 12 “The activity of composing the space [...] serves to organize the discourse”: Jacobs and De Cordova 1982: 301. 13 See Maingard 2009: 2 and 6. 14 Bordwell and Thompson 2010; and Gibbs 2002: 5; 53-54, quoted by Lewis 2012: 183-184. 15 It should be observed in this regard that the analysis of Sardinian geo-symbols in this chapter has evident points in common with a number of features in the representation of the landscape in colonial cinema (see Maingard 2009). One example is the journey of discovery in colonial territory seen paradoxically as a movement into the past. The portrayal of natural and man-made spaces is thus identified with a reality outside time, atavistic, irrational – as a savage and primitive space. But at the same time it presents signs of incipient modernity and a tourist view. These are all characteristics to be found in the depiction of the Sardinian landscape on screen, not only in the early days of the cinema but in a number of recent productions.

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films therefore have in common not only a pre-eminent narrative type (stories of shepherds, bandits and vendettas) but the representation of the island as a Sardinian ethnographic spectacle. For this exhibition of the Sardinian world to achieve full expression, the audience must be able to decipher the message communicated by the film. If the observer fails to understand what is shown or misinterprets it, the viewpoint revealed by the representation will not have its intended evocative power. The ethnographic spectacle thus appeals to existing knowledge possessed by the audience, which has been fed with suggestions and prejudices that have built up into a collective image of Sardinian identity. In this sense the Sardinian ethnographic spectacle constitutes an articulation of the discourse on otherness produced by 19th-century European culture. The theory that the cinematic representation of Sardinia is essentially the result of a cultural process developed in the way described above is corroborated by the fact that where the ethnocentric viewpoint is lacking, the Sardinian ethnographic spectacle is also absent. In a number of recent films the island is portrayed much like other places; there is no sign of the traditional world (that of the pastoral bandit-ridden Sardinia) and the mise-en-scéne is devoid of the places, situations and objects with which the ethnographic spectacle was generally structured – traditional costumes, dancing, breadmaking and similar slices of folklore. A further consideration arises from the question of cinematic genres and ways of portraying national character. Although recourse to ethnographic spectacle depends on the type of genre, given that comedies and the more popular and commercial types of film are known to make frequent use of stereotypes,16 in Sardinian-set films – not many of which are comedies – ethnographic spectacle is predominant in the whole of 20th-century production. The main reason for this continuity is to be sought, yet again, in the univocal character of the view, the ethnocentric standpoint around which the cinematic discourse on the Sardinian character is built. Mention should nonetheless be made of the films which have attempted to follow a different path. This and the following chapters 16

Leerssen 2007k: 354.

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will analyse the images around which the Sardinian ethnographic spectacle has been articulated, but will also focus on those which have broken with tradition and are augmenting the existing repertoire from a post-modern and post-colonial viewpoint. The reasons for this development are to be found above all in the refusal of some Sardinian film-makers to adopt an ethnocentric narrative in favour of a depiction of the island similar to that of other places in the contemporary world. Aside from the specific characteristics of individual directors, in its assimilation of the most interesting literary ideas this revision of the Sardinian cinematic image amounts to a full-blown counter-narrative, with a repertoire of counter-images.17 It is a process of renewal which has taken its place alongside the traditional images, whose vital force still continues, as witnessed by the heterogeneity of the island’s most recent films. Sardinian Landscape From the earliest days the cinematic evocation of the Sardinian landscape was never a simple question of the photography of reality. It was a function of a set of ideological assumptions and the vehicle for a specific idea of Sardinia. As it is the case for literature, cinema was thus a medium for the construction of a national character by means of tropes. The way in which the landscape is represented in literary texts stands as a powerful instrument for celebrating a nation through the creation of myths and symbols. The territory tends to be identified with the people who inhabit it, it becomes the projection of the feelings and characteristics of a community, it bears the marks of the past and of collective memory. The territory thus becomes the mirrorimage of the traits attributed to the characters in it.18 Widely used in literature, this procedure has proved to be applicable to films, as demonstrated by a number of recent studies.19 The aim here is therefore to uncover the mechanisms whereby Sardinia passes from being a simple geographical entity to an icon of Sardinian identity, by specifying the types of landscape presented as tropes of Sardinia and 17

The counter-narrative and counter-images add up to what Linda Hutcheon discusses in political discourse as indigenization “within a national setting to refer to the forming of a national discourse different from the dominant one”, Hutcheon 2006: 150. 18 Smyth 1999: 152. 19 Dissanayake 2006; Bussi and Leech 2003.

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finding out what elements of the national character are hidden behind the pictures. This chapter explores the film images of the Sardinian landscape and analyses the various tropes in the films which make up the corpus of study. A look at the development of this iconographic tradition will also indicate elements of continuity and rupture with the written tradition during the 20th century. When film-makers discovered Sardinia it was for many people still a mysterious and largely unknown place, even though a complex image of the island had already been established in literature. The fascination it exerted over ‘continentals’ (Italian and foreign) arose in the first place from its centuries-old notoriety as a wild and primitive land. At the end of the 19th century Sardinia was known above all through the many prejudices disseminated about it: I asked for more definite information about this eccentric island, but it was not easy to obtain. Encyclopaedias and Blue-books were hinted at. Cicero was exhibited, in which the author vaunted of a voyage to Sardinia as if it were a feat of courage or skill. Had I needed additional incentive, this general tone of mystery had sufficed to set me upon so brief a journey of discovery.20

The prospect of a journey to Sardinia was therefore an adventure, an exploration of a strange and virtually unknown land. And the island, indeed, had great surprises in store for the gaze of the intrepid traveller. Forty years before anyone venturing into the deserted areas to the north of the Barbagia would find a virgin landscape with stunning mountain views, but one populated by some of the island’s fiercest bandits whose craggy habitat made them impervious to the police expeditions organised to capture them.21 The ambivalence of the image of Sardinia was clear from the outset. On the one hand emerged the drawbacks of a place which has earned itself an ugly

20

Edwardes 1889: 1. Edwardes 1889: 233: “Forty years ago, the traveller would have hesitated ere he travelled thus, with but a single attendant, on these northern skirts of Barbagia. The banditti (sic) who hived in the celestial mountains which thus won my admiration were the most roguish in the island. They were very strongly entrenched among these steep rocks, and no troops could take them unawares”. 21

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reputation,22 and on the other there was the impression that the surrounding landscape seemed like a real paradise.23 The island aroused contrasting feelings of disapproval and wonder in visitors to it, and such feelings lent themselves to be relived and amplified in the journey in time and space that is cinema. It was partly on the strength of written accounts that early film-makers decided to work in Sardinia – Carmine Gallone, for example, decided that the island was the only possible setting for his Marcella (1921), based on a novel actually set elsewhere.24 The Sardinian landscape had made such an impression on him that he was prepared to take on a whole series of problems in order to shoot the film in Gallura, in the north-east of the island.25 Most of the films set in Sardinia, especially in the early days, were produced by film-makers from outside the island and its culture. Starting from a consolidated literary tradition, they were the ones who devised and selected a body of images considered representative of the Sardinian national character. It should be borne in mind, however, that the work of Grazia Deledda stood as the link between European culture and Sardinia, so it was often the case, especially in the early days of film, that directors choosing to shoot a film on Sardinian themes had Deledda’s Sardinia as their main model, since it stood as the most authoritative resource for the construction of a popular image of the island at the beginning of the 20th century. So crucial was Deledda’s mediating role that it was her Sardinia that acted as “the key with which film-makers could unlock the Sardinian world”.26 Before being translated to the screen, however, her thought was purged of its deepest and most complex elements in favour of more visible features, those which could arouse the curiosity of the public and meet certain expectations.27 The selection of Deledda’s themes in the representation of the Sardinian landscape on film thus took on the characteristics of stereotyping, a tendency which has remained unchanged to the present day. A characteristic feature of Deledda’s work was the presence of elements of nature. Her pages are full of descriptions of places familiar to her and she makes frequent mention of animal and 22

Edwardes 1889: 33. Ibid., 233. 24 Ibid., 26. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 21. 27 Ibid. 23

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vegetable species, but the significance of the landscape is more than just a dry listing of names and adjectives. On the contrary, its variety reflects the complexity of the human soul, and it is to the soul that she makes recourse when she wishes to dwell on the physical and moral qualities of her characters. What is more, the climactic moments of her stories are always accompanied by sudden changes in the weather, which results in an intertwining of the fate of her characters with natural phenomena, whereby in her poetics “there comes about a singular communion between the still-unspoilt environment and its inhabitants”.28 It is no coincidence that ‘wild’ (selvaggio) is the adjective most used by the writer to convey the nature of the island’s inhabitants and, by reflection, its flora and fauna.29 Likewise, in cinema the Sardinian landscape is first and foremost splendid and wild, and is thus loaded with moral values and human feelings – nature participates in the action and has the community’s forma mentis projected upon it.30 In Cainà. L’isola e il continente (Righelli 1922), the protagonist’s escape is set against the raging of a terrible storm. The father is struck by lightning as he seeks his missing daughter, and these dramatic shots are accompanied by the caption “And the cypress tops repeat the same song: Giantolu is dead, he’s dead!”.31 The main consequence of the identification between the features of the environment and the moral profile of its inhabitants was the rigid selection of the settings for the stories, which led to the total exclusion of other locations which, though no less Sardinian, were not experienced as such in the collective imagination of the time. Originating in the repertoire of images provided by the literary tradition, this selection resulted in the crystallisation of a number of symbols of the Sardinian landscape which remained virtually intact for much of the century, and only recently have there been any signs of a change in this state of affairs. Since the Sardinian identity was personified in the form of the shepherd, the vast majority of films were set against a pastoral background in locations in the island’s 28

Paulis 2006: 173. Ibid. 30 On concepts of religious belief and atonement in the work of Deledda see Guiso 2005: 83-92. 31 The script is published by Jaccarino 2001: 67-118. Intertitle: “E le cime dei cipressi ripetono la stessa canzone: Giantolu è morto, è morto!” (ibid., 112). 29

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interior. The rather surprising consequence of such an identification of the Sardinian essence with the rural world was the almost total absence of the maritime landscape in films. The elaboration of a continental image of Sardinia led in the cinematic medium to a loss of its main geographical feature – that of being an island, being surrounded by the sea, a place which by its very nature should have represented a bridge to somewhere else. This representation is diametrically opposed to the impression that must have been given by the sight of the island to a traveller arriving by sea, since “Sardinia appeared on the horizon as a vast blue plain placed in the centre of the Mediterranean”.32 Yet most films contained no reference to this central Mediterranean position, indeed there was hardly any mention of its being an island and for a long time the sea was virtually absent, as though Sardinia was entirely inward-looking and its borders were nowhere to be seen. On the occasions when the sea was mentioned, its relationship with the island’s people was always problematic – suffering, tragedy and misadventure marked the few maritime scenes from the beginning of Sardinian-set films Cainà onwards. Only in recent years has there been any sign of a change in the symbolic representation of the sea, as exemplified by …con amore, Fabia (Camoglio 1993) and Ballo a tre passi (Mereu 2003). Another landscape long ignored by cinema was the urban one. Sardinia has no big cities, but some towns, such as Cagliari, have centuries of history and long-standing contacts with the whole of the Mediterranean. However, if we exclude a number of specific scenes, the first film to be shot entirely in the island’s capital is dated as late as 2001 (Pesi leggeri by Enrico Pau).33 Despite Cagliari’s traditional 32

Valery 1837: 52; quoted by Le Lannou 1941: 9. Some films from the silent era were made by Cagliari-based production companies: Alba serena in un tramonto di sangue (Celada 1920); Il trionfo della vita (Gravina 1922), Il richiamo della terra (Bissi 1928). The first two were set in the bourgeois ambience typical of films of the time; while the third one had a rural setting, it celebrated the construction of a dam on the Tirso river, and thus exhibited a modernist approach to Sardinian life. Olla (2008: 27) takes this as grounds for saying that the island’s cultural climate contained a desire to put forward the image of a modern Sardinia, an island in step with progress; had this not been the case the mainland filmmakers would have chosen to portray the island as primitive, exotic and wild. This view, however, does not seem to be borne out by the subsequent development of Italian cinema; as will become clear in the following chapters, mainland Italian and Sardinian film-makers alike disseminated an essentially univocal model of Sardinian identity. 33

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political supremacy, the Sardinian feeling of cultural belonging is identified with the island’s innermost province, Nuoro, once defined as the Sardinian Athens.34 This feeling of cultural superiority is not tied only to the past, however, since artists and writers from elsewhere on the island still admit to something of an inferiority complex.35 While the urban and coastal environments remained on the margins of films set in Sardinia, the island became basically identified with the province of Nuoro, and even more specifically with the agriculturalpastoral world coinciding with the area of the Barbagia. Film-makers thus operated a rigid selection of landscapes considered to be icons of Sardinia and its culture. This process almost reached the extremes of a reductio ad unum,36 whereby speaking of Sardinia essentially meant speaking of the Barbagia, its inaccessible mountains, its treacherous paths, its wild flora and fauna, its harsh climate, a habitat re-created as a topos as wild and splendid as the nature of its people. This selection of Sardinian locations was accompanied by a series of other images which contributed to the definition of the island in its anthropological – besides geographical – dimension. In the first place Sardinia-Barbagia, so far removed from the centres of power and development of Western civilisation, represented the periphery of the world, and as such passed as an icon of the archaic and the primitive.37 The splendid wild landscapes catapulted the cinema-goer into an ancient time when nature ruled unopposed and man was powerless to influence the eternal cycle of existence. Sardinia became a place bereft of the concept of historical time, and its landscapes bore the traces of an eternally present past. Trying to explain the essence of the fascination of this mysterious land, D.H. Lawrence wrote that Sardinia belongs “to nowhere, never having belonged to anywhere. To Spain and the Arabs and the Phoenicians most. But as if it had never really had a fate. No fate. Left outside of time and history”.38 Sardinia also had attributed to it all the backward features traditionally associated with southern Italy, as opposed to the 34

Deledda 2011d: 66. See chapter 2, the interview with Flavio Soriga quoted by Baumann 2007: 317. 36 Marci 2006. 37 Leerssen 2007i: 406-408. 38 Lawrence 2009: 51. 35

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progressive north, but the same dichotomy was presented in a reversed form in the island itself. The Barbagia, the extreme periphery with respect to the rest of Italy, was presented as the quintessence of Sardinian identity, since it was the only part of the island to have withstood all attempts at invasion and preserved this alleged identity intact. The low-lying and coastal areas containing the towns – Cagliari first and foremost – were thus portrayed as peripheral with respect to the Barbagian centre. In historical terms their inferior position stemmed from the various phases of foreign domination and their tendency to assimilate to the occupiers and relinquish their own identity. The urban and coastal world was considered a faded appendix of Sardinian identity because of its marginal geographical position with respect to the Barbagian centre. There was thus a reproduction in Sardinia of the dichotomy generally attributed to the dyad North(Italy)-South and centre(Italy)-periphery(Sardinia). These dualities were taken up in a big way by cinema; representing Sardinia on the big screen meant re-presenting the images of a specific portion of its territory – the province of Nuoro and the Barbagia. It also meant creating a scale of values between areas which were ‘genuinely’ Sardinian, bulwarks of tradition, and others, contaminated by outside influences. Venturing into the Sardinia re-created by cinema meant attempting to explore an archaic, static world, one which perpetuated itself by projecting itself into the future whereby the various temporal dimensions dissolved into an eternal present, so in the eyes of a visitor “on the island of the Sardinians, every departure is a return. In the presence of the archaic every cognition is recognition”.39 To the eyes of the continental world exploring the island meant above all venturing into the most distant periphery, into the deepest South with respect to the civilised world. It was an enterprise of discovery and at the same time a confirmation of the prejudices in which the culture of the time was steeped. North versus South One of the major tropes of the European collective imagination is the North-South dichotomy.40 The Alps stood as the border beyond which 39

Levi 2003: 35 (“nell’isola dei Sardi, ogni andare è un ritornare. Nella presenza dell’arcaico ogni conoscenza è riconoscenza”). 40 Arndt 2007: 387-389.

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stretched the South, which included the entire Italian peninsular. In Italy, however, this dichotomy was applied with another meaning following unification, when it seemed obvious that political unification would not be enough to achieve national cohesion. In the intentions of intellectuals sympathetic to the South, the divide between the rich civilised North and the poor primitive South could be bridged by means of a government policy designed to overcome southern backwardness.41 Despite their noble intentions, in laying the basis of the southern question these southern-minded politicians and intellectuals elaborated a homogeneous and negative concept of the South and in so doing forged the trope of the Italian North-South dichotomy. In the context of deterministic positivism the difference between the North and the South came to be set in unchangeable existential categories in which the backwardness of southerners was attributed to genetic factors. Exemplary in this respect was the publication in 1901 of Alfredo Niceforo’s book Italiani del Nord e italiani del Sud, which sealed the unbridgeable divide between the two parts of the country.42 And in the debate on the South, Sardinia was also emblematic: despite forming part of the original nucleus of the Kingdom of Italy, in cultural and socio-economic terms it belonged to the South, so when the southern question was posited, with it was posited the ‘Sardinian question’.43 The North-South dichotomy was a basic driving-force for cinema, which from the outset was attracted by the mysterious, archaic world hidden beyond the borders of modern Italy. And interest in Sardinia was fully comprehensible if it is borne in mind that in the 19th century it was less well known than the remotest Pacific islands.44 While to foreign eyes the Italian landscape looked altogether typical of the 18th century, requiring a classical-Romantic representation replete with aqueducts, rugged ravines and waterfalls, Sardinia, by contrast, was

41

See Dickie 1999; Beller 2007c: 194-200; Schneider 1998; Moe 2001. See also chapter 1, section Sardinia in European Literature before 1900. 43 About the ‘Sardinian question’ see Ortu 2005 and Lei Spano 2000. 44 Tyndale 1849: I, XV. 42

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another thing. Much wider, much more ordinary, not up-to-down at all, but running away into the distance. Unremarkable ridges of moorlike hills running away, perhaps to a bunch of dramatic peaks on the south-west. This gives a sense of space, which is so lacking in Italy. Lovely space about one, and travelling distances – nothing finished, nothing final. It is like liberty itself, after peaky confinement of Sicily. Room – give me room – give me room for my spirit: and you can have all the topping crags of romance. So we ran on through the gold of the afternoon, across a wide, almost Celtic landscape of hills, our little train winding and puffing away very nimbly. Only the health and scrub, breast-high, man-high, are too big and brigand-like for a Celtic land. The horns of black, wildlooking cattle show sometimes.45

Cinema dwelt at length on the characteristics of the Sardinian landscape, accentuating the features which recalled the harsh, arid habitat and its contrast with the Italian North. One essential factor which defined the southern character of the island was the climate and its natural effects on the landscape. Exemplary in this regard is the film Faddjia. La legge della vendetta (Bianchi Montero 1949), which opens with a shot of a map of the island and the film’s title superimposed on it. The result is the conceptual unity of the ideas of Sardinia and vendetta. The shot zooms to a specific area of the island north of Villacidro, in western central Sardinia. In actual fact the film was shot in the village of Riola, located on the border between the pastoral and agricultural areas.46 While the camera dwells on the map, the audience hears a voice over saying: Pressed by the restless waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea, beaten by sudden rains, burned by an implacable sun, harsh in its tormented landscape – this is Sardinia. Nature here, like the feelings of men, smacks of truth and the eternal. Here sorrow and the effort of living, like joy and love, are governed by a single law – honour. On this terrain and with these feelings unfolds our story, which is of many years ago, but nothing in this land has time nor date, like the sea that restlessly presses it and the sun that implacably bakes it.47 45

Lawrence 2009: 66. Olla 2008: 136. 47 “Stretta dalle irrequiete onde del Tirreno, flagellata da improvvise piogge, arsa da un sole implacabile, aspra nel suo paesaggio tormentato: ecco la Sardegna. Qui la natura, come il sentire degli uomini, sa di schietto e di eterno. Qui il dolore e la fatica 46

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Superimposed on the map, meanwhile, appear images characteristic of Sardinia: a nuraghe, an ox-cart, peasants working the land, herdsmen tending their livestock, men and women going to work. The pictures and the voice over combine to forge a relation between the island’s harsh geographical and climatic conditions and the hard life of its people. The discourse has a circular construction: attention goes first to natural features, then it captures the intrinsic relationship between the landscape and human nature, and it concludes with the eternity that brings together human feeling and nature. All the adjectival functions are negative: the island is pressed, oppressed by the restless waves of the sea, beaten by the rains which are sudden, while the terrain is burned, baked by the implacable sun and harsh with its tormented landscape. The landscape and human nature are authentic and eternal. If honour is the Sardinian’s only moral, the climate and his land, like his fate, are unchangeable, out of time. The film’s opening thus provides a sketch of Sardinian identity in which climate, landscape and human nature all mirror one another perfectly. The sun-baked land is also the background to a vendetta story in Le due leggi (Mulargia 1963).48 The opening scene shows a Mexicanstyle landscape. The peasants are in despair because there is no water with which to work the land. The environment looks parched and empty, except for a few olive-groves and a dusty road against a mountain backdrop. Even though it subsequently rains, the scirocco wind irreparably damages the harvest, reinforcing the idea of a cruel nature hanging like a sword of Damocles over human destiny. Perhaps the most brutal and dramatic scenes, rendering all the tragedy intrinsic to the island’s climate, are those showing the flock tended by Michele, the shepherd in Banditi a Orgosolo (De Seta 1961). In his tragic journey through the rugged hills around Nuoro, his flock is decimated by drought. Exhausted by their desperate slog through the crags, one by one his sheep collapse and perish, leaving Michele in a state of despair which drives him to crime. Left without his flock, he has no di vivere, come la gioia e l’amore, sono governati da un’unica legge: l’onore. E su questo paesaggio e con questi sentimenti che si svolge la nostra storia che è di molti anni fa, ma tutto in questa terra non ha tempo, né data, come il mare che irrequieto la stringe e il sole che implacabile la arroventa.” 48 See Olla 2008: 149.

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option but to procure another one, stealing it from a poor wretch like himself. These scenes resound with the words of the Mayoress of Orune, pronounced in January 1955: if the year is a bad one the pastures are yellow, “the livestock is hungry, and hunger begets hunger”, but “drought makes no noise, it’s a scourge attracting little attention”.49 Like Sicily, and probably more than Sicily, in the context of southern Italy Sardinia stands as a clearly distinct physical entity. Its insularity is the strongest mark of its otherness, and was at the root of another trope built along the lines of the North-South dichotomy – the contrast between island and mainland. According to Maurice Le Lannou, Sardinia’s archaic appearance was determined by ‘objective’ factors: “in fact it is in its distance from the continent and the ruggedness of its landing places that the explanation for this extraordinary conservation should be sought”.50 Understood in opposition to the idea of North/Continent, insularity was an important concept in cinema and as such was explicitly exploited from the very beginning, as confirmed by the title of the film Cainà. L’isola e il continente (Righelli 1922).51 This trope engendered others, such as the topoi of antiquity and immobility compared with the modernity typical of the mainland. In Cainà the sea separating Sardinia from the mainland became the metaphor of otherness, whose allure flattered the protagonist. Beyond the confines of the island stretched an indefinite and unknown space in which people lived according to different rules. The Sardinia of Cainà was a closed, separate place where nothing could change. It was above all the symbol of an immobile past which aroused both curiosity and revulsion in continental travellers (Italian and foreign) because of its primitive condition. This archaism found full expression in the trope of the rural Sardinian landscape and the rocks which were the pasture of the protagonist’s goats, defined as ‘wild’ in the same way as the island’s inhabitants were traditionally defined.52 From the origins of Italian cinema, then, the islandmainland dialectic stood as an archetypical icon of the difference between ancient and modern, static and mobile, primitive and 49

Fiori 2001: 77. Le Lannou 1941: 26. 51 On this film see Cainà. L’Isola e il Continente. Un film di Gennaro Righelli – 1922. Filmpraxis. Quaderni della Cineteca Sarda della Società Umanitaria, 5, 2001. See also the analysis made by Olla 2008: 27-28; 126-128. 52 Paulis 2006: 173. 50

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progressive. And the Sardinian landscape presented the unfamiliar and exotic features pointed out by 18th- and 19th-century travellers and subsequently reworked with great success by Grazia Deledda. At the beginning of Cainà the mountain environment combines with the collective memory. A view of the mountains, the “giants of Sardinia”,53 is followed by a shot of a nuraghe, the icon of Sardinian civilisation.54 The rest of the film produces other signs of the island’s history and culture in a spirit that may be defined realistic, in that it accurately renders places, situations and characters captured in their relationship with the historical, environmental and narrative context.55 Yet apart from these historically verifiable references, the whole film revolves around the island-mainland dichotomy, in which the two terms are irreconcilably opposed. Behind the story of the protagonist and her yearning to set sail and reach the mainland we sense a metaphor of the desire to reach beyond the insular condition. What is telling, however, is that the only image of the mainland is that of the port where Cainà lands in the ship on which she stowed away, while all our attention is directed to the discovery of the mysterious world that was Sardinia at the beginning of the 20th century. The story is told from the standpoint of a mainlander looking at the island and laying bare all its drawbacks. Though not directly based on Deledda’s writings, the story of Cainà presents a cinematic image of the island which is congruent with her poetics.56 In the mountain landscape and the traditional agricultural-pastoral environment in which the story is set, every attempt to rebel against the rules produces a collective tragedy which destroys the community’s internal order. In accordance with a rhetorical strategy used as widely in cinema as in literature, the act of rebellion coincides with a large-scale natural event. In Cainà the moment of her flight is marked by the onset of a violent storm which ends in tragedy – Cainà’s father is struck by a bolt of lightning which 53

About Gennargentu as “the giant of Sardinia” see chapter 1, section Tropes of Land: The Barbagia. 54 Intertitles: “Fantastico panorama dei giganti della Sardegna”; “Vecchie rovine, testimoni di una gloria e di un potere tramontati” (Jaccarino 2001: 67). 55 Olla 2008: 128. 56 Ibid., 26-27.

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should have hit her, and her mother is paralysed with grief.57 Nature’s violence is the metaphorical expression of the rupture in the social system caused by the act of rebellion (which has tragic consequences for the collectivity). Another storm accompanies the homicide perpetrated by the female protagonist in Delitto per amore (Genina 1950),58 and a veritable deluge coincides with the murder of a maid, of which crime the shepherd-bandit Simone Sole is then accused in Amore rosso (Vergano 1952). The insoluble North-South and mainland-island dichotomies stand as one of the major themes in the literary and cinematic tradition, and their influence is still to be felt in more recent films. In Padre padrone (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani 1977) the island-mainland theme is expressed in the unbreakable contrast between the archaic world of the island, where life is lived in a natural state, and the mainland, where Gavino Ledda gains his dignity as a man by mastering the Italian language and culture. In 1984, however, Ledda himself made a film, Ybris, whose complex symbolic references make it hard to interpret, recounting a fraught ‘return journey’ to Siligo, the village of his birth.59 Considered as an outsider by the locals because of his personal rebellion against his origins, “the most grievous sin a man can commit”,60 Ledda is driven by the community’s hostility to restore his relationship with nature and his roots. This he does with the help of an old shepherd, in whose hut he withdraws and eventually resolves the island-mainland contradiction by rediscovering the value of Sardinian culture and his origins.61 The circular island-mainlandisland journey stands as the proof of reconciliation with the old world embodied by the paternal figure. A very different circular journey is depicted in La destinazione (Sanna 2003), shot in the villages of Mamoiada and Benetutti in the heart of the province of Nuoro.62 It tells the story of Emilio, a young 57

Intertitles: “E il fulmine che ha risparmiato la figlia ha ucciso il padre”; “La paralisi ha sfigurato la faccia della signora Agnes contratta in una espressione di dolore”; “Povera signora Agnes! Paga per i peccati di sua figlia!” (Jaccarino 2001: 99-100). See also in this chapter, note 31. 58 See Olla 2008: 139. 59 See Olla 2008: 358-360. 60 Interview with Gavino Ledda: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9beOzWVcLmU (accessed 12th September 2012). 61 Olla 2008: 360. 62 Ibid., 189-190.

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Carabiniere who is assigned to the (fictional) Sardinian village of Coloras. Born and bred in the Italian region of Emilia Romagna and accustomed to parties and night-life, upon hearing of his transfer Emilio is initially curious about his destination because a village called Coloras reminds him of colour, joy and fun. His Sardinian colleague Costantino, however, tells him that in the local dialect the name means ‘snake’. Emilio’s journey provides an unhappy confirmation of that bizarre name. After landing on the island he continues by train, but the line to Nuoro is a hundred years old. Emilio distracts himself from the boredom of the slow and tortuous train-ride by listening to his i-Pod, hardly realising that he is entering a different world, covered with thick undergrowth, where the signs of human habitation give way to nature in its pristine state. After getting off at a tiny ramshackle station he has to complete his journey on foot – the farther he goes from the mainland, the more he penetrates the deepest South. Life on the mainland is thus contrasted from the outset with life in Sardinia. The road-races and loud music Emilio was used to give way to interminable waits at a semi-derelict railway station and the condition of absolute stasis that seems to dominate the landscape. The spectator senses that his arrival in Sardinia is not simply a transfer from one place to another, it is a journey backwards in time, towards the immobile time that is the icon of the archaic South.63 Emilio soon realises that Coloras has nothing of what he took for granted on the mainland – magazines, cinemas, bars, amusements – and he cannot find an explanation. His difficulties in settling in then take a decisive turn for the worse when he is beaten up by a gang of local youths who resent the relationship he has started with a girl in the village. Emilio, an Italian state serviceman, is perceived as an intruder, an invader who considers himself entitled to ‘take’ what he has no right to. While for their part the locals reject him, he is unable to comprehend their mentality. Talking to his girlfriend on a beautiful deserted beach, he criticises the antiquated lifestyle in the village and berates the Sardinians for their lack of enterprise. Where are the bars? Where can you go to have fun? The girl replies by pointing out that the beach is beautiful just as it is, but Emilio is not impressed. 63

Marci 2006: 19.

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La destinazione confirms all the tropes which the protagonist carries about him of a land different to the continent, where archaic customs still prevail and the community seems impermeable to the allure of modernity, indeed it feels obliged to keep its guard up against invaders from the mainland. While Emilio manages to return to the mainland and his previous life, things are much more difficult for Costantino. He has developed a deep-seated rejection of his place of origin and his decision to join the Carabinieri should ensure him a future away from the island, a life more dignified than that of the shepherds, but he has to make an enormous effort to be accepted by other Italians as an equal. The idea of Sardinians as an inferior race of bandits is not confined to the writings of the late 19th century, it is a lingering prejudice which reaches even within the walls of the military academy, where Costantino is subjected to repeated exam questions on conspiracies of silence and kidnappings precisely because of his origins. Emilio fails to understand the condition of Sardinians – to him they seem more like foreigners than outsiders, accustomed as he is to the mainland lifestyle. For his part, on a daily basis Costantino pays the price of the ‘sin’ of being Sardinian. Sardinia as a Symbol of the South Alongside the images referring to Sardinia as such, film-makers resorted to other ways of representing the landscape which encouraged the reconstruction of settings and atmospheres that were quintessentially southern in a generic sense. These images translated into iconographic terms the characteristics attributed to the South in the debate on the southern question. To this day they continue to stand as the constituent paradigms used to define what is supposed to be the southern identity. Cinema, too, advanced a prejudiced picture of the South, conceived as a single, primitive and immobile geographical and socio-cultural entity, elaborating a generically southern landscape model.64 This strategy was repeated throughout the 20th century. ‘Southern’ films were interesting to the public above all because they offered a chance to enter into contact with a world which was different, in other words inferior, because of its primitive and barbaric customs. On the strength of this interest, shaped by an Orientalist attitude, a number of films went to considerable lengths to reconstruct 64

Olla 2008: 49.

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the rituals and traditions of folklore. Other films reduced particular regional characteristics to a minimum in the interests of creating a generic southern setting which encapsulated all the features peculiar to the South, as the opposite pole to the North, without any details that might recall any specific part of southern Italy. Subsequently, in the wake of the consideration enjoyed by Giovanni Verga’s literary realism and post-war Neorealism, there was a wave of films designed to draw attention to the South and its social problems.65 They made ample use of the southern landscape and setting cliché, again relying on the late 19th-century image of the South. Here, too, elements of local folklore were put into generic southern settings and scenes; the actual purpose was to project audiences into a wild atavistic world and satisfy their curiosity. In this respect Sardinia, considering its consolidated profile in the popular imagination, did not disappoint. One of the oldest Sardinian film still available to us, Cenere (Mari 1916), based on a story by Deledda, is a clear example of how the southern setting was central to the interest of film-makers.66 Although its first pictures evoke Sardinian mountains and nuraghi, the film was actually shot in Piedmont and few scenes in the Alpi Apuane in northern Tuscany, at the direct suggestion of Deledda herself.67 A wild and primitive natural landscape characterises the rest of its scenes, in one of which the protagonist drinks from a stream just as an animal would. It is a world captured in its atavistic splendour. Even the scenes shot in interiors – bare and humble in the extreme – communicate the sense of ancient poverty characteristic of southern homes and documented in literature.68 An example of ethnographic background research and a desire to render a southern setting with the peculiarities of Sardinian folklore is found in Cainà (Righelli 1922). The scene of the festivity not only stands as a focal point in the narrative, it is almost a documentary fragment within the story.69 The attention to detail in filming the 65

De Rooy and Urban 2011: 13. See Olla 22-23. 67 Ibid., 122. 68 See also the photos made in Sardinia in the 19th and 20th century now published by Miraglia 2008. 69 About this film see also chapters 5, section The Festivity as an Icon of Sardinian Identity. 66

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costumes and especially the striking dance choreography testify to a desire to render on screen the fascination of the ancient traditions that lived on in southern communities. Detailed research has revealed that the dance depicted in the film corresponds to one typical of the Gallura region in the north of the island, which was also the location used for shots of historical monuments, such as the rural church of Bortigiadas, near Aggius.70 On the one hand, therefore, the scene in question reveals an evident desire for realism, in the use of factual events and places, but such attention to ethnographic detail also throws light on the film-makers’ actual intentions in depicting such scenes.71 The dance episode served the purpose of capturing the South in one of the most pregnant enactments of its identity – the South as a fascinating world which lived according to the rhythm of the seasons, punctuated by atavistic rituals and religious festivals in which historical time was eliminated.72 The desire to reconstruct a southern environment is even more striking in La grazia (De Benedetti 1929), a film based on Deledda’s short novel.73 Most of it was shot in film studios, but the few scenes shot on location, not in Sardinia, were supposed to evoke the island’s mountainous area. Throughout the film typically Sardinian features appear alongside others which are generically southern, such as the artificial setting of the cave in which the protagonist Simona, a shepherdess, seeks shelter from a snowfall and by chance meets the man with whom she is to fall in love. Around the cave the presence of prickly pear and a parched landscape are redolent of the South, but there is nothing locally specific. Aside from references to the landscape, an artificial note is also struck by the presence of some musicians in Simona’s house on Christmas eve: although they play the launeddas, the typically Sardinian reed flutes, they are dressed as bagpipers, which have no place in the island’s tradition. Southern settings became a full-blown leitmotiv in post-war cinema.74 One such film, Le vie del peccato (Pastina 1946) was loosely based on Grazia Deledda’s short story Dramma, taken from

70

Olla 2008: 128. See chapter 5, note 3. 72 See chapter 1, section Character: A People in “Perpetual Celebration”. 73 Grazia Deledda, ‘Di notte’, in Idem, Racconti sardi (Sassari: Giuseppe Dessì, 1894), now Deledda 1996a: 117-134. 74 Olla 2008: 133. 71

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her 1928 collection Il fanciullo nascosto.75 It was shot not in Sardinia but somewhere in the Apennine mountains, probably in the Abruzzo region.76 The film opens with a well-worked scene full of mystery: in a rugged, desolate landscape the protagonist Ilaria is seen walking along a country track leading to a village. The audience is immersed in a wild natural environment, over which hovers a sense of expectation but also the premonition of tragedy. As seen in other instances, the opening scene serves to set the story, but in this case the landscape recalls a generic southern environment and emphasises the pastoral world as representative of it, even though the pastoral elements plays no major part in the story. In the original text the story begins in medias res: in her tavern as always, Ilaria is waiting for her husband to get out of prison, and continues to do so until the arrival of Don Mattia, who eventually seduces her. At the end of the original, Don Mattia returns to her to confess that his mother-in-law has been made ill by the sorrows he has visited upon her and that he intends to find a solution. Since he will inherit everything on her death, he has arranged a reconciliation with his wife and so informs Ilaria that he wishes to leave her. The last sentence of the story comes from the mouth of Mattia, who informs Ilaria that he has already sent a letter of pardon in favour of her husband, so the ending is left open. The film version of the story accentuates its melodramatic features and the erotic dimension is played up.77 The ending is also changed: Ilaria kills herself out of remorse for the betrayal of her husband and because Mattia has left her. Deledda’s story thus provides the idea for the film, but the latter departs from it in terms of narrative development and dramatic tension, but also in the perspective in which the whole story is placed and above all in the space given over to the ‘absent’ protagonist Rocco, guilty of killing a man for boasting that he had seduced his wife Ilaria. In the original, Rocco is referred to only sporadically – by Ilaria at the beginning of the story and then by Mattia, who cites his good behaviour in prison – and there is no direct mention of pastoral life, if we exclude one 75 Grazia Deledda, ‘Dramma’, in Idem, Il fanciullo nascosto (1928), reprinted in Deledda 1996b: 275-281. 76 Olla 2008: 133. 77 Ibid., 133-134. See also Casadio 1990.

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reference to a shepherd who drinks too much. By contrast, the film starts with Ilaria following a silent path into the village, where she goes to the chemist for medicine to treat gunshot wounds. The scene’s suspense leads to the expectation of a bandit requiring treatment for his wounds. Clarification arrives immediately when a hue and cry starts, with the villagers accusing the woman of helping her husband evade capture after killing a man. Running from her pursuers, Ilaria takes refuge in a church, where one of the Carabinieri who finds her cannot resist remarking “They’re a bad lot, these shepherds” – a simple observation which serves to highlight the southern setting in which the whole story unfolds. We thus discover that Rocco has killed to save his wife’s honour, and that his act is that of a desperate man, not an evil one. The figure of this outlaw is set against the background of a primitive pastoral world where honour is defended by blood feud, but rather than being a choice it appears as an almost unavoidable obligation, and one that entails a sin which has to be atoned for. Despite the lack of a specifically Sardinian setting and the fact that the story revolves around the relationship between Ilaria and Don Mattia, the film thus deliberately accentuates the bond between the South and banditry. What is it that makes the film’s setting so undeniably ‘southern’? In the first place the spectator’s impression of being catapulted into an archaic place, of being transported into a bizarre world where the material and moral conditions of life are far removed from the civilised world. Ilaria spends most of her time in the tavern, which looks like a cave and becomes her prison.78 The almost total lack of light and the paucity of the furnishings contribute to creating an impression of poverty and backwardness. Everything appeals to the concept of the South as the negative pole opposed to the modern, civilised North. The rest of the film is shot in interiors or in the village streets. These settings lack any reminder of the festivities or traditions of Sardinian life, nor are there any traditional costumes. In the whole film there is just one explicit reference to the island, when mention is made of Oliena wine – otherwise the story could have taken place anywhere in the South.79 Despite a few references to Sardinian folklore, a similar strategy is adopted in Delitto per amore (Genina 1950), loosely based 78 79

Olla 2008: 134. Ibid., 133.

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on Grazia Deledda’s novel L’edera (1908). The opening shot pans across a parched, desolate landscape to settle on the roofs of the houses in a village. We glimpse a few courtyards, the alleys marking the chaotic layout of the village. Chipped-walled houses alternate with fleeting views of places looking more like caves than buildings – the general impression is of extreme poverty and backwardness. The camera shows nooks and crannies, windows reduced to empty gaps punctuating the surfaces of walls from which human faces and animals’ heads (a sheep, a cow) protrude, as if to embody the vagueness of the border between the state of nature and civilisation. The men and women in the camera’s gaze are in traditional costume: the former wear the classical Sardinian black and white outfit, while the latter are distinguished by their wide skirts, aprons and the obligatory headscarf. Their faces recall a far-off traditional world elsewhere extinct, and when they look into the camera the spectator has the illusion of actually entering the physical and cultural space defined as the South. This imaginary transposition is confirmed by the vision of a veritable parade of figures in pose or involved in household duties with everyday objects. The scene satisfies the desire to portray that world as an elsewhere far removed from the parameters of civility, so when a bailiff turns up at the house of the Cherchi family to impound their property he can only wonder “Are there any gentlemen here?”.80 This film, too, is dominated by interiors, of which the most important is that of the De Cherchi family residence, seen here as an example of a southern bourgeois home with no particularly Sardinian features.81 The setting is evoked by scenes recalling the island’s traditions, such as preparations for the famous Ardia horse race and for the village festivity, though in the latter case little attention is reserved for the costumes and Sardinian dance, which are characteristic features.82 Instrumental in the creation of a Southern setting are the scenes depicting daily life in the streets and alleys of the village. The people busy with their domestic chores constitute a picturesque but plausible picture of life in the South at the time. By 80

See also Olla 2008: 51. Ibid. 82 Ibid., 138. 81

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contrast, an obviously bogus representation of Sardinian folklore is to be found in the comedy Vendetta... sarda (Mattòli 1951), where a celebration is marked by the distinctive rhythms of a Tarantella, a type of music and dance far removed from the rigours of Sardinian culture. Such evident falsification does not seem to be explicable solely in terms of comic licence, but can be traced to the idea that Sardinia is part of the South, where local festivities and traditional dances have great symbolic meaning, whatever the ‘details’ of the staging. Compared with the tradition of travel writings which sometimes provide detailed accounts of the natural features of the places visited, cinema chose to simplify the image of the South in its settings. In the case of Sardinia, while the influence of Deledda’s writings had the stories set in the Nuoro area – filmed on location or artificially evoked, recourse was repeatedly made to models considered typical of a generic South, where the borders separating the various regional communities faded into invisibility. Mountains and Landscape Stationed in Sardinia in the early 19th century to conduct hydrological research and make a map of the island, British scientist and officer William Henry Smyth observed with great astonishment that Sardinians felt a strong aversion to the sea.83 Such an observation is less surprising to us, since this was part of the image of the island in the literary tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries, and this representation was taken up by cinema and used to convey the idea of an island-continent. The population’s detachment from the island’s coasts is one of the most distinctive features of its depiction in films, which constantly identify it as a mountainous land closed in on itself, in clear contrast to its character as an island. The outstanding consequence of this premise was the predominance of the mountain landscape in the island’s portrayal – in the earliest films the stories set in Sardinia were usually introduced with views of mountains.84 In Cenere (Mari 1916), based on Grazia Deledda’s story of the same title (1903), the opening shot of a sunlit mountain scene is accompanied by the caption “On the slopes of the Gennargentu” and is followed by a mother and child at one with 83 84

Smyth 1828: 107. “These mountains hold the veritable Sardes of Sardinia”: Edwardes 1889: 47.

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nature. Shot in Gallura, Cainà (Righelli 1922) begins with the caption “Fantastic panorama of the giants of Sardinia” and a view of the same.85 It is on those “sun-drenched mountains” that we witness the tragic fate of the girl who is punished for wishing to leave the island and discover the mainland. The reference to the mountains as “giants” was not an unusual one. About a decade earlier, Max Leopold Wagner concluded his description of the Gennargentu region with the remark that the closer one gets to them the clearer it becomes that the name ‘the island’s giants’ is fully justified.86 Though shot for the most part in interiors and using artificial backdrops, La grazia (De Benedetti 1929) opens with a vista of snow-covered mountain tops. The same procedure is to be found in many post-war films, which show mountains and a rural landscape characterised by rocks, rugged promontories and low-growing scrub. It is an unspoilt, wild and lonely landscape which excites a sense of mystery and expectation in the viewer. So begins Delitto per amore (Genina 1950), shot in the village of Oliena, near Nuoro:87 unlike Deledda’s novel L’edera (1908), which opens with the village festivities, its opening credits are backed by a dry mountain landscape with low-growing bushy vegetation. Amore rosso (Vergano 1952), also based on a novel by the same writer (Marianna Sirca, 1915) was shot in the Gallura countryside between the villages of Aggius and Tempio, not in the Nuoro setting used in the original.88 The film’s first scene depicts a rocky landscape and mountains from which a vast panorama is enjoyed, until the appearance of a man armed with a shotgun. The film’s opening thus combines two Sardinian icons – the mountain landscape and a bandit. In addition to these features, the suspense in Proibito (Monicelli 1954) is augmented by the view of a coach driving along a dusty road towards an unknown destination. This opening plunges the spectator into the heart of an arid mountain area where the only sign of a human presence is the coach moving quickly along a dusty track. All around are mountains and rocks, nothing but rocks. 85

See note 54. Wagner 1908a: 105. 87 Olla 2008: 51. 88 Ibid., 140. 86

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Whether made of rock or papier-mâché, then, mountains constituted the first icon of Sardinia in cinema, and they stood as the dominating backdrop to the vast majority of films. It should be borne in mind, however, that shooting a film in Sardinia in the early 20th century was a demanding financial and organisational enterprise, so despite the best intentions it was not always possible to film on the island, especially in the province of Nuoro, where communications were particularly difficult.89 To reduce the problems and save money in filming in Sardinia, especially in the early days, the favourite location was Gallura, in the north-east of the island. Though different from the Barbagia, it had the characteristics considered essential for a proper representation of the island’s essence: first of all its rugged terrain, dominated by sharp peaks and massive rocks of enormous visual impact, and secondly scarce signs of human habitation and broad, thinly populated spaces with scattered settlements, able to communicate a sense of profound solitude and real desolation. Gallura was thus an ideal location able to function as a presentable replacement for the setting of the Barbagia. Most films were therefore set in the Barbagia or a place similar to it such as Gallura. As time went by the Nuoro area became more accessible for shooting, so a number of films give us a faithful representation of that seemingly mysterious and impenetrable world. An example is the view of the Supramonte seen at the beginning of Vittorio De Seta’s Banditi a Orgosolo (1961). There follows a long semi-documentary scene depicting a mouflon hunt in the thick woods of the Barbagia and herdsmen having lunch. Most of the story takes place out of doors, in the mountain pastures where the herdsmen live out their solitary lives. The landscape is beautiful and remote, a habitat harsh in the extreme – the protagonists negotiate woods, parched terrains, mountains and steep paths in what is actually a pilgrimage through the nature around the Supramonte.90 The mountain icon has proved to be highly durable, at least as seen in the recent television drama L’ultima frontiera (Bernini 2006),91 which opens with breathtaking views of the Barbagia landscape: a succession of wooded heights patrolled by eagles, a symbol of freedom. The strident musical soundtrack adds to the 89

Ibid., 25-26. Ibid. 91 A specific analysis of this film is made in chapter 6, section L’ultima frontiera. 90

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impression of majestic, overpowering beauty. This is accompanied by shots of a man and a woman grieving over the body of a loved one, found dead. After clutching his body she shows bloodied hands and blood on her breast. Her outstretched hand, holding a chain with a cross, seems to express the promise of revenge. This Barbagian vendetta takes us back to the primitive setting in which the mountains evoke a nature magnificent, inaccessible and wild, where the very flora and fauna become actors in an archaic, exotic world. We are also taken back to Wagner’s words referring to magnificent oak and chestnut woods stretching across the mountain slopes and on the Gennargentu framing the old eagles’ nests forgotten by the world.92 This television production contains all the traditional images of the Sardinian landscape which regularly cause vibrant protests on the part of the islanders but are the features which fascinate Italian viewers in general, since they correspond to the Sardinia codified in the popular imagination. An essential aspect of this representation is the image of the Barbagia as a hotbed of banditry. In L’ultima frontiera, a story loosely based on Giulio Bechi’s book Caccia grossa (19001; 19142), an officer is sent to the island at the end of the 19th century as part of a largescale military operation designed to arrest as many Sardinian outlaws as possible.93 In the television production, as in the book, banditridden Sardinia has to be civilised by the Italian government, which means that the island-mainland relationship reproposes the classical North-South and centre-periphery dichotomies. If the mountains are the image symbolising Sardinia in cinema, it is the mountain area of the Barbagia which stands as the primary symbol. According to Wagner, these are mountain locations cut off from the world, difficult to reach and virtually unknown, placed around the island’s giant, Gennargentu (1834 m), the highest peak of the wild Ichnusa.94 This mountain area is covered by impenetrable forests and devoid of a proper road network, as a result of which travel in it and control of it have always been precarious. They constitute the beating heart of the province of Nuoro, where animal husbandry has always been the main 92

Wagner 1913-1914: 12. See chapter 1, section Sardinia in European Literature before 1900. 94 Wagner 1913-1914: 1. 93

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economic resource. Such was the fascination the area exerted on the visitor that Wagner went as far as to exclaim “How beautiful is the Barbagia, as primordial and virgin as few regions still left in the old Europe!”.95 The fascination of these naturally majestic areas was augmented by the fame of the communities living in them. The inhabitants of the Barbagia continued and still continue to feel themselves to be the heirs of the Civitates Barbariae who, we are told by a Roman inscription,96 so ferociously opposed Roman conquest. The image of these mountains thus evokes the memory of their inhabitants’ indomitable spirit, it is a metaphor of the tough, free land that so fascinated all its visitors and that Grazia Deledda depicted in such rich detail. And in the cinematic imagination the image reinforces the bond between the people of those mountains and the memory of their past. This stands as a full-blown case of the territorialisation of memory.97 The Barbagian shepherd-bandit becomes the embodiment of that world and in films dealing with banditry the characters and the landscape mirror each other perfectly. In such a harsh environment, requiring discipline, wit and a great ability to adapt, the figure of the bandit stands out as the anthropological synthesis of a world which is primitive, wild and indomitable. Exemplary in this regard is a scene from Barbagia. La società del malessere (Lizzani 1969), in which the congruence of the concepts Sardinia-Barbagia-banditry reaches its maximum.98 Though it was shot in the most remote areas of Gallura rather than the Barbagia,99 the film stands as an ode to the feral beauty of the latter (Supramonte/Barbagia) and moral stature of its inhabitants. It opens with an imposing view of the Supramonte di Orgosolo, the backdrop for an outlaw hunt of unprecedented scale and intensity. As agents of the law use dogs to try to reach the most inaccessible bandit hideouts, the tension is fuelled by the chop-chopping sound of a helicopter ready, like a bird of prey, to swoop down on the fugitives. The pictures show a full-blown military operation being carried out on the mountain slopes, on which the footsoldiers appear as ants running this way and that in a frenzied search for the slightest clue. Above the 95

Wagner 1913-1914: 2. Zucca 1987: 349-373. 97 Smith 1999: 152. 98 On this film see Olla 2008: 161-163. 99 Olla 2008: 162. 96

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agitation stands the Supramonte, majestic and untouchable. Over these pictures runs a commentary: Orgosolo. Dawn on a morning in March 1968. The Barbagia is the innermost part of Sardinia. It’s a corner of Europe, but does not belong to Europe. European culture has not penetrated this far. Since the 4th century BC Sardinia has been dominated many times, but the dominators have never managed to conquer the Barbagia. In the rest of the island live people influenced by the customs of the conquerors. They are Sardinian collaborators – first Africanised, Semitised, Romanised, then Hispanicised and Piedmonticised, and now Americanised. The Barbagia is the land of fighters; perhaps the Sardinian shepherds are at year zero in terms of technological civilisation, but they are certainly in the year three thousand of their civilisation, a civilisation with barbaric features.100

The history of an unending struggle for freedom referred to in the commentary has its epicentre in the Supramonte. That mountain range thus stands as the symbol of the Sardinian people and embodies their indomitable spirit.101 The territory of the Barbagia is considered extraneous to modern civilisation, but also as the cradle of Sardinian culture par excellence, that of the nuraghe. The strength and power of the rock, impervious to helicopters, becomes the icon of the Sardinian people’s courage and spirit of rebellion against all invaders. This mirror-image of the Barbagia and the community living in it was remarked upon by a great many travellers in the island and the survival of such ancient customs was explained precisely in terms of the impenetrable environment. In his 1906 study of traditional 100

“Orgosolo. L’alba di un mattino del marzo ‘68. La Barbagia è la zona più interna della Sardegna. È un angolo d’Europa, ma non appartiene all’Europa. Qui la cultura europea non è penetrata. A partire dal IV secolo a.C. la Sardegna ha subito molte dominazioni, però i dominatori non sono mai riusciti a conquistare la Barbagia. Nel resto della Sardegna vivono popolazioni influenzate dai costumi dei dominatori: sono i sardi collaborazionisti, prima africanizzati, semitizzati, romanizzati, in seguito spagnolizzati, piemontesizzati e adesso americanizzati. La Barbagia è la terra dei resistenti; i pastori sardi saranno forse all’anno zero della civiltà tecnologica, ma sono certo all’anno tremila della loro civiltà, che è una civiltà con aspetti barbarici.” (Barbagia. La società del malessere, Lizzani 1969). 101 See chapter 1, section Tropes of Land: The Barbagia.

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Sardinian poetry, Wagner posited the indigenous origin of the mutos by tracing the melodies of these songs not only to the character of the people but to the nature of their environment.102 Based on his observation on the island he concluded that the Nuoro region was wild and inhospitable with rocks everywhere. Someone could ride for hours on end through scrubland and wild uplands, seeing the sun beating down until evening on fields of asphodel and grey nuraghi. According to him this nature aroused melancholy, and from it the inland Sardinian drew much of his austere character, so different from the vivacity of other southerners.103 That correspondence between the people’s character and the landscape became clear to him when he saw the nuraghe at Santa Barbara, near Macomer. He wrote: the areas around Nuoro and the Gennargentu are the heart of Sardinia. Here the mountain ranges join and reach their highest point in the Gennargentu massif. The few scattered settlements lie detached from the world, in the silence of their woodlands or perched above the mountain slopes. Man has kept himself as simple and austere as the nature of these places, and with him his patriarchal customs and conservative language. It is the world of the characters in Grazia Deledda’s stories and novels, and it is thanks only to that local writer that we know today of the existence of these lands, seldom visited and barely accessible.104

Though the mountains, and the Barbagia in particular, became icons of the island landscape, it should be remembered that even when films were shot in other locations there was never any doubt about the landscape model to be used: a primitive rural environment dominated by the primary economic activities of animal husbandry and agriculture. One example is the setting of Faddjia. La legge della vendetta in the province of Oristano.105 The innermost areas of this province constitute the natural border between cultivated lands and the prevalently pastoral areas of the province of Nuoro. Sardinian livestock herds are made to migrate seasonally, and part of that migration is towards the Oristano plains. The predominant landscape 102

Paulis 2001: 17. Ibid. 104 Wagner 1908b: 245. 105 Olla 2008: 136. 103

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is not mountainous, but again the central island setting is in an agricultural-pastoral economy, where farmers and herdsmen compete in exploiting the land. The film was shot in real contemporary locations, though the story is set in the distant past.106 The agriculturelivestock dichotomy is translated in landscape terms into the contrast between flourishing cultivated fields and the untilled lands left for pasture and sheep tracks. These two landscapes recall Maurice Le Lannou’s renowned study Pâtres et paysans de la Sardaigne (1941), which identified the essence of the Sardinian landscape precisely in the opposition between the world of peasant farmers and that of herdsmen. Needing to defend the land for pasture, the herdsman required a society with no private property and remained faithful to a migratory lifestyle. Peasant farmers required permanence, which they saw as the basis for the construction of a developed society. The film draws – somewhat bizarrely – on the social struggle under way at that time in Italy (especially in Sicily and Sardinia).107 In 1950 a number of agricultural reforms were introduced, particularly against the large feudal estates, with the aim of creating a class of agricultural smallholders.108 Among the consequences of these measures was an increase in the acquisition of property by rich landowners at the expense of land given over to pasture. In the Sardinia portrayed in Faddjia, then, the predominant landscape is an agricultural one, recalling an archaic world characterised by the struggle between farmers and shepherds and reinforcing the traditional cultural model based on the rule of honour. A film which contributed greatly to relaunching the model of the countryside as the realm of pasture and as the symbol of Sardinia was Padre padrone by the Taviani brothers (1977), which won the critics’ award at the Cannes Film Festival.109 It was based on an autobiographical novel (1975) by Gavino Ledda, an illiterate Sardinian shepherd who later became a renowned linguist and writer. Apart from an interpretation of the original which departed

106

Ibid., 134. Ibid., 135. 108 Ginsborg 1990: 121-185. See also chapter 4, note 110. 109 See Olla 2008: 170-172. 107

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significantly from the author’s intentions,110 the film offers a snapshot of Sardinia in line with the classical parameters of the popular imagination and thus helped to consolidate them in the European mind. It shows a slice of life in the Sardinian sheepfolds, immersed in a virgin habitat of extreme harshness, as experienced by the young Gavino, symbol of the Sardinian shepherd. The film’s authoritarian father figure, though not a reflection of the original, appears at one with a natural environment which leaves no room for pity or tenderness. It is above all his astuteness and resilience against the harshness of the environment which enable him to survive in it. His child’s upbringing is a result of his wish to give him his own spirit of resistance to the destructive force of nature. His decision to take the child out of school and force him to live in the sheepfold is another reflection of the contrast between the world of nature and the world of culture. The Sardinia of Padre padrone is a land where people still live in the state of nature but, as the book shows us, there are clear signs that the situation is changing deeply.111 The world of the countryside portrayed in this film encapsulates two contrasting feelings: revulsion for the violence intrinsic to that lifestyle and a fatal attraction for a different, archaic world. These were sentiments associated ab antiquo with the literary image of the island. After a period of crisis in Italian cinema, film-makers’ interest in Sardinia began to return in the late 1980s.112 The films still depicted an island chronically torn between tradition and modernisation, but one in which it was no longer possible to claim that nothing had changed. This resulted in a different approach to the Sardinian landscape. With the passing of time the impression of the impact of change became increasingly marked; Sardinian identity was still equated with the classical image of the Barbagia, but the picture was beginning to crack and show signs of decay. A decade after Padre padrone, the film Disamistade (Cabiddu 1988) again presented the Supramonte as the icon of a Sardinia torn by conflicts (disamistades) between shepherd-bandit families.113 The main character is a man who tries to avoid the obligation to exact revenge, but ends up as an outlaw and performs his duty as a balente – a man of honour according to the 110

See chapter 2, notes 20 and 21. Marci 2006: 262-263. 112 Olla 2008: 93-97. 113 Ibid., 105 and 178. 111

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code of the Barbagia. His school education should have been enough to draw him away from the feuds of his native village, but in the end he is unable to escape them and falls into the trap of local tradition. The film thus stands as a stark re-statement of the Supramontebanditry representation, showing the inevitability of the shepherdbandit’s fate. Having been actually shot in the heart of the Barbagia, the film presents a series of its symbolic sites, such as Tiscali cave, where the young man hides out on the run from the law. The present archaeological site of Tiscali was a village hidden in a natural hollow where a local community took refuge from the Roman occupation of Sardinia about 1,500 years ago. Despite his adherence to the trope of the Barbagia, the director departed from the classical image of the outlaw as a romantic hero. Though good-looking, the protagonist proves to be cold and calculating, trying under all circumstances to gain the maximum benefit for himself and his family, even at expense of the feelings of the woman he loves. The film’s merit lies precisely in the ambivalence it creates between the characters and the landscape, in a way running counter to the traditional mythical idea of Sardinia.114 The image of traditional Sardinia and its attendant values continued to predominate for a long period, being called into question only rarely, as happened with the only comedy productions set in the island: Vendetta... sarda (Mattòli 1951) and Una questione d’onore (Zampa 1966).115 Their irony was used as an instrument to lay bare the falsehood behind the Sardinian icons of the Barbagia and banditry. They trotted out the classical tropes in such a way as to make them grotesque, but also provided glimpses of the profound changes that were overtaking what was still considered an archaic and immobile world. Since Vendetta... sarda was shot in the studios at Cinecittà, the real Sardinian landscape never appears. The action starts in Milan and then shifts to the fictional Sardinian village of Dente di Canu (“Dogtooth”). The contrived settings – including the donkeys (“Sardinian steeds”) and stables turned into a car-park (“car-pork”) – contain all the usual clichés, but an unmistakable sign of change is found in the opening of the “Gennargentu Oasis of Peace” hotel in the 114 115

Ibid., 178. On this film ibid., 141-142 and 151-153.

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heart of bandit-ridden Barbagia, bearing witness to the fact that even in this forgotten backwater the tourist industry was making its presence felt and one of the main things which attracted tourists was the location’s fame as an untamed land. As a sign of modernisation, the presence of the hotel threw light on the contrast between the Sardinia of popular imagination and the real thing. The second comedy, Una questione d’onore, was actually shot on the island, although its theme – the murder of an adulterous wife – is more commonly associated with Sicilian culture.116 The choice of the setting probably had a lot to do with the coeval recrudescence of banditry. A series of elements in the film give the impression that its makers knew the work of Antonio Pigliaru and were well versed in Sardinian traditions and folklore.117 Only parts of the film were shot in agricultural-pastoral and mountain areas – the hills and sheepfolds of Gallura are recognisable, as are the limestone rocks of Oliena – but it also features the east-coast tourist centres of Orosei and Posada, Cala Gonone (one of the island’s most renowned bays) and the salt pans of Assemini/Capoterra in the south.118 The image of the Sardinian landscape presented in this film is thus much more varied that the one generally offered. Homage is paid to the idea of Sardinia as the place where the vendetta holds sway, but alongside mountains and flocks of sheep we see tourist beaches and in particular the villas of the Costa Smeralda, the area of Gallura whose modern development leaves no room for the code of the Barbagia.119 The virility of the Sardinian, faithful to his code of honour, is replaced by the preference of the modern Sardinian for a seaside holiday in pleasant company over the obligations of the vendetta.120 And this human profile was the protagonist of a new landscape which took on increasing substance in those years: the artificial landscape produced by tourist development. In recent years a number of films have returned to the image of Sardinia as the Barbagia, but they have captured the contradictions within the island’s social structure. The trope of a wild, primitive land continues to exert a strong cinematic attraction, then, but most of the film-makers who have dealt with the theme in the last two decades have been Sardinian. The viewpoint has therefore changed: an inward 116

Ibid., 152. Ibid., 152-153. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid., 151-153. 120 Ibid., 153. 117

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gaze is now used to explore individual origins. In some cases tropes are resorted to in the interests of viewing figures (the television drama L’ultima frontiera by Franco Bernini, 2006), but other films have had the courage to present classical images of the island in a more problematic and complex light (Arcipelaghi and La destinazione). Sardinia-Barbagia has thus become a metaphor for the irreconcilable contradiction between the choice to modernise – now irreversible – and the bond with tradition, which remains strong. The image of a land divided between tradition and innovation is indeed one of the interpretative keys of literary discourse and historical-political debate in the second half of the 20th century. These are the terms that should guide an interpretation of the glimpses of landscape and settings shown in the films released since the 1980s: traditional places that remind us of past customs, such as the religious sanctuary, the shepherd’s hut and the village bar, are juxtaposed with features confirming the modernity of the island’s lifestyle. Everyday life in the villages around Nuoro have their share of the habits (vices) of our times and what remains of old traditions can no longer conceal the real irrational and criminal nature of types of behaviour too easily justified under the Barbagian code of honour. Exemplary in this regard is Arcipelaghi (2001), by Sardinian director Giovanni Columbu, based on Maria Giacobbe’s novel Gli arcipelaghi (1995).121 The story takes place during the trial of a boy accused of murdering a shepherd, during which a series of flashbacks allows a reconstruction of the context of the event and a laborious discovery of the truth.122 The film was shot in the villages of Ovodda and Fonni, in the heart of the Nuoro province. It shows the mountain villages and the sheepfolds of present-day Sardinia, but does not dwell greatly on the famed landscape. In this regard certain Barbagia images may be said to be absent, while attention is focused on the dynamics at work in the community and in the life of the village. The natural landscape is largely obscured by modern sheepfolds, centres of capitalist production which fall prey to full-blown criminals who have nothing in common with the romanticised image of the traditional bandit. It is a landscape which is losing at least part of its primitive 121 122

See chapter 2, section People: The Bandit – from Hero to Anti-hero. Olla 2008: 187-188.

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charm. Though the vegetation is dense, the roads through it are increasingly used by cars and other motor vehicles – open spaces shrink and the human imprint on the land deepens and expands. What prevails is not the majesty of the landscape, symbol of the sense of freedom and the indomitable spirit of its people, but the dense network of personal relations built up in the streets and alleys of the village, relations which turn into hypocrisy, conspiratorial silence and above all the pursuit of personal interest.123 In other words, the Barbagia landscape as a forceful icon of Sardinian identity seems to fade and lose its quality of impregnability, showing itself as a place like any other in the world, dominated by crime and selfishness. Social-political Marginality The Sardinia depicted in films is in a condition of chronic inferiority with respect to the centres of political power. With the rest of the South the island shares a centuries-old history of foreign domination which has driven it to a marginal position. There is a constant expression in Sardinian literature, especially up to the mid-20th century, of being denied an autonomous development, which gave rise to the idea of Sardinia as a land without a history. Its peripheral position seems to be the result of a history imposed rather than independently built – thousands of years of successive colonisations deprived it of any autonomous development.124 As the island’s subordinate position did not change a great deal even after Italian unification, the Italy-Sardinia relationship was an expression of the centre-periphery dichotomy, and was in turn reflected in cinema. Historically the island was primarily a place of exile, punishment and atonement, as is the case with the officer Gabriele De Marchi, protagonist of L’ultima frontiera, transferred there as punishment for his scandalous love-life, some episodes of which involved the wives of prominent politicians. While exile is coercive by nature, there are also characters who choose the island as a place of voluntary seclusion, such as Sara in Pesi leggeri (Pau 2001), who attempts to recover from a painful separation by isolating herself there. Understood as the centre of power, the mainland is represented in films by the state institutions present on the island, designed to 123 124

Ibid., 188. See chapter 1, section Sardinia in European Literature before 1900.

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impose rules and distribute punishment. These take the form of the courts and the Carabinieri, the two faces of authority always visible, seen as instruments of control and oppression exerted by an extraneous power. Cinema gives visual expression to the power of the Italian state over Sardinia by showing the detested face of ‘justice’. This abstract concept, which in the local culture is a synonym of ‘a conviction’ takes concrete form in two actions executed by the powers-that-be: trials and the military patrolling of the villages and areas considered to be hotbeds of banditry. The police stationed on the island, along with the inevitable Carabinieri stations, are supposed to express the strength and effectiveness of state power on the ground, but in fact their massive presence is a sign of the difficulty of the struggle that the state is obliged to undertake against the local community to impose its own rule of law. When the Sardinian question came to the fore in the cultural debate of the 1960s, a number of people asserted that it was time to put an end to the oppressive policy adopted by the Italian state. One of the most authoritative cultural voices in journalism stated that “in the Barbagia there is a wall between the police and the people, built by the state over centuries of authoritarianism and indiscriminate repression. It may be true to say that the people do not cooperate with the state institutions, but it is more true to say the opposite, that the state institutions have never cooperated with the people”.125 Other journalists took the opposite view, proposing a full-blown military expedition in Sardinia, urging the use of gas to force criminals into the open, calling for anybody seen in remote mountain areas to be shot at on sight, even suggesting the mass deportation of the population of the Barbagia and the burning of the woods.126 In those years cinema exploited the controversy whipped up around the Sardinian question, picking out images and expressions which relaunched the myth of a primitive, uncivilised island. Above all it projected a visual reproduction of the unequal relationship 125

Fiori 2001: 127: “C’è in Barbagia, tra popolazioni e polizia, una muraglia edificata dallo Stato in secoli d’autoritarismo e di repressioni indiscriminate. Dicendo che la popolazione non collabora con le istituzioni dello Stato si può essere nel vero, ma ancora più vero è il rovescio, che le istituzioni dello Stato non hanno mai collaborato con le popolazioni”. 126 Ibid., 128.

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between the island and the Italian state – strongly influenced by Gramsci’s writings, whose ideas were mediated by different authors as Pigliaru, Cagnetta and Fiori – presenting the Barbagia as the topos of the contrast between two worlds and two laws.127 The heart of Sardinia became the scene of the resolution of the dispute between Sardinian rebels and Italian ‘colonial’ power.128 The Barbagia landscape was the symbolic locus for the clash between the forces of the centre and the periphery. If the Barbagia is the place where the code of the Barbagia holds sway, in Le due leggi (Mulargia 1963) the hatred between two men divided by a family feud has to be resolved in the mountains because, as one of them says, “mountain law rules here”.129 By the same code, he who kills to redeem the honour stained by insult chooses to leave his village, becomes an outlaw and hides in the mountains, where he can live free. From the model of the romantic bandit of Simone Sole in Amore rosso (Vergano 1952) to the last tragic figure of the anti-heroic outlaw, Sonetàula, in the film of the same name (Mereu 2008), cinema has given us many examples of escapes acted out by men who decide to relinquish their village lives and take to the hills in order to avoid prison and remain free men. When Marianna suggests to her loved one (Simone Sole) that he give himself up so as to be able to start a new life with her once he has atoned for his crimes, he will have none of it: when men like him are arrested “they slam the door behind us and throw the key into the sea”.130 Likewise Michele, the shepherd of Banditi a Orgosolo, has no choice but to go on the run. Though he has done nothing wrong the evidence points to him, and surrendering to ‘justice’ means being thrown into prison, even as an innocent man, “for as long as ten years, twenty, thirty”. So his little brother Peppeddu understands and approves of his decision to run – how could a blameless man stay locked up for so long? One constant which renders the island’s feeling of inferiority to the mainland is the massive presence of police and Carabinieri, engaged in imposing state law and fighting banditry. The mountain landscape is shown as the natural space in which the state’s coercive power is expressed in the peremptory violence of the round-up. 127

See chapter 2, section Sardinia in European Literatuur after 1900. Pigliaru 2000: 354-357; Cagnetta 2002: 117-118; 275-280. 129 “qui vige la legge della montagna”. 130 “chiudono la porta dietro di noi, buttano la chiave in mare”. 128

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Patrols and round-ups are shown repeatedly in films of the 1950s and ‘60s (Pelle di bandito and Barbagia. La società del malessere) and also in more recent productions (La destinazione and L’ultima frontiera). In Proibito (Monicelli 1954) the Carabinieri attempt to find Costantine Corraine’s band who are hiding in an inaccessible mountain cave. In Sequestro di persona (Mingozzi 1968) the state shows its ugliest face in the round-up conducted in the fortress of Posada – a whole village, perched high on a hill, is involved in the operation as Carabinieri with dogs break into houses, take people away and detain and search everyone, women and children included.131 The vicious barking of the dogs helps to create the impression of brute force. Metaphorical significance and a premonition of a future on the run is provided by the opening scene of Pelle di bandito (Livi 1969). In this film, based on the biography of the most famous bandit of the time – Graziano Mesina, whose name in the film is Mariano De Linna – the story begins with the image of the mountain world in which the protagonist, still a boy, is a shepherd. Two men try to take the flock he is tending. The boy asks them if he can smoke. Asked whether he is afraid of being alone, the future bandit replies that he fears no-one. Forged by the natural state of the mountain landscape, the shepherd is the synthesis of the virtues required for survival in such a harsh environment.132 As an adult, tempered by life on the Supramonte, Graziano Cassitta, personification of Graziano Mesina in Barbagia. La società del malessere, observes “A shepherd knows a bed three times in his life. When he’s born, when he takes a wife and when he dies”.133 A decade later the Barbagia appears unchanged: in Dove volano i corvi d’argento (Livi 1977) the mountains are the realm of freedom for the outlaw Simbula. Even for he who is not a bandit, but ‘just’ a shepherd, it is in the mountains that his state as a free man finds full expression. The protagonist of Una casa sotto il cielo (Locci 1987) shouts wildly into the mountains to celebrate his salvation from the condition of servant-shepherd and his elevation to the ownership 131

Olla 2008: 155. On this film see chapter 6, section Sequestro di persona. See chapter 1, section People: Shepherds and Bandits. 133 “Il pastore conosce il letto solo tre volte nella vita: quando nasce, quando prende moglie e poi quando muore”. 132

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of a flock, which means his attainment of freedom. In La destinazione (Sanna 2003), set in the present day, Sardinia’s subordinate position with respect to central government power does not seem to have changed much – the main aim of the Carabinieri stationed in the area seems to be to gain control of the mountain areas in the province of Nuoro. Just as they did a century ago, agents of the law hunt the bandits hiding out in rocky ravines, using increasingly potent human and technological resources to get the better of that indomitable landscape and its people. Even in the absence of bandits the presence of the state is experienced as coercion. In the opening episode of Ballo a tre passi (Mereu 2003), the only piece of dialogue not spoken in the Sardinian dialect is in the mouth of a policeman who uses standard Italian – even though he was born on the island – to reprimand a lorry-driver on his way to pick up a load of sand from a prohibited military zone.134 The language difference is used to mark the division between the authorities and the local community. In visual terms the divide is expressed by the absence of the speaking policeman from the screen – we see instead a group of children behind the lorry who greet the prohibition with a series of obscene gestures. This response expresses an attitude of rebellion entirely intrinsic to the community, a learned and shared social behaviour.135 Alongside the centre-periphery dichotomy in the feeling of conflict between the central government and Sardinia is the reverse of the same trope on a regional scale. The centre of political power in the island is the regional capital Cagliari, considered as caput Sardiniae since antiquity. It has always been the seat of power, whether that power was invested in Roman magistrates or Spanish viceroys. The city-dwellers traditionally despise those living in the island’s interior, considering them vastly inferior. The world of the Barbagia described by Grazia Deledda is in their eyes merely the product of an excited poetic imagination and for them the centre of that world thus remains periphery.136 This contradiction between the urban world and that of the interior is made explicit in films: the city is the symbol of progress and luxury, but it easily lapses into its opposite, becoming an icon of

134

See Urban 2011: 91. Ibid. 136 Wagner 1913-1914: 3. Idem 2001:153. 135

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decadence.137 The pastoral model presents the wild and splendid landscape, the home of true Sardinian civilisation, free despite a succession of colonisations, while the towns are above all the product of foreign occupiers who used coercive power to impose their own lifestyles on the islanders. As in the literary representation of Sardinia, in cinema the power relationship between the centre (Cagliari) and the periphery (the rest of island) turns to the advantage of the Nuoro province. It is in the Barbagia that the essence of the island’s identity is located, so the periphery of the civilised world becomes the epicentre of the real Sardinia. This reversal is expressed on screen in the centrality of the Nuoro area with respect to the coastal and agricultural plains. The real protagonists of Sardinian cinema are either Barbagians or evoke such an anthropological model, just as literature reminds us that the farther we go from the Barbagia the more its distinctive characteristics fade and the human profile changes. Thus, according to Wagner, “the places that are located on the slopes of the Gennargentu beyond this line do not possess the wild fascination of the Nuoro area. They lie docile, hidden by handsome forests, and as the landscape becomes less harsh, the characteristics of their inhabitants become gentler”.138 In conclusion, cinema successfully relaunched the model of the Barbagia as the imaginary centre of the island’s culture and prestige, just as the linguist Wagner proclaimed early in the 20th century that only in the heart of the Nuoro area “does there survive a picturesque patriarchal society that recalls the Homeric and Biblical life and that the real Sardinia, the one worth visiting, is here and here alone”.139 The topos of the Barbagia became so all-encompassing in cinema that it is only recently that a few glimpses of coastal and urban landscapes have emerged from behind the peaks of the Gennargentu. Exoticism and Wilderness In the 1950s Italian film-makers began an attempt to exploit the success of films on the American Wild West legend by setting up a kind of syncretism between the southern Italian genre and the western 137

Leerssen 2007a: 280. Wagner 1908c: 269. 139 Wagner 1913-1914: 3. 138

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model.140 As is well known, the refined use of landscape shots is one of the basic characteristics of westerns,141 but the adoption of techniques typical of that genre and the search for terrains which could recreate the feeling of the great American prairie started from the ideological assumption that the Italian South had a great deal in common with the wild frontier. It is enough to call to mind some of the classical features of the South to grasp the many points of contact in the popular imagination between the Wild West and what may be called the southern frontier. As a land on the edge of civilisation, inhabited by primitive, violent savages, a place where the only law that counted was that of blood, the South readily lent itself to that identification. In 20thcentury Italian literature, for that matter, as recalled by the very title of the novel Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Levi 1945), the lands located beyond that edge represented a world extraneous to civil progress. Given these assumptions, the adoption of western-style production values was likely to succeed in the representation of the southern landscape. This tendency accounts for a number of films set in Sicily, but it also featured Sardinian films such as Delitto per amore (Genina 1950). In the final scene the male lead, Don Paulu De Cherchi, gallops in pursuit of the woman he loves, who is leaving town in a carriage. The surrounding country appears as a parched, desolate plateau, and the camera-work emphasises the impetus of the rush through a landscape similar to the Wild West. Something very similar is seen in Amore rosso (1952). At the beginning the wagon of the protagonist, Marianna Sirca, is assailed by bandits in a scene recalling an attack by gunslingers. But the final scene is loaded with implications redolent of western narrative models: in a rugged rocky landscape the woman fights a duel to the death with the murderer of her man, and as she pursues him up a cliff-face the camera follows the pair in their laborious climb up the rocky wall. Critics discussed this scene in terms of an explicit reference to King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946), but also of an anticipation of a number of features of the spaghettiwestern genre.142

140

Olla 2008: 51-52. Mills 1997. 142 Olla 2008: 51. 141

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The use of landscape photography achieved its most spectacular results in Proibito (Monicelli 1954).143 This film serves up all the elements already seen in other films of the period, but they are taken to extremes, above all as a result of the decision to render the story more spectacular than is the case in Deledda’s intimate-style novel La madre, on which the film is based. The film actually draws on elements from a number of her works, which makes the screenplay “a patchwork of Deledda’s themes”144 and betrays an intent to exaggerate the features in the literature that appeal to the Sardinian images most attractive to the public. The film’s climax is a duel between two bandits on horseback. The pursuit and the fight take place in a broad arid valley with the mountains in the background. It was no coincidence that the success of the 1960s genre of the spaghettiwestern should directly involve Sardinia. A number of films set near the American border in Mexico were shot on the island, and a whole village, San Salvatore di Sinis, was built for the purpose.145 Sardinian bandit country corresponded to an increasing degree to the far-off untamed lands of the Wild West. Comedy films also made use of the Sardinia-Wild West trope, as in one of the funniest scenes in Vendetta... sarda (1951), a spoof of an attack on a stagecoach. Against a parched, rocky landscape where nothing grows but cactus, the helpless passengers try desperately to elude the shots fired by the bandits, bizarrely dressed in Sardinian costume, in an attempt to kill their enemy in the coach. This is an ironic reversal of the dramatic Wild West-style pursuit already seen in Delitto per amore (Genina 1950). In the next comedy, Una questione d’onore (Zampa 1966), the identification of Sardinia with the Wild West is further strengthened. It opens with the usual panorama of the Sardinian mountains, as a series of captions, accompanied by typical western music, informs us of the island’s essential features: Sardinia: 24,084 square kilometres, a population of 967,000 people, 4,345,000 sheep, 8,200 flyweight boxers, 36,250 Carabinieri... 143

Ibid., 52. Ibid. 145 Bill il Taciturno (Max Hunter 1966), Giarrettiera colt (Gian Rocco 1967), Dio perdoni la mia pistola (Mario Gariazzo and Leopoldo Savona 1966/1969) are some of the films shot in San Salvatore di Sinis: Olla 2008:150-151;154;158-159. 144

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…On October 7th 1954, Sardinia attained Regional autonomy – a constitutional measure right and proper, long awaited, and completely pointless, as the Sardinian people have always been autonomous in every way, perhaps even too much so. Sardinia, past and present alike, makes the celebrated Wild West of a hundred years ago look like a country which is slightly restless. Among other things, this film intends to rectify that historical injustice.146

At the end of this preamble the camera focuses on the posters advertising a western film entitled Il piombo e la carne (“Lead and Flesh”): they are at the entrance of a Sardinian cinema where, as it happens, a murder is being committed. At which point a shout is heard: “Somebody call the sheriff!” The Italian film industry thus exploited the popular success of the Wild West, but the use of western-style features was possible because the Sardinian landscape recalled a lawless, uncivilised world not very different from the one depicted in the American legend. Once again, it was the representation of Sardinia (and of the whole South) in the popular imagination which stimulated and vindicated that identification. Yet the symbolic identification of Sardinia with the Wild West has continued until the present day. The very title of the television film L’ultima frontiera (Bernini 2006) explicitly recalls the idea of a land on the edge of the civilised world, a land that can only be introduced to progress and civilisation through its conquest and liberation by the more advanced Piedmontese.147 This viewpoint is corroborated by various narrative elements, such as the scene of an attack on an army coach carrying an officer back to the mainland before he is replaced by the protagonist Gabriele De Marchi – it is shot exactly along the classical lines of an Indian attack on a stagecoach.

146

“La Sardegna: 24.084 km. quadrati, 967.000 abitanti, 4.3450.000 pecore, 8.200 pugili pesi mosca, 36.250 carabinieri… Il 7 ottobre 1954, la Sardegna ottenne l’autonomia regionale, un provvedimento costituzionalmente doveroso, a lungo invocato, ma assolutamente inutile, perché il popolo sardo è sempre stato autonomo sotto ogni punto di vista e da che mondo è mondo forse anche troppo. Il tanto celebrato Far West di cento anni addietro, appare al confronto della Sardegna di ieri e di oggi, appena come un paese moderatamente irrequieto. Questo film, fra l’altro, intende rimediare a questa ingiustizia storica.” (Una questione d’onore, Zampa 1966) 147 On this film see chapter 6, section L’ultima frontiera.

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Though there can be no doubt about the lasting influence of Westerns on films set in Sardinia, it should be remembered that in theoretical terms the conviction that the North-South relationship was a clash between contrasting societies (one considered civilised and superior, the other barbaric and inferior) was not only a basic feature of the ethno-centric assumptions of European culture and postRisorgimento Italian thought, it also appeared in the work of Antonio Gramsci. His writings became the object of careful analysis following the publication of his Prison Notebooks after the Second World War, at a time when Neorealism was becoming a major force in Italian cinema. In his essay on the Southern question and later in his reflections on the Risorgimento, Gramsci had already identified the main cause of the failure of unification as the hostile (and thus not properly national) nature of government policy towards the South, considered at the same level as a land to be colonised, ‘straightened out’ and ‘redeemed’, with no acknowledgement or value attached to the culture it expressed.148 It is thus no coincidence that while the influence of Westerns on Italian cinema was manifest in Southern-set films, in Sardinian cinema the symbolic depiction of a primitive land probably reached its climax when Gramsci’s teachings were transmitted to Italian culture by politically engaged authors such as Pigliaru, Fiori and Cagnetta. As observed in chapter 2, their viewpoint was centred on the dichotomy between a subordinate Sardinia and dominant mainland Italy, a vision reiterated in films featuring Sardinian banditry made in the 1960s and ‘70s – Pelle di bandito, Barbagia. La società del malessere, Sequestro di persona, I protagonisti and Dove volano i corvi d’argento. In these films the island’s status as a ‘colony’ is articulated at more than one level. First of all, there is the Barbagia and the Supramonte as the geo-symbol of a land besieged, continually subjected to round-ups, searches, preventative arrests and the like. Secondly, there is a full-blown physical clash between the Italian army and the local community, which considers the Italian state and law to be alien forces. And the dialogues constantly reflect a fight to the death between two systems of law, two philosophies of life and two irreconcilable worlds facing each other on unequal terms. Sardinia thus lent itself to be portrayed 148

Gramsci 1966: 63-73.

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on film as the ideal setting for the perennial struggle between dominant and subordinate forces, between conservative regimes and the revolutionary spirit.149 Sea and Tourism: Coast as Interface For a long time the coasts and the sea were largely absent from the cinematic image of Sardinia, in line with a conception of Sardinian culture in which it was a closed entity, separate from the world beyond the Tyrrhenian Sea. The island’s separateness from mainland Italy had been posited in the beginning of cinema in Cainà (1922), where the protagonist’s attempt to reach the mainland took on the scale of a collective tragedy. In the eyes of her fellow villagers Cainà had been bewitched by the sea and her desire to leave the island was unnatural, because it meant turning against the values of their community. However, when the girl decides to return after some time spent living on the mainland, she is thrown out and cursed by her own people. Even her flight into nature fails because she is unable to find peace, and her tragic end is played out among the wave-washed rocks. In this film Sardinia’s closed and separate nature stood as definitive existential characteristics, projected into a timeless vision of the island’s history. The cinematic imagination remained faithful to the above vision for a long time, and the first story set in the world of the coast and its fishermen was Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Wide Blue Road (1957).150 Based on the novel Squarciò (1956), by Franco Solinas, it tells the story of a clandestine fisherman in the Maddalena archipelago in north-east Sardinia. Since the film was shot on the Dalmatian coast, however, it shows little or nothing of the real Sardinia.151 The novel, a singular case in the literature of the time,152 was chosen as a result of the political convictions of director Pontecorvo, who wanted to send a 149 See for example the films Sierra maestra (Giannarelli 1968) and El Che Guevara (Heusch 1969), in which Sardinia is the geo-symbol of the struggle against conservative regimes, imperialism and capitalism. About these films Olla 2008: 155156 and 159. 150 See Olla 2008: 143-144. 151 Ibid., 143. 152 See chapter 2, sections Tropes of Land: Counter-images: the City and the Beach and People: Alternative Models, and chapter 4, section People: The ‘New’ Sardinian People.

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message of social criticism along the lines of La terra trema (1948). Visconti’s model is explicitly recalled in a number of scenes in Squarciò (1957), which show the chicanery of wholesalers and the idea of cooperation among fishermen as a way of freeing themselves of exploitation. Owing to a series of circumstances involving the film’s production and its director’s decisions, it is devoid of any specifically Sardinian references.153 It thus failed to develop the idea inspiring the original, which, as was lucidly explained at the time by Manlio Brigaglia, was to put forward an image of Sardinia radically different from the Barbagia trope.154 What interested Pontecorvo was the opportunity of sending out a militant political message in the Neorealist vein.155 The real discovery of the Sardinian coasts did not begin until the 1960s, when the island was targeted by international speculators who had seen the chance of making money through the tourist exploitation of the Costa Smeralda in Gallura. From the very first super-luxurious developments, designed for the international jet-set, one of the main aims was to combine the highest level of amenities with the conservation of an unspoilt environment. The economic exploitation of the area was accompanied by an effective advertising campaign with a clear exotic imprint: the familiar image of a land of wild beauty which contrasted with the stress of modern life, an earthly paradise at the gates of the civilised world in the heart of the Mediterranean. The discovery by cinema of this corner of Sardinia led to a whole series of holiday-type films.156 Other coasts were also used as locations in Italian and foreign productions, including the famous pink-sanded desert island scene in Deserto rosso (Antonioni 1964), shot on the Maddalena island of Budelli, and La calda vita (Vancini 1963), shot on the south coast between Cagliari and Villasimius but based on a novel set in Trieste and on the Istrian coast.157 In some cases the choice of Sardinia was a fall-back to avoid large tourist crowds, as in Boom! (Losey 1968), which brought superstars Elisabeth 153

Olla 2008: 143. Brigaglia 1958: 53-56. 155 Olla 2008: 143-144. 156 Ibid., 64. 157 Olla 2008: 149-150. 154

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Taylor and Richard Burton to Sardinia for a film whose story was actually set in Capri.158 The representation of Sardinia as a tourist paradise stood in diametrical opposition to the island’s classic image. But on closer scrutiny the two landscapes – the interior and the coast – complemented each other. Sardinia was at that time torn by profound contradictions, dominated by the continuation of archaic socioeconomic structures while enthusiastically embracing the capitalist model through the massive development of the tourist industry. A number of films managed to capture the contradictions hidden behind the nascent icon of Sardinia as a tourist attraction.159 The interior landscape drew on the barbaric and primitive trope, while the magnificent beaches lay ready to flatter with their exotic beauty – features typical of a land like Sardinia, traditionally considered strange, bizarre and different, and as such extremely attractive to the European public. The island thus lent itself to invasion by a growing mass of tourists in search of extreme experiences, lured by advertising campaigns which regurgitated the myth of the antiquity and authenticity of Sardinian civilisation. This prophetic vision was ironically presented in Scarabea (Syberberg 1969),160 in which a German hotelier called Bach, having spotted a chance to make a killing, decides to buy a plot of land to build a holiday complex on the island’s east coast. The film shows both the interior, with the Supramonte, and the east coast. Shooting took place in locations symbolic of the traditional Sardinia (Orgosolo and Oliena), but also in places which became so only later, such as the fine-sanded beaches of Cala Luna and Cala Sisine and the town of Dorgali.161 In Bach’s design Sardinia was a no-man’s land to be occupied, in this case cemented over, and turned into a cash-cow. Syberberg’s film trots out all the cinematic tropes: the Nuoro landscape with its bare limestone rocks and traditional rituals and customs never actually shown hitherto, but also a (sham) kidnapping and the film-set of a spaghetti-western. All the finely spun threads which contributed to weaving the screen image of Sardinia are used here to lay bare the falsehood of the Sardinian icon, so that even the 158

Ibid., 158. The Italian title of this film was La scogliera dei desideri (ibid.). Ibid., 59-61. 160 About this film, see chapter 6, section Scarabea. 161 Olla 2008: 157. 159

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heart of the Barbagia, the town of “Orgosolo (symbol of the entire island), rather than being inaccessible and incomprehensible, is just a big theatre of local colour and folklore where there is nothing to discover”.162 Despite the attributes of archaicism and exoticism which had for centuries distinguished the image of Sardinia, Syberberg tellingly revealed a world which was such only in literary and cinematic fiction. Behind the curtain of the ‘imaginary island’ was felt the reality of a progressive assimilation to the lifestyles of a civilised and modern Europe. In the 1960s and ‘70s Sardinia made an unwelcome return to the headlines as a result of a wave of kidnappings and protest movements centred on the Barbagia. The image of tourist Sardinia was thus contrasted by what is probably the oldest topos of Sardinian cinema, the bandit country.163 The role of the news media in mythologising this phenomenon and inflating it in the popular imagination has only recently been adequately investigated.164 In this light it may be said that the enormous interest in these events was fuelled above all by the extraordinary attention given to them by journalists. Cinema made its own contribution, regaling an insatiable public with a series of films revolving around the figure of Graziano Mesina, known as the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ of Sardinian banditry.165 Based to varying degrees on his biography, those films depicted an island still identified with the Barbagia but also contained traces of a new geography in which the mountain landscape became closely linked to coastal areas. The pastoral regions of the interior supplied the labour force for the kidnappings and other misdeeds typical of the “Delinquent Zone” (Niceforo 1897), but the strategic centre of this enterprise was located in the towns and the business interests linked to the development of the coastline. While reiterating the symbolic centrality of the Barbagia, then, cinema turned its gaze to the beaches, where tourism stood as the sign 162

Ibid. The first film of which we are aware, courtesy of a poster advertising it, was entitled I briganti in Sardegna (Olla 2008: 19). 164 See Loi 2001. 165 Graziano Mesina is the Sardinian to whom cinema has devoted most attention, even though his prestige in the island’s history does not stand comparison with people such as Antonio Gramsci and Grazia Deledda (Olla 2008: 59). 163

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of an incipient modernisation. In Sequestro di persona (Mingozzi 1968) the coastal environment is seen as a built-up landscape.166 The coast is identified with luxury hotels, and the shots of the airport confirm the link established between the ‘colonised’ part of the island and the outside world. The camera devotes due attention to the island’s natural beauty and dwells on the panorama enjoyed from the terrace of a hotel room – the choppy sea and the deserted coast recall the image of a virgin land waiting to be discovered by tourists, but from the comfort of a five-star hotel. Although the representation of the Sardinian landscape was still intact, the Costa Smeralda was becoming an artificial scenario in which to celebrate the hedonistic rituals of a society devoid of values and very far removed from the alleged Sardinian identity. One example is to be found in the themed parties organised for bored mainland holidaymakers in I protagonisti (Fondato 1968).167 Like Scarabea, this film shows up the falsehood of Sardinian tropes – those related to tourism as much as banditry. The group of holidaymakers on the Costa Smeralda is made up of mainland Italians in search of thrills. Not content with admiring the local beauty spots, they seek an extreme experience by going on an excursion to the Supramonte to meet the famous bandit, who is more than happy to be photographed, weapons in hand, as he brandishes letters from female admirers – in exchange for a substantial sum of money. To meet him in his own ‘kingdom’ the tourists have to travel a long way by car and then undertake a difficult trek on foot, which stands as a confirmation of the representation of the Supramonte as a remote, impenetrable and wild country. When the adventurous day out turns to tragedy, the tourists hypocritically inform the police of the bandit’s hideout and are praised in the radio news as staunch upholders of the law. At that point all they have to do is make their way back to the coast and rapidly forget their experience in the archaic and barbaric heart of Sardinia. The film reveals the ambiguity and the ‘colonial’ dimension of tourism: to mainlanders the island is a source of amusement to distract them from the boredom of everyday life, simply a resource to be exploited and then thrown away and despised because it is uncivilised and barbaric, like the bandits who populate it.

166 167

See also chapter 6, section Sequestro di persona. About this film see Olla 2008: 165-166.

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It was not until 1980 that the coastal and seafaring dimension of the island returned to the fore, in Sa jana, made by director Massimo Pupillo. The film was loosely based on Giuseppe Fiori’s work of investigative journalism Baroni in laguna (1961), which looked at the condition of clandestine fishermen in what was erroneously called the lake of Cabras, in the province of Oristano.168 Fiori’s investigation and a documentary by Fiorenzo Serra (L’ultimo pugno di terra, 1965) did a lot to draw attention to the medieval-type regime under which these people were compelled to make a living.169 The inquiry concluded with an account of a protest organised by piscadoris and massaius (fishermen and peasants) shoulder-to-shoulder, involving their wives and children.170 When the film was shot the dispute over fishing rights in the lake had been settled, so the question was no longer an urgent one.171 It focused instead on a world which had hitherto been left virtually untouched by cinema, because it was not considered to be a real example of Sardinian identity. Sa jana revisited the features already presented in La terra trema and clearly distinguished itself from the other seafaring film, Squarciò, in the prominence it gave to the Sardinian setting.172 Its title, which is Sardinian for ‘fairy’, is a reference to the domus de janas, megalithic tombs which according to legend were the abode of the fairies. The landscape in Sa jana is an open liquid space in which a ‘desert of rushes’ is fused with the water. The repetition of simple everyday acts transmits a sense of the deep symbiosis binding the fishermen to the water and the surrounding nature, not unlike the way in which shepherds draw the maximum from their own habitat. Punctuated by the rhythm of routine and labour, everyday life is quickened by the arrival of festivals and their re-enactment of ancient rituals, such as San Giovanni fest and the rite of the comparatico (companionship), which reaffirm the community’s traditional values. Although the life of the fishing community is indissolubly bound to the surrounding landscape, the deeper sense of its existence 168

Olla 2008: 174. Ibid., 78; 303-305. 170 Fiori 2001: X-XI. 171 Olla 2008: 174. 172 Ibid., 174. 169

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goes beyond daily needs to connect with a larger design which takes us straight back to the origins of the Sardinian people. On a visit to a nuraghe, a priest explains to the children with him that those extraordinary megalithic monuments, in legend the handiwork of an ancient “race of giants”, are in fact the work of a great old pastoral civilisation which was different from modern society, but of which the people of Cabras should be proud because they can recognise their roots in it. He thus establishes a direct, unbroken line between the history of the nuraghi and the lake’s fishing community, which takes its rightful place in the island’s collective memory. Like the shepherds of the Barbagia, the fishermen of Cabras are the heirs of that civilisation and have to preserve its memory.173 Cinema proved able to come up with a positive ending to a story revolving around the island-mainland dichotomy in …con amore, Fabia (Camoglio 1993), loosely based on Grazia Deledda’s autobiographical novel Cosima, published posthumously in 1937.174 The original contains an enchanting page devoted to the sea, on which Cosima-Deledda remembers the dream of flying over it to reach Rome and the mainland.175 Set in the present, the film’s story matches that of 173

See also chapter 5, section Prehistory as a Topos of Sardinian Identity. Olla 2008: 361-362. 175 Deledda 1971c: 748-749: “She ran off through the ferns in the clearing, brushing them with her outstretched arms like a swallow flying low at the approach of a storm, and returned to the top of the precipice overlooking the sea. The sea: the great mystery, the blue-bushed heath with a blooming hawthorn hedge for a shore; the desert that the swallow dreamed of flying over towards the wonderful regions of the Continent. At least she would have liked to stay there on the rocky bastion, like the keeper of a lonely castle, scanning the horizon waiting for a sail to appear with a sign of hope, or for Prince Charming to jump ashore, dressed in the colours of the sea. [...] It was time to go home; she remembered her days still youthful, cheered only by the stories she told herself; and atop the high sunset-blushed cliffs above the sea she felt like a goat on the crenellated summit of the rock, that would imitate the falcon’s flight but must, at the shepherd’s whistle, return to the fold. [...] Then she stood up, but shook her arms again at the sea, feeling as if she brushed the waves as she had brushed the ferns in the clearing a short time before, like the swallow migrating after the warm but sterile winter of the Libyan plateau to the sunlit lands, to the red summer sunsets, to the love which alone confers the gift of eternity.” (“Si allontanò rapida tra le felci della radura, sfiorandole con le braccia aperte, come una rondine che vola basso all’avvicinarsi del temporale, e tornò poi in cima al dirupo donde si vedeva il mare. Il mare: il grande mistero, la landa di cespugli azzurri, con a riva una siepe di biancospini fioriti; il deserto che la rondine sognava di trasvolare verso le meravigliose regioni del Continente. Se non altro ella avrebbe voluto restare lì, sullo spalto dei macigni, come la castellano nel solitario maniero, a guardare l’orizzonte in 174

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the director, Maria Teresa Camoglio, who moved away from the island, like so many Sardinian artists. Its development seems to take place in slow-motion, in conformity with the trope of a Sardinia outside time and history. So closely does Fabia (Camoglio’s alter ego) scrutinise the sea that she almost converses with it, projecting upon it her dream of becoming a sculptress – an ambition achievable only on the other side of the Tyrrhenian. The girl seems to have a divided soul, and this inner fracture is projected on to the places in her life. On the one hand is traditional life with its detested domestic obligations in the cramped space of her village, on the other the freedom she enjoys in the family’s seaside retreat, where she continues to busy herself with demanding family commitments but can cultivate her dream of being an artist. She commutes between the two landscapes on a moped. The images of the country house take us to an agricultural setting intimately connected to the coast. From the rocks dominating the inland area, the country environment opens up to move beyond its natural boundaries, towards the sea. It is no coincidence that the film opens with the classic image of an inland village towered over by mountain walls, and concludes with a shot of Fabia sitting huddled on a beach as she looks out to sea. Through her gaze we see the sparkle of the waves and the horizon where the sea melts into the sky until the image fades into nothing but shining light. Projected towards infinity, Fabia’s gaze is loaded with expectation, communicating hope for what she will achieve on the mainland now that she has won a grant to attend a specialised course for young artists. In the traditional image the sea was a boundary that could not be crossed but at the same time an essential element for the realisation of ambition – a confirmation of Sardinia’s inferiority to the mainland. Fabia cannot develop her attesa che una vela vi apparisse con i segni della speranza, o sulla riva balzasse, vestito dei colori del mare, il principe dell’amore. [...] Era tempo di ritornare a casa; e ricordando le sue giornate ancora fanciullesche, rallegrate solo dalle storielle ch’ella racontava a se stessa, ella si sentiva, al cospetto del mare e sopra i grandi precipizi rossi di tramonto, come la capretta sulla vetta merlata della roccia, che vorrebbe imitare il volo del falco e invece, al fischio del pastore, deve ritornare allo stabbio. [...] Allora ella si alzò, ma scosse di nuovo le braccia, verso il mare, sembrandole di sfiorare le onde come poco prima avva sfiorto le felci della radura, come la rondine che migra, dopo l’inverno caldo, sì, ma sterile, degli altipiani libici, verso le terre del sole, i rossi crepuscoli estivi, l’amore che solo concede il dono dell’eternità.”).

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artistic passion on the island because it is still a closed world which resists change, rejects her strangeness and condemns her for her otherness, just as one hundred years earlier Grazia (Deledda)-Cosima had to face the disapproval of her family and fellow townspeople for her desire to be a writer.176 Despite the upbeat ending, the girl’s decision to leave the island reiterates a stereotyped vision of the relationship between Sardinia and mainland Italy. Fabia can leave the island and make herself a successful future, but at the cost of abandoning her family and her homeland, which continue to live in a different world – closed, traditional and far removed from the accelerating pace of progress. However, in contemporary Sardinian cinema the sea stands in the dual role of a vehicle for dreams and the bringer of tragedy, such as that which befalls Alice, the young protagonist of the film of the same name (Marcias 2005), who spends her time sitting on a jetty waiting for her father to return from a fishing expedition.177 It turns out that the sea has swallowed him up in a storm, wiping out all hope from the child’s gaze. In 20th-century cinema the stories of Cainà, Fabia and Alice symbolised Sardinia’s difficult relationship with the sea: an infinite space which induces fear and excites the emotions and upon which are projected dreams which can only be realised elsewhere. However, the first episode of Ballo a tre passi (Mereu 2003) advances an image of the sea which is in some ways revolutionary.178 The plot is a simple one: a group of children go on a long, tiring journey to see the sea for the first time. Depicted realistically and with touching lyricism, the situation breaks with the traditional “fear of the sea”179 – the atmosphere is different, there pervades a sense of expectation and childlike curiosity about the unknown. While the other Sardinian landscapes are present and visible, the sea is first and foremost an absence which can only be made good by overcoming individual fears and going beyond individual limits. It is therefore a frontier, the gateway to the Other. In fact the sea is an absence in a limited sense, because although invisible it is present in the landscape – what cannot (yet) be seen is there, can be heard, if listened for in 176

Deledda 1971c: 766. Olla 2008: 192-193. 178 About this film see Olla 2008:190-192 and Urban 2011: 85-96. 179 Marci 1994: 19. 177

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silence. Taking up a stylistic approach well represented in the literary tradition, the soundscape in this episode acquires fundamental significance, becoming the sign of an omni-present nature:180 the children tilt their heads as they try to hear the voice of the sea and, running through the sand-dunes, the last obstacle to the sight of it, they sense its presence more and more until one of them whispers (in Sardinian language) the sea! Experience of the world involves all the senses, taking the form of a gradual conquest. The sea becomes visible – for the spectator it ‘exists’ – through the eyes of the children, and only then does a long shot show us the waves breaking on the shore, the deep blue of the sea, its immeasurable greatness fading into the sky on the horizon. Emotion is dissolved in tears, in a spontaneous shout, the memory of man’s wonder at the origins of civilisation. An experience hitherto only visual and auditory is followed by the tactile, by the appropriation of the object until then admired from afar. The children go through this experience driven by a positive impetus, a curiosity which overturns atavistic fears. First they throw themselves into a peaceful assault on the shore, then the smallest of them tentatively starts to jump around in the waves until he finds the courage to taste the seawater, against his friends’ advice, and discovers that it is “good”, metaphorically exploding the conviction that the liquid in question is bad because it is the vehicle of misadventure. Having overcome all their fears, the children plunge into the water and start to splash one another, intoxicated by their new experience. Although the scene presents behaviour and sensations which are probably not far removed from our expectations, it is a complete novelty in the representation of Sardinia in films. After being identified first with its mountains and flocks of sheep and more recently with its holiday resorts, at all events closed in upon itself and at most the object of interest for foreigners (the hurried tourist takes on the appearance of another coloniser), in Ballo a tre passi Sardinia finally discovers a positive value in its island status and the chance of redemption for its people, if they have the courage to open up to the Other. The meaning of the first episode is encapsulated in two acts performed by the youngest of the children. At the beginning, as he 180

Paulis 2006: 171; Marci and Pisano 2002: 92.

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looks for his swimming trunks in a dark forgotten corner of the house, he finds his way barred by a rat. Screwing up the courage to overcome the obstacle, he first threatens the animal and orders it to move, on pain of death, and then carries out his threat by throwing a bucketful of water over it. In the final scene the boy catches a bucket which has fallen miraculously from the sky and uses it to splash his friends with seawater, after which the bucket is passed from hand to hand. The circle is complete: prey to his own fears, at first the boy is no different to the trapped rat, but when he kills it he anticipates the emancipation from his limits which comes about when he finds the courage to venture into the water and play in it. The limpid seascape is no longer a harbinger of danger, a barrier placed between us and the world, it becomes an opportunity, potential, an instrument of freedom for he who is prepared to face the Other with a new self-awareness. Cities and Post-modernity For a long time the urban environment was ignored by cinema, which preferred to represent Sardinia through the icon of the Barbagia and the agricultural-pastoral setting. Although the traditional tropes survive and still work in marketing strategies to sell products ‘made in Sardinia’ internationally, they now seem increasingly unsuitable to sublimate the idea of a land which has finally joined the modern world. Contemporary cinema appears to have found new topoi which are helping to reshape the popular image of Sardinian identity. One of these is urban Sardinia. Until a few years ago scenes shot in towns were a rarity. Though we know that Cagliari was used for the shooting of a number of scenes in Il trionfo della vita (Gravina 1921) and La calda vita (Vancini 1963), it was not until Il figlio di Bakunin (Cabiddu 1997) that glimpses of the regional capital were to be found in a feature film.181 The story in this film revolves around the mining industry in south-west Sardinia, which had long since been identified in documentaries as the main driving force of modernisation on the island.182 This standpoint found its fullest expression in Oro nero (Guazzoni 1942), a piece of full-blown political propaganda constructed on the contrast between the ancient pre-Fascist world and 181 182

Olla 2008: 126 and 146. Ibid., 18.

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the new urban reality destined for the progress and well-being produced by Mussolini’s policies.183 From that point the mining area, whose landscape and culture were so typical of Sardinia, were ignored by cinema until the release of Il figlio di Bakunin, based on the novel of the same name by Sergio Atzeni (1991), which represented a real watershed in the development of films set in Sardinia.184 The places in which the story unfolds offer a view of Sardinia far removed from the traditional image of the island, taking us to the origins of its urban industrial dimension, and they are presented in a dynamic perspective which runs counter to the immobility considered typical of the Sardinian identity.185 Although some glossy – even oleographic – images are a departure from Sergio Atzeni’s taut style,186 the film follows the story of the novel: sheep and shepherds have made way for miners, who, from the bowels of the earth, develop their resistance to the injustices they suffer. Despite the substantial differences between the book and the film,187 both show a world in which the harshness of the miners’ life does not prevent their tenacious struggle providing hope for a future which has yet to be built.188 In other words, they offer a glimpse of a form of modernity seen as a positive value. Director Cabiddu turns protagonist Tullio Saba, who in the book is evoked only by the memories of those who knew him, into a living hero whose epic deeds (real or imagined) make him an icon of the Sardinian workers’ struggle on the world stage. The fact that the film, unlike the novel, closes with a boy discovering that Tullio Saba is his father, re-establishes an imaginary line that connects the past experienced by the father with the present embodied by the young generation.189 Tullio Saba’s spiritual legacy thus becomes a value for present-day Sardinians, the collective 183

Ibid., 131-133. See Sergio Naitza, ‘L’epopea dell’orgoglio’, L’Unione Sarda, 4th October 1997. 185 That Sardinia did not live outside history was proved by the first industrial strike in Italy, which took place as consequence of the protest in the mining town of Buggerru in 1904, when government forces fired on demonstrators, killing three people and wounding many others (Marci 2006: 238). 186 Floris 2001: 95. 187 Ibid., 71-85. 188 Marci 2006: 284. 189 Floris 2001: 106-107. 184

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memory takes on a territorial dimension and the world of the miners becomes a topos of the Sardinian nation.190 Cabiddu’s film came out at a time when the conservation of memory and national identity was at the centre of interest which had been increasing since the 1980s.191 It thus marked a defining moment in the recovery of history through the celebration of the places and events in which the Sardinians expressed their value as a people. A number of subsequent films shot in an urban setting have distanced themselves from that viewpoint, presenting a reality in which the memory of the past has lost all its fascination and can no longer be revered in mythical or epic terms. So appears the town of Sassari in Un delitto impossibile (Grimaldi 2001), based on Salvatore Mannuzzu’s novel Procedura (1988).192 Set at the time of Aldo Moro’s kidnapping by the Red Brigades (1978), the story revolves around the murder of a popular high-profile judge, Valerio Garau, whose personality is revealed to be unexpectedly complex. In an attempt to get to the bottom of it, and of the circumstances of his death, investigating magistrate Piero D’Onofri looks closely into the places and the people frequented by the judge. The truth is revealed as a multi-faceted prism in which everyone involved has his own version of events and in which everyone has something to hide. In the novel the traditional picture of Sardinia is replaced by an urban environment, by an image of the sea as a means of communication with the outside world and by the tourist resort as a new form of settlement typical of the island – three elements which give this work a distinctive originality compared with the literary scene of the time.193 The town in which the novel is set is never named, it is simply referred to as “T”, but is easily identifiable as Sassari. It is described as crumbling from humidity, and the plaster on the buildings in the tourist resort of Platamona is similarly said to be “worn by time and the salt air”.194 The feeling given by the story is “as if modernity had already passed, doing more harm than good, leaving 190

About the concept “territorialisation of memory” see Smith 1999: 152. The historic national significance of the collective experience of the Sardinian mining industry is confirmed by the creation in Sardinia of the Giuseppe Dessì Cultural Park, the first mining monument to be included in the UNESCO list of human heritage sites. 191 Floris 2001: 107. 192 Olla 2008: 186-187. 193 Marci 2006: 281. 194 Ibid., 281-282.

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more losses than gains, more wear and tear (material and human) than lasting benefits”.195 The townscape shown in Un delitto impossibile creates the same impression. But the story is set in the present day,196 not in the 1970s, so the Sassari seen in the film is the present one – a provincial, bourgeois place, corroded by petty hatreds and scandals, in which there is virtually no trace of the traditional Sardinia. Equally mysterious and decadent is Bosa, a small town on the river Temo where the murdered judge had his summer residence, a building hiding traces of dreams and unmentionable vices. Dominated by a sense of inevitable decay, the whole story has a sluggish feel to it, almost as if time were slowed down and stretched, in conformity to the image of the timeless Sardinia.197 The defining characteristic of the places explored in this film is their hyper-realism combined with a symbolic and allegorical dimension, with no concessions to folklore.198 A different representation of urban space is in Ballo a tre passi (Mereu 2003).199 Presented in four episodes set in various places and landscapes, the film devotes its final part to urban reality in an exploration of nocturnal solitude and disquiet. Against a background of a factory blowing fire from its chimneys, a stark frontal shot shows four petrol tankers in perfect linear formation, juggernauts of the road whose terrible totemic power dwarfs all human significance. This image bears no trace of picture-postcard Sardinia – in the absence of flocks of sheep and dream beaches, rather than being the land of the mythical nuraghe people, the island expresses the contradictions of our time, no less than any other metropolis. There prevails a sense of decay, and it is no coincidence that the story is set in winter, the season identified with the final stages of life. The relationship established between the characters and the landscape reflects this malaise. In a rural setting the characters live in symbiosis with their environment and feel protected by their families and friends, whereas the town exudes a feeling of hostility, danger or at least indifference. 195

Ibid., 282. The choice of the setting was dictated by financial considerations (Olla 2008: 187). 197 See about this film Morandini 2006. 198 Olla 2008: 187. 199 Urban 2011: 89. 196

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As happens to Giorgio, the elderly protagonist, shown crossing the road with great caution as he braves the furious blasts of driver’s horns. These scenes remind us of different settings, but now they are part of Sardinia, too. Indeed the film’s episodic structure, punctuated by the changing seasons, represents the development of the Sardinian landscape from its origins to the present day. The urban dimension stands as humankind’s terminal stage in the passage from the carefree condition of youth, when life is lived in symbiosis with nature, to the decay of old age. For the last few years Sardinian cinema has been dominated by Cagliari, long considered unrepresentative of the island’s life.200 The town’s screen identity is post-modern: as sad and nondescript as its non-places, with no real centre and projected towards its ugly grey suburbs. The roads – narrow streets and broad expressways – trace the perimeters of physical and symbolic spaces inhabited by a marginalised and multi-ethnic population on the cusp between boredom and despair. Most of the merit for the cinematic discovery of the regional capital goes to director Enrico Pau.201 Though he understandably rejects the categorisation of his work in the narrow definition of ‘Sardinian cinema’, Pau has helped bring about a profound change in the island’s cinematic identity and is responsible for some of the boldest and most striking images of the urban environment. His first exploration of Cagliari is to be seen in La volpe e l’ape (1996), a “film loosely based on the life of Franco Beccini, transporter of rubble, metal shutter expert and street singer”, who plies the city streets in his moped van.202 In addition to a number of the town’s best-known spots – Largo Carlo Felice, the harbour, Poetto beach and the Bastion of San Remy – it shows its run-down suburbs, particularly the tough district of Sant’Elia, with the football ground and its huge car-park and the characteristic dismal tenement blocks. The cityscape alternates continually between the centre and the suburbs as the protagonist drives from one to the other. The story unfolds as an unbroken journey along streets, through crossroads, past facades and car-parks, showing more of the town’s building 200

See Edwardes 1889: 47: “As a town, it is lively and in many aspects agreeable; but it is not Sardinia”. 201 Olla 2008: 102-103. 202 “Film liberamente ispirato alla vita di Franco Beccini, trasportatore di macerie, esperto di serrande metalliche e cantante di strada”. About this film see Olla 2008: 182-183.

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development than its inhabitants. Franco Beccini performs in crowded streets or in front of the entrance to the almost-deserted football ground – his presence rings false in non-places where human presence appears ephemeral. It is no coincidence, therefore, that his dreams are shattered in a building under reconstruction: while he fantasises about performing in an imaginary theatre for a real audience, someone steals his van, as essential to his life as the bicycle is for the protagonist of Ladri di biciclette. A one-reeler, La volpe e l’ape is honest and crude, showing disillusionment played out in an urban landscape whose architectural ugliness stands as the most visible sign of social malaise. In these places the bandit country, populated by shepherds and sheep, seems never to have existed. Cagliari returns to centre stage as a post-modern metropolis in Pau’s first full-length feature, Pesi leggeri (2001).203 A town devoid of a centre, or rather with several centres, all peripheral, the capital is identified with the dismal housing blocks of the poor districts crisscrossed by the characters on their mopeds. It is the town where you always go uphill, as we are informed by one of them, a budding boxer called Nino, on a training run in the Monte Urpino area. The gym where he trains to become a champion is the film’s symbolic place, where sacrifices have meaning, but success may prove fleeting since it can slip from your grasp as easily as in a boxing match. Pesi leggeri explores the city in its contradictions and its history: the streets of the centre, some of its monuments, working-class districts, the sunny Poetto beach. It is a place to arrive in from the mainland for those who seek ‘isolation’, or to escape from, as in the trope of Sardinia as a land of punishment and exile. What is there to see outside Cagliari? No mountains, shepherds or flocks – just emptiness. It is a horizontal space, more liquid than solid, in which water fuses with a desert-like plain so that the city seems to rise from an immense post-industrial puddle and the factory chimneys confirm that this is modern reality. This space is completely new in Sardinian iconography. Perhaps most striking is the clear separation between Cagliari and the rest of the island, which is entirely absent here. The post-industrial, almost lunar, landscape is the kingdom of the film’s anti-hero Giuseppe, whose social marginalisation is embodied by his home, a derelict farmhouse 203

Ibid., 188-189.

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in the lagoon area a long way outside the city. Every day he walks all the way into town to go to the gym. As we follow him we see Cagliari in the distance, sitting on top of its hill, apparently out of reach. The novelty of this image is confirmed by its colours. Whereas the capital is traditionally called ‘city of the sun’, renowned for its splendid Mediterranean light and the bright colours of its facades, the city of Pesi leggeri is always grey, almost colourless, metallic, overshadowed by a leaden sky presaging a storm. Recounting the places of his native city, Pau reveals a face of the island which is entirely new but in keeping with a modernity common to all cities in the world. Against the trope of a wild, exotic Sardinia, implying a possible redemption for the island, he posits a desolate world at the end of civilisation. Similar forms of representing the urban world are to be found in Enrico Pau’s most recent work, Jimmy della Collina (2006), loosely based on the novel of the same name by Massimo Carlotto.204 The story was set partly in the author’s home region of Veneto, but the director successfully transfers it to the industrial area of Sarroch, just outside Cagliari.205 Towering horribly over the whole film and over the story of its young protagonist Jimmy, is the local refinery, its chimneys belching fire and noxious gases.206 Hoping to avoid the fate of his father and brother, both of whom work in the refinery, Jimmy nurtures a dream of going to Mexico. Here we have a return of the idea of the journey, but the escape in the trope is no longer from a closed and ancient world, it is from a place bearing all the scars of modernity. Antithetical to the city is a reception centre for juvenile delinquents located on a cultivated hill in the country. Named “La Collina”, it is “really beautiful. To its right the plain of Campidano, to the left the sea”.207 Cagliari is far away.208 While the book gives a brief description of life in the community, in the film this antithesis of urban life bulks large. La Collina is entered through gates left “completely open” because its inmates are considered as guests rather

204

Carlotto 2002. On the film see Olla 2008: 193-194. Olla 2008: 193. 206 See online documentary: http://www.ecoblog.it/post/8463/i-fumi-neri-dellaraffineria-di-sarroch-in-un-video-su-youtube (accessed 12th September 2012). 207 Carlotto 2002: 64. 208 Ibid. In the film the “La Collina community” is a very Sardinian youth rehabilitation centre run by Padre Morittu. 205

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than prisoners.209 Accessible only by a steep road, it is surrounded by the green of the fruit trees and cultivated fields below. In addition to Sardinian boys it houses a number of non-Europeans, coming mostly from the Quartucciu juvenile detention centre. Despite the benign treatment he enjoys in the community, the only thing that really matters to Jimmy is his dream of escaping. It is in a shopping mall, a non-place without a trace of human warmth, that he manages to give his supervisors the slip and attempt to escape. But after walking through the countryside back to the urban jungle, he falls victim to yet more wrongdoing and finds himself on his own again. The film’s ending is radically different from the book. Carlotto’s Jimmy decides to stop running, goes back the community and gives himself up to his custodians, realising that only by relinquishing his flight can he have another chance of redemption. His last words are devoted to the peaceful landscape, the promise of a better future, that he can admire from La Collina: “Last thing, before going to bed, I go into the garden for a smoke. I look at the city lights and the scattered lights of the villages on the Campidano. Sometimes I follow the tiny lights on the ships heading out of Cagliari bay for the open sea.” The screen Jimmy runs away and goes through the dramatic experience of another disappointment. At the end of the film he looks at the sea from a promontory he has climbed, but it is just a moment to remind us of his unfulfilled desire to escape. A Cagliari without hope also takes centre stage in Peter Marcias’ film Sono Alice (2005).210 It features the life of a normal family, but one in serious financial difficulty, living on the edge of town. The protagonist Alice sells flags at the football ground when the football team of Cagliari is playing a home match, and the money she makes is for her unemployed father. Her brother goes as far as selling his sexual favours for the same purpose. It is a story set in the suburbs of anywhere, where there is no place for the romantic myth of bandits or shepherds. Real life for Sardinians is much more cruel and difficult than that of the Barbagia outlaws. This is a Sardinia that questions itself through the camera lens and discovers after centuries of proclaimed diversity that it is completely normal, the same as a 209 210

Carlotto 2002: 64. Olla 2008: 192-193.

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thousand other places on earth, where the poor have nothing but illusions. And one of them is Alice, holding in her lap the money she has earned as she waits for her father to come home, unaware that he has died in a storm at sea. The icon of a Sardinia diametrically opposed to the traditional tropes presented by Marcias is confirmed by Tutto torna (Pitzianti 2008).211 A coming-of-age tale, this film tells the story of Massimo, an aspiring writer who moves from the country to Cagliari to work for his uncle in a nightclub. He discovers a multi-racial city populated by shady characters and artists. His introduction to the urban world is the metaphor for his passage into adulthood, and in his case it comes about in the capital, but it is just the prelude to further development which will have to take place beyond the Tyrrhenian Sea, outside the narrow confines of the island.212 The Cagliari we see in Tutto torna stands as a provisional synthesis of the search for new forms representing Sardinia in contemporary cinema: it rediscovers the classic trope of the journey to another place as the necessary condition to overcome the limits of insularity, but also reiterates the postmodern, multi-cultural image of Cagliari consolidated in the films of Salvatore Mereu and Enrico Pau. In the course of the 20th century cinema identified two antithetical but complementary topoi of the Sardinian landscape: the icon of the Barbagia and subsequently the coastal tourist resorts. The presence of these tropes in most of the films developed a lasting image of Sardinia which was recognisable in the popular imagination. There were occasional attempts to depart from this model, but they never threatened the perfect mirror-images of the island’s landscape and the character of its inhabitants. Though some films tried to capture the changes under way in a world hitherto considered to be timeless, none made before the turn of the century was able to represent Sardinia in all its complexity and variety. The first to attempt a synthesis of the various landscapes was Ballo a tre passi (2003), by Salvatore Mereu.213 It shows the pastoral environment and rural villages, juxtaposing them with tourist-packed resorts and the urban world with all its contradictions. The film consists of four episodes, each associated with a season of the year 211

Ibid., 196. Ibid. 213 Urban 2011. On this film see also Olla 2008: 190-192. 212

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and of life. Some characters appear in more than one episode, though the four stories are independent. The one seen the most is Michele, a Nuoro shepherd and friend of the director, who plays himself. The camera shows the shepherd’s life in the solitude of the countryside, forced to get by with what little he has in his thatched hut. Life among the sheep-pens is frugal but above all genuine, in perfect symbiosis with the surrounding landscape. The backdrop of the daily routine is nature unspoilt or bearing only primitive signs of the human hand – a paradisiacal lake enclosed by rocks or the hut where the shepherd makes his cheese with a traditional and evidently anachronistic method. Despite a number of similarities to the pastoral world of Padre padrone, this is light years from the tragic violence intrinsic to the model presented by the young Gavino. The pastoral world narrated by Mereu inevitably recalls the icon of the Barbagia, but it is not an absolute, self-contained landscape. To survive it has to go beyond its natural borders, and every so often Michele gets on his scooter and leaves his mountains to sell cheese to the owner of a bar on a crowded tourist beach. The echo of the archaic pastoral Sardinia finds its counterpoint on the coast, the location of the tourist industry which has become the island’s main economic resource. The focus on the coast constitutes a break with the consolidated tradition according to which Sardinians have always experienced their island state as a misfortune, an unavoidable destiny, rather than a resource to be exploited. Having abandoned the coastal areas for fear of raids and the age-old danger of malaria, Sardinians have always looked with diffidence and distrust at anyone coming from over the sea, seeing him as an oppressor – as the proverb has it, “furat chi benit de su mari”: he who comes from the sea is a thief. While this episode confirms the synergy between the pastoral world and the coast, the experience of the sea remains an ambiguous one – the tourist with whom the shepherd has fallen in love dies in its waves. Yet in the first episode, from which the others are derived, a group of children undertake a long and arduous journey to find and know the sea. This episode shows a Sardinia completely different from tradition, one in which for the first time contact with the sea takes on a really positive meaning. On the other hand, this interpretation seems to be called into question in the later episodes – the tourist-packed coastal areas constitute an unstable frontier between

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the traditional Sardinian world and an increasingly pervasive anonymous modernity. The fourth episode confirms the signs of the malaise typical of our times. It is embodied in the discovery of the urban landscape, captured as much in the greyness of the day as in the anxious silence of the night, with its alienating spaces populated by a marginalised humanity. To sum up, Ballo a tre passi appears as a complex work containing hints of and references to tradition combined with a wish to recount modern-day Sardinia and its contradictions. Although it does not depart completely from the traditional figurative repertoire, it does enable us to discover faces of the island hitherto unseen, a heterogeneous land as complex in its landscapes as in its humanity. And the discovery of the urban landscape shows us a Sardinia experiencing the present in the same fleeting way as the rest of the world. While geography appeared to have condemned Sardinia to a marginal position – the marginality restated for centuries in literature as the reason for the islanders’ ancestral distinctiveness – through the discovery of the mosaic of its landscapes Ballo a tre passi shows that isolation and exclusion are only apparent, because “as we are taught by Spinoza, Leibniz, Einstein and Merleau-Ponty, every point in the universe is also the centre of the universe”.214 Conclusion What emerges most clearly from the analysis of how cinema portrays Sardinian geography and landscapes is that the island’s image on the big screen is largely consistent with that propounded in literature, fiction and non-fiction alike – indeed, written texts constitute the main source of origin for the stories told in films. The trope of the Barbagia, used as the symbol of Sardinia, is taken up and made absolute by cinema. Its mountains stand as an icon, dominating a wild and beautiful landscape; it recalls Deledda’s literary model, which is the principal point of reference for every 20thcentury representation of Sardinia and its society, forming the background to the vast majority of films set on the island. It was only at the end of the century that there began to emerge a body of work centred on the urban, coastal and therefore modern face of Sardinia.

214

Giuseppe Dessì in Baumann 2007: 103.

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The reason for the predominance of the Barbagian topos is to be found in the attraction exerted on cinema audiences by the island as a wild and exotic land alien to the civilised world. It is in the exaggeration of its differentness that Sardinia is an object of interest for cinema. Even Sardinian film-makers contributed to the dissemination of that image; as in the written sources, those who turn their gaze on the island world reproduce the traditional image of it, taking the familiar standpoint of the reader-spectator, of he who assumes a cultural dichotomy between Sardinian reality and the world to which he belongs. Even where a literary source contains an alternative, in some ways revolutionary, view of the island’s society, cinema prefers to focus on the undisputed fascination of the archaic Sardinia, as exemplified by the film Padre, padrone, based on Gavino Ledda’s novel of the same name. An analysis of more recent trends reveals a basic contradiction. Some Sardinian-born writers and directors have pointed their cameras at new geographical and socio-cultural landscapes far removed from the classical pastoral setting. Cinema seems at last to have opened up to the discovery of modern city life, with all its attendant contradictions. This is a Sardinia never seen before on the big screen, but it is indebted to literature, too; the urban-set films considered to be a departure from cinematic tradition are based directly on the two foremost contemporary Sardinian authors: Mannuzzu and Atzeni. Yet even this new trend, with the range of images it has generated, has not been able to cancel out the topos of Barbagian Sardinia. In conclusion, the ways in which Sardinia is portrayed in cinema, imbued with a centuries-old literary tradition, have contributed to the standardisation and identification of the island with its most archaic and conservative face, even though this face is progressively farther removed from reality. And the image of a wild and primitive island – a world unfailingly alien – continues to act as the main force of fantasy to draw cinema audiences to the ‘discovery’ of the Sardinian world.

4. Sardinian Characters on Screen

Physical Appearance and National Character No attempt to capture an overall impression of how Sardinians have been represented in cinema can avoid the conclusion that the big screen has produced a fixed, unchangeable image of their national character, which is easily recognisable and traceable to a particular idea of the Sardinian identity. From the very beginning the Sardinians, like other southerners, have been an object of public curiosity, exciting attraction and repulsion, as the embodiment of a modus vivendi diametrically opposed to modernity. The cinematic imagination is dominated by a focus on their diversity, meaning moral and cultural inferiority, expressed in images which remained unaltered for the whole of the 20th century. Recourse to cliché has been even more marked in comedy productions, where the distorting lens of irony takes the characteristics considered typical of the islanders to grotesque and surreal extremes.1 The character of Sardinians is also reflected in their physical appearance. In a long literary tradition that warned readers against the evils of the island and the defects of its inhabitants, Sardinia was a sort of cursed country populated by ugly-looking men.2 While the Sardinians’ wild appearance reminded some of Corsican mountaindwellers,3 others of the Irish4 and Scottish,5 in all events they were a “little-known, strong and severe race” whose characteristics were later absorbed by their film image.6 1

Deupmann 2007: 348-351. Vuillier 1893: 363. See a brief of Cicero to his brother, but also Silius Italicus, Punica, liber XII, v. 70, both quoted by Pais 2000: 283, n. 581. 3 Vuillier 1893: 386. 4 Forester 1859: 365; Edwardes 1889: 5; Tennant 1885: 219-220. 5 Poggi 2002: 69. 6 Vuillier 1893: 446. 2

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One of the oldest tropes of Sardinian identity is the islanders’ barbaric character, which goes back at least to Roman times.7 It was the Romans who gave the communities of the Barbagia the name civitates Barbariae.8 Since then their notoriety has been accompanied by epithets confirming their primitive condition, going as far as contemptuous outbursts such as the one produced by Joseph de Maistre. According to him the Sardinian was more savage than the savage, because the savage did not know light, and the Sardinian loathed it.9 He was devoid of man’s finest attribute: perfectibility. He doubted whether anything could be done about it; they could only be treated as the Romans treated them.10 Cinema concentrated on the backwardness of Sardinian life, appealing first to the deterministic theories typical of the 19th century and then, from the 1960s, to the analyses by Cagnetta and Pigliaru, who reworked the idea of the Barbagia as an island cut off from the world as a fossilised relic. The Barbagian character is shown through situations and behaviour that emphasise the distance between modern civilisation and the island customs, such as the use of violence to resolve social disputes (the code of the vendetta) and banditry. Until recent years Sardinian characters were built around a restricted number of basic social models. The synthesis of the islander’s identity was the inhabitant of the interior, engaged in animal husbandry or agriculture, displaying the physical and moral attributes already described by travellers and writers on the South. The Sardinian people were thus identified with the rural world, which was usually considered antiquated and inferior to the urban world, and with the periphery as opposed to the centre.11 A symbol of their backwardness is the best-known and most characteristic Sardinian means of transport – the omni-present donkey, the faithful companion in life and work depicted in a host of films.12 7

Beller 2007a: 266-270. See chapter 2, note 231. 9 Brigaglia 1983: 76. 10 Ibid. 11 Leerssen 2007a: 280. 12 The silent film Tontolini e l’asino (Negroni 1911) was a reworking of the story of Pinocchio, at the end of which the protagonist appeared dressed in the inevitable Sardinian costume accompanied by the inevitable donkey. One memorable example of the strength of this trope: in the 1959 final of Canzonissima, a highly popular 8

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The Sardinian lives in direct contact with nature, in a closed and impenetrable world and, like primitive and barbaric peoples, displays wild instincts and violent impulses which are reflected in extreme feelings and find expression in the vendetta. From Cenere to Sonetàula, then, Sardinian identity was characterised by primitivism. As a counterpoint to these negative characteristics – since the construction of the national identity is based on pairs of opposites in what is known as the “nation of contrasts”13 – are virtues and qualities such as hospitality and a primordial frankness. A shepherd, a bandit or a farmer, the representation of the Sardinian is confirmed by cinema as coarse, barbaric and uncivilised but also hospitable and honest. As in the literary descriptions peppered with the adjectives ‘primitive’ and ‘wild’,14 on screen the Sardinian is captured when he performs ‘prehistoric’ actions: finding his way through the forests of the Barbagia, surviving on what nature provides, imitating birdsong, eating raw meat, drinking from natural springs or sucking water from cavities in the rocks.15 Life in a wild habitat requires adaptability and unusual resourcefulness; it is a harsh existence, punctuated by the rhythm of the seasons (Banditi a Orgosolo 1961), without comforts.16 This state of nature is also distinguished by taboos such as sexual intercourse between shepherd and animal (Padre padrone 1977). To such primitive habits is added a proud, rebellious spirit that inspires all Sardinian characters, male and female alike. The Sardinians are considered a nation of “fighters” (Barbagia. La società del malessere 1969), permanently fighting those who would impose new rules and hostile to ‘mainlanders’. Tradition has it that a people’s character is the synthesis of the virtues and faults that make it unique among other nationalities. Cinema has defined the Sardinian character in a range of actions and variety and song competition television programme, broadcast on that occasion from the Teatro Massimo in Cagliari, the presenters appeared on the stage dressed in Sardinian traditional costume and on a donkey (Olla 2008: 86). 13 Leerssen 2007g: 344. 14 Paulis 2006: 173. 15 Here are just two of many examples: lying on the grass, Rosalia Derios drinks water straight from a stream without using her hands, almost as an animal would (Cenere, Mari 1916). In Barbagia. La società del malessere (Lizzani 1969) Graziano Cassitta sucks rainwater from cracks in the rock, saying that shepherd-bandits have to make do with what nature provides. 16 See chapter 3, note 133.

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customs imbued with a symbolic national value. Some of them draw on the agricultural-pastoral world of the South as a whole, others emphasise what is properly Sardinian. In many cases the focus on behaviour which is considered typically Sardinian takes the form of ethnographic digressions on screen, sometimes apparently irrelevant for the story but essential to stage the ‘Sardinian ethnographic spectacle’.17 Scenes of everyday life show men, descendants of hunting stock, going out on hunts and roasting the kill. Or they are seen tending their flocks, making cheese in their huts, spending days on end in the open country or accompanied by a faithful donkey – they are consummate horsemen when races are shown and equally well versed in the use of weapons. Women are generally depicted about their domestic chores, sifting flour or making bread and cakes, on which they patiently etch decorations evoking archaic symbols of fecundity and good fortune. Or they are intent in devout prayer, in the mourning ritual of attitu or on a pilgrimage to a country shrine, which concludes with the supreme Sardinian self-celebration that is the festive dance. Rather than using the information on Sardinians’ physical appearance available in the literary tradition, cinema has reproduced the images that describe their national character and way of life. One example is the habit of shepherds in the Orgosolo area of wearing long hair in plaits,18 a fashion still extant at the beginning of the last century but unacknowledged in films until it featured in the contrived television museum-piece L’ultima frontiera (Bernini 2006). Casting is influenced by factors other than realism, and preference was given, especially in the past, to stars able to attract large audiences. Even the best-known Sardinian actor, Amedeo Nazzari, male lead in Proibito (1954), had a classical physique in sharp contrast to the image of his fellow islanders – coarse, short, dark, surly-looking shepherds.19 Only in minor characters is it occasionally possible to see any desire to adhere to the typically Sardinian model. In Sequestro di persona (1968) director Mingozzi cast a Sardinian as the bandit, while the male lead – playing a Sardinian – was blond heart-throb Franco

17

See chapter 3, section The ‘Ethnographic Spectacle’. Wagner 1908c: 268. 19 See chapter 1, section People: Physical Appearance and National Character. 18

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Nero.20 Recourse to local extras was useful for ethnographic set pieces, such as the dance and festivity scenes in Cainà and Proibito, which offered a ‘picturesque’ image of Sardinian life and served to create the ‘local colour’ attractive to popular taste. It was in comedies – the few of them that there were – that Sardinian tropes were manifested in the greatest range and variation. In Vendetta…sarda (Mattòli 1957), which tells the story of an emigrant who is persuaded to return to Sardinia to collect a substantial legacy only to find that he is obliged to exact vengeance, a Sardinian cook is called ‘sardegnolo’, an insulting epithet analogous to the term ‘terrone’ (peasant) commonly used to refer to southerners.21 The Sardinians in the film are generally distinguished by their ugliness, shortness and coarseness. Arriving in the imaginary village of Dente di Canu, one of the mainlanders blurts out “We’re back in the stone age”. Sardinian characters wear traditional costume, ride donkeys (“Sardinian steeds”) and are extremely vindictive and violent but also hospitable. Another defining characteristic, distinguishing them from other Italians, is an almost caricature-like version of the Italian spoken by Sardinian people. And, naturally enough, Sardinian place-names and surnames end in with the characteristic ‘u’ (Dente di Canu; Porchiddu), whose sound is supposed to evoke associations with cavemen.22 Equally barbaric are the Sardinians in Una questione d’onore (1966), in which the main character, wearing traditional costume and accompanied by the regulation donkey, wins a series of challenges involving head-butts – confirmation that the islanders are very obstinate and have very hard heads.23 The narrator provides a number of statistics designed to aid comprehension of the deep meaning of the Sardinian identity, which would be unthinkable without shepherds wearing brown velvet and tending markedly towards crime: “75% of Sardinians wear velvet of this colour; of this 75% 45% rustle sheep, 20

Olla 2008: 154. The cook reacts immediately saying: “Deu seu sardu, non sardegnolu” (“I’m a Sardinian, not a “sardegnolo!”). 22 Words that finish with unstressed ‘u’ are particularly prominent in Sardinian and Sicilians dialects. Beside the geographical connotation Italian native speakers usually associate this vowel with the idea of backwardness and general rusticitas. 23 The film’s lead role is played by Ugo Tognazzi, a non-Sardinian comic actor among the most renowned of his time. 21

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and of this 45% 100% shoot when caught red-handed.”24 The defence of honour, and the offence in question can only be made good by the spilling of blood. Whoever fails to follow the code of the Barbagia is inexorably expelled from the community. Until the late 1980s relatively few Sardinian actors were to be found in cinema, but since then most films set in the island have been directed by Sardinians, and they have shown an increasing interest in local actors. Besides being dictated by financial considerations, choosing professional and non-professional Sardinian actors is one way for directors to be true to the reality they wish to recount and recreate it more authentically. In the wake of Visconti’s example in La terra trema, Vittorio De Seta showed the way with the Barbagian shepherds featured in his film Banditi a Orgosolo. The first bandit film with a Sardinian playing the leading role of Graziano Mesina was Pelle di bandito (Livi 1968).25 The other films of that time based on the life of the famous bandit featured Lou Castel, star of I pugni in tasca (Bellocchio 1966), in I protagonisti (Fondato 1971), while Carlo Lizzani chose Terence Hill, the slim, blond, blue-eyed male lead of Bstandard spaghetti westerns.26 The 1990s saw an increase in the number of Sardinian actors, thanks largely to directors such as Salvatore Mereu and Enrico Pau, who placed islanders like Pietrina Menneas and Vanni Fois alongside mainland Italian and foreign actors, but above all rightly placed their faith in untried figures such as Mereu’s shepherd friend (Michele in Ballo a tre passi), the children who featured in the first episode of Ballo a tre passi and Francesco Falchetto, who played the title role in Sonetàula. However, with few exceptions – such as the expressive and symbolically evocative faces of Maria Carta and Pietrina Menneas27 – the Sardinian identity of the characters is distinguished not so much by their physical attributes as by their language (regionally-accented Italian or Sardinian full blown), actions and dress, all marks of national membership of great symbolic impact and in keeping with the model of Sardinian identity held in the public imagination. 24 “il 75% dei sardi veste di un velluto di questo colore (marron n.d.a.); di questo 75% il 45% ruba le pecore, e di questo 45% il 100% spara se lo beccano sul fatto.” 25 Ugo Cardea, for instance, was given the leading role in Pelle di bandito after playing a minor part in Sequestro di persona (Olla 2008: 159). 26 Olla 2008: 61. 27 See in this chapter, the section The Sardinian Woman.

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Shepherds and Bandits As with the selection of forms of representing the Sardinian landscape, cinema used fixed images to define the characteristics of the island’s people by drawing on the literary tradition, in which, as we have seen, the island is essentially identified with its interior, populated by farmers and above all seasonally migrating shepherds. Living mostly in the Barbagia, the land symbolising Sardinia, the shepherd thus became the anthropological model in which the essence of Sardinian identity was condensed. This image is confirmed by a broad range of sources. The “Delinquent zone” described by Alfredo Niceforo was inhabited by “shepherd peoples”,28 Max Leopold Wagner also spoke of a “shepherd people” and D.H. Lawrence wrote of coarse indomitable mountain men.29 It was in the name of shepherds, the embodiment of the Sardinian nation, that Emilio Lussu fought his political battle, and Giovanni Lilliu saw the shepherds as the true heirs of Sardinian civilisation.30 Cinema relaunched the figure of the shepherd as the symbol of Sardinian identity and made it the undisputed protagonist of films set on the island. Who were these shepherds? What were their defining characteristics? A clear answer is given in the opening scene of Banditi a Orgosolo (De Seta 1961): This story is happening now, in Sardinia, in the village of Orgosolo. These are the shepherds of Orgosolo. Their time is measured by that of seasonal migrations, by the search for pasture, and for water. These men’s souls have remained primitive. What is right by their law is not by the law of the modern world. All that matters to them is the bonds of the family and the community – everything else is incomprehensible, hostile. Including the state, represented by the Carabinieri, by prisons. The thing they know best of the modern world is the rifle – to hunt with, to defend themselves, but also to attack. They can become bandits overnight, almost without realising it.31 28

Niceforo 1897: 64. Lawrence 2009: 84; Wagner 1908b: 246. 30 Lilliu 2002. 31 “Questa storia accade oggi in Sardegna, nel paese di Orgosolo. Questi sono pastori di Orgosolo. Il loro tempo è misurato su quello delle migrazioni stagionali, della ricerca del pascolo, dell’acqua. L’anima di questi uomini è rimasta primitiva. Quello che è giusto per la loro legge, non lo è per quella del mondo moderno. Per loro contano solo i vincoli della famiglia, della comunità, tutto il resto è incomprensibile, 29

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The shepherd is thus a primitive man living in symbiosis with nature and obedient only to the habitual law of the community to which he belongs. His skill with weapons comes from the practice of hunting and is associated with an innate familiarity with the practice of violence. This description essentially echoes the representation presented in literature, as witnessed by an observation written by Max Leopold Wagner early in the 20th century. He saw the Sardinian people as “still tied to the ancient blood feud which inexorably demands its victims year after year, paying homage to superstition in a thousand forms, preserving customs strange to say the least; but they are not wicked as described by those who do not know them. They have simply remained primitive and archaic and to this day retain legal concepts which are out of fashion in the modern world but in times past were ours too... Terra antiqua!”.32 This anthropological model of a nation ancient and violent, but courageous to the point of heroism, was strengthened by accounts of the fearless exploits of the Sardinian soldiers in the Brigata Sassari during the First World War, exploits which rapidly achieved remarkable renown.33 This brigade, the only regionally-recruited one in the Italian Army and composed essentially of humble peasants and shepherds, contributed to an enormous swell of interest in Sardinia and may also explain the large number of films made in the 1920s about the island as a proportion of the few regionally-based productions of the time.34 In the popular imagination the soldier in the Brigata Sassari was identified with the Sardinian shepherd, whose courage (balentìa) and sense of honour he inherited. As recorded by Attilio Deffenu, given the task of making enlistment propaganda on the island and subsequently killed on the front line at the age of 26, the Sardinian soldier was profoundly different to soldiers from other Italian regions:35

ostile. Anche lo stato che è presente con i carabinieri, le carceri. Della civiltà moderna conoscono soprattutto il fucile per cacciare, per difendersi, ma anche per assalire. Possono diventare banditi da un giorno all’altro, quasi senza rendersene conto.” 32 Wagner 1913-1914: 10-11. 33 Sotgiu 1990: 35-36. 34 See chapter 2, section People: The Sardinian Soldier. About the films made in the 1920s see Olla 2008: 26. 35 Fiori 2000: 62; Fois 2006: 40, note 33.

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Like all somewhat primitive peoples, which have not suffered the influx of ideas produced by the most abject and materialistic selfishness, the Sardinian has a very acute and profound sense of honour and pride. He feels strongly the pride of being a man – in the highest and nobless sense of the word – and a Sardinian. This is why the Sardinian soldier does not raise his hands, does not surrender in combat, does not know the dishonour of desertion. In their scale of moral values Sardinians hold very dear the virtue of courage, of physical prowess, of disregard for danger, and the cult of the fundamental sentiment of honour. Nothing offends the sensitivity of a Sardinian as much as being tainted with or suspected of cowardice. Whatever the cause he is fighting for, the true son of the Island feels duty-bound to cut what is commonly know as a fine figure, never to appear cowardly in the face of any danger. A popular song in dialect coming from the war expresses this common spirit very clearly in the words, addressed to the Sardinian soldier: «Not only your parents, your woman, your relatives and your people, but even the stones of your rocks will turn against you if you return to the Island with the stain of infamy and dishonour on your forehead». (my italics)36

The heroic deeds of the Brigata Sassari thus put Sardinians in a new light, confirming the ambiguity of the Orientalist viewpoint, oscillating between repulsion and attraction for this ‘exotic’ people. In the wake of the fame achieved by the Brigata Sassari, in the films 36 Relazione sui mezzi più idonei di propaganda morale da adottarsi fra le truppe della Brigata, written by Deffenu in April 1918 and cited by Fois 2006: 222-226; the quote is ibid., 223 (“Ora il sardo ha – come i popoli alquanto primitivi, che non hanno subito l’influsso di correnti d’idee che sono l’espressione del più abbietto e materialistico egoismo – molto vivo e profondo il senso dell’onore e della fierezza; sente in modo spiccato l’orgoglio di essere uomo – nel senso più alto e nobile della parola – e di essere sardo. Per questo il soldato sardo non alza le braccia, non si arrende in combattimento, non conosce l’obbrobrio dello «sbandamento». Nella scala dei valori morali tengono per i sardi un gran posto la virtù del coraggio, della bravura fisica, dello sprezzo del pericolo, e del culto del sentimento fondamentale dell’onore: niente urta di più la suscettibilità del sardo che l’essere tacciato e sospettato di vigliaccheria. Il vero figlio dell’Isola – per qualunque causa si batta – sente il dovere di fare come comunemente si dice bella figura, di non parere vile, mai, di fronte a qualsiasi pericolo. Una popolare canzone dialettale nata dalla guerra esprime assai bene questo diffuso stato d’animo quando dice, rivolgendosi al Sardo combattente: «Non solo i tuoi genitori, la tua donna, i tuoi parenti, la tua gente, ma anche i sassi delle tue roccie (sic) si rivolteranno contro di te, se tornerai all’Isola con in fronte il marchio dell’infamia e del disonore»”).

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made in the years following the First World War and available to us or about which something is known, the male characters correspond precisely to the model of the Barbagia shepherd. In terra sarda (Borgnetto 1921), shot in the Supramonte near Orgosolo and now lost to us, told of the tormented love between a girl from a well-off family and a poor shepherd; a still from it shows the male characters wearing traditional costume and a grim expression.37 Cainà (1922) features the same image of the mountain shepherds and skilled horsemen.38 An interesting para-documentary sequence on mouflon hunting shows us Sardinians in the role of shepherd-hunters. The same characteristics return in La grazia (1929), whose protagonists are shepherds with rifles permanently slung over their shoulders, ready to avenge any wrong suffered. The Sardinian custom of the vendetta and other primitive habits made the distinction between the condition of the shepherd and that of the bandit an extremely uncertain one. Film-makers immediately saw the identification of the two figures as a great attraction for the popular imagination and so adopted it, creating a large repertoire of shepherd-bandits, of whom Michele in Banditi a Orgosolo (De Seta 1961) is one of the most famous and of which Sonetàula (Mereu 2008) is the most recent confirmation. It is no coincidence, then, that the first Sardinian-set film on record was about bandits: I briganti in Sardegna (Vitrotti 1905).39 The men featured on the film’s poster, however, resembled the classic southern brigand and had nothing in common with the figure of the Sardinian male.40 At the beginning of the last century the Southern question bulked large in the public consciousness and the discovery of Sardinia by film-makers was probably not unconnected with the large-scale military expedition to the island mounted a short time before with the aim of wiping out 37

Olla 2008: 26. In a manner consistent with the internal viewpoint of the community, the words of Cainà’s fiancé also express the direct relationship between the Sardinian man – shepherd and horseman – and his environment. In two intertitles he says to her, “I want you for my wife, and to take you on my horse to the highest peak of our mountains” (“Voglio prenderti in moglie e portarti sul mio cavallo fino alla cima più alta delle nostre montagne”) and “How wonderful it will be to live up here in our little house” (“Come sarà bello vivere lassù, nella nostra casetta!”): Jaccarino 2001: 75. 39 According to Olla 2008: 18 the film was probably not a work of fiction but a staged reconstruction, a popular form at the time. 40 Ibid. 38

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banditry. These events are recalled by Giulio Bechi’s controversial book Caccia grossa (19001; 19142), which was probably the most direct source of inspiration for the first Sardinian film.41 From the outset the representation of the Sardinian bandit ran along two parallel lines. On the one hand, as statements by Army officers confirm, he was likened to the southern brigand, beastly and barbaric, so that the fight against banditry assumed the characteristics of a battle to defend civilisation. On the other hand he was, especially in the eyes of southern Italians, a romantic hero, forced to abandon the life of a shepherd and become an outlaw to escape social injustice and preserve his freedom42 – in a letter to his sister Teresina (dated May 4th 1931) Antonio Gramsci wrote that to children’s eyes the famous bandits Tolu and Derosas seemed more Sardinian than many other historical figures.43 This double face of banditry – negative and positive – widely referred to in literature was adopted in full by cinema. The anthropological model of the southern brigand was particularly successful in the cinematic imagination in the post-war period, which was greatly influenced by Giovanni Verga’s realist poetics.44 In the wake of the Neorealist wave, though without its openly ideological elements, southern-leaning films took up the late 19th-century tropes of the South and found in them the ideal setting for dramatic stories loaded with violent and primitive passion, a world where the only law was the code of honour. All the images of the South as a negative pole opposed to the modern and civilised North were projected on to a natural landscape which recalled a generically southern setting rather than any particular region. In Le vie del peccato (1946), to cite one example, specifically Sardinian references were reduced to a minimum, even though the story was based on a work written by Deledda; there was a clear emphasis on the link between the shepherd’s life and honour killings as the expression of a barbaric principle common all over the South of Italy.45

41

Ibid., 17-19. Dickie 1999: 25-51, 32. 43 Gramsci 1965: 431-432. 44 De Rooy and Urban 2011: 13. 45 On this film see chapter 3, section Sardinia as a Symbol of the South. 42

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The films set in Sardinia in the following years were made in the same vein, skilfully exploiting the recrudescence of banditry on the island and with it the public’s interest in the characters involved, shrouded in an aura of mystery and romance. Exemplary in this regard was Amore rosso (1952), based on Marianna Sirca (1915), the first novel by Deledda to feature bandits. At first the film flopped, but it was later re-released in 1954 with posters announcing “a film on the Orgosolo bandits”.46 Marianna, the female lead, introduces Simone Sole, explaining what had led him to become a bandit. As a boy, when he was a shepherd and servant to Marianna’s rich uncle, Simone had had the temerity to pay her a compliment, and was given a whipping by his master as a result. He reacted by taking a rifle, declaring himself a free man and running into the mountains, becoming an outlaw. The film makes repeated reference to the link between banditry and the defence of freedom: speaking to Bandine Fera, a feared and respected bandit, Simone refuses to join his band – not out of conceit, but because of his “thirst for freedom”. The decision to go on the run, his “yearning for the mountains”, is the mark of his desire to be a free man.47 Simone was recognisable as the prototype of the rebellious Sardinian shepherd interpreted as a bandit in the romantic mould – courageous, generous, obviously handsome, and far removed from the violent, bloodthirsty criminal type. The appearance of the actor cast in the role – tall, good-looking, fair-haired – contributed to the romantic image, while the character in the novel conformed to the Sardinian topos: swarthy, with short black wavy hair and short in stature (Marianna was taller than him). Deledda’s Simone was also less noble than his screen counterpart: he was irascible and violent, and his actions had an animal-like quality.48 The model of the southern bandit 46

Olla 2008: 53. “When I served the Cossu family I heard it said that Bandine Fera was a brave man. If I saw the Carabinieri heading for your camp-fires at night I was worried because I didn’t want them to catch you; that’s how I developed a craving for the mountains” (“Quando ero servo dei Cossu sentivo parlare di Bandine Fera come di uomo coraggioso. Se la notte vedevo passare i Carabinieri diretti verso I fuochi del tuo bivacco soffrivo, perché non volevo che ti prendessero; così mi nasceva dentro la smania della montagna”). 48 “As he (Simone) spoke his chest swelled, something feline made his face more handsome; the men stared at him, nodding their approval” (Deledda 1981f: 777). “The ember in his hand, Simone listened in astonishment. His eyes shone with hatred; 47

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was probably best represented in this film by Bandine Fera, whose appearance and clothing recalled the traditional icon of the brigand: dark-haired with an unkempt beard, a surly expression, a rifle always hanging from his shoulder, living on bread and cheese like all Sardinian shepherds.49 In the shots featuring Simone and Bandine together the typological contrast between the two is immediately apparent. Though similarly dressed they arouse opposite sensations – one repulsion, the other attraction – because of their physical appearance. In dealing with the theme of banditry in Amore rosso Deledda made mention of the condition and the social problems of being on the run, including servitude, poverty, spies, continual surveillance by the Carabinieri, road-blocks, the notoriety of the outlaws. The love story between Simone and Marianna embodied above all the unbridgeable gap between two opposed social classes, the haves and the havenots.50 The film left out everything in the book which attempted to explore the bandit world and the class tensions in late 19th-century Sardinia, so the figure of the bandit was bereft of any political hatred for everyone: for Sebastiano who had never meant anything to him, for Marianna whom he had loved, for Bantine Fera who had distracted him from her, for Costantino who told him the truth. A blind fury began to make him pant; inside, the wild beast stirred. [...] Simone sprang up, the ember in his hand like a red-hot club. [...] Simone gave a yell and rushed out of the cave with the ember in his hand as if to set the world on fire” (ibid., 918). “Without replying Simone removed his berretta with a flick of the head and put that head in her lap, childlike and tired. His thick short hair, its tight waves silvered by the moonlight, smelled of grass, of dust, of sweat; an odour at once wild and fragrant, which disturbed Marianna more than his act. She felt her heart melt; it seemed he had placed his head on her lap as a pledge of himself, and she loved him as she would a sleeping child; it seemed she could protect him, save him, gather him into her innermost depths like her own child” (ibid., 795). “And now, yes, the veil fell, the wall fell; now she could see him properly, the Simone for whom she had waited and waited, the Simone who had walked and walked to reach her. He was on her lap, truly a child again. He was the man in the woman’s lap, the innocent boy to whom the mother shows the right path. Now she had no more shame, nor fear, nor pride; she had only a sense of a responsibility almost frightening. A man was there, at her feet; she could have torn him up like a flower, used him as a weapon; a few words and his destiny would be changed. So she hardly dared speak. She ran her fingers through his damp hair and a small trembling stirred her knees under the weight of his head” (ibid., 851). 49 Certain shots featuring Bandine are strongly reminiscent of typical portraits of brigands. 50 See Spinazzola 1981: 765.

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connotation. The film set out to create a story of impossible love, in which the presence of the bandits was innate to an immobile world, outside the flow of history and progress, a last frontier to be conquered by modernity. And the inclusion of typical western-style features absent in the book, such as the pursuit scene and the duel, apart from betraying a desire to jump on the Hollywood epic bandwagon, resulted in an identification between the American frontier and that of the Italian South.51 This procedure was even more evident in Proibito (Monicelli 1954). Some of the camera work was typical of westerns, but from a moral standpoint the bandits Costantine Corraine and Nicodemo Barras embodied the Sardinian character. Corraine says he is free “to be compelled to kill as honour obliges” and a number of dialogues express the islanders’ total distrust of state law, which is seen as foreign, unfair and incapable of rendering real justice. Hence the necessity of taking the law into your own hands, as in the Wild West, where there was no law except the law of the jungle.52 Costantine’s habitat also recalled one of the most important topos of Sardinian identity – his hideout was in the country, near a nuraghe.53 This association has precedents in literature, such as Max Leopold Wagner’s recollection of the sight of a young shepherd on horseback by a nuraghe, wrapped in a sheepskin and with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He observed that this mounted figure was not in contrast with the immobile pre-historic construction; mentally he could even have been transferred to the era of his nomad ancestors.54

51

See chapter 3, section Exoticism and Wilderness. “The day the first Corraine killed the first Barras there was no law and no justice, but abandonment and indifference, so other men took this right upon themselves. At your age I also thought I could break this… chain of vendetta; in fact there were two of us – me and the man you saw this morning, Costantino Corraine. We swore friendship as brothers, and then, one on one side and the other on the other side and between us the memory of the dead.” (“Il giorno in cui il primo Corraine uccise il primo Barras non ci fu né legge né giustizia, ma abbandono e indifferenza, e allora altri uomini si arrogarono questo diritto. Anch’io alla vostra età credetti di poter spezzare questa… catena di vendette, eravamo in due anzi, io e l’uomo che avete visto stamani, Costantino Corraine, ci giurammo amicizia come fratelli, e poi, uno da una parte e l’altro dall’altra e tra noi il ricordo dei morti”). 53 See chapter 5, section Prehistory as a Topos of Sardinian Identity. 54 Wagner 1908d: 41. 52

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The typology of the shepherd who becomes a bandit was central to a whole series of films, from Le due leggi (Mulargia 1963) to Pelle di bandito (Livi 1968), from Banditi a Orgosolo (De Seta 1961) to Disamistade (Cabiddu 1988), up to and including Sonetàula (Mereu 2008). In them the prevalent image was the Barbagian shepherd as the product of a primitive, barbaric culture which forged him and drove him inexorably into banditry. According to Antonio Pigliaru “[t]he Barbagian shepherd demands of himself not to be overbearing, but to be strong, to be one who in the face of his enemy and destiny (and destiny as his enemy) is able to fronte parare, that is to stand firm worthily in the conviction that hic et nunc the only possible way to be a man is to be a strong man: s’àbile, su bàlente, the man who can stand up for himself and who is therefore worthy”.55 Shot virtually without a film crew during an eight-month sojourn in the heart of the Barbagia, De Seta’s masterpiece was well received by islanders because they perceived it as a ‘realistic’ and respectful rendering of Sardinian life.56 Despite that, however, the film did not manage to go beyond the tropes. Though the story and its characters were authentic, there was still a tendency to present the shepherd as the absolute icon of Sardinian identity, putting the seal on an irreparable fracture between the world of the director and the world observed. Thus, as Lino Miccichè wrote, the film offered “a new key, after Deledda’s, to the complexity of Sardinia” – that of its “inapproachability”.57 The investigation carried out in Orgosolo by Franco Cagnetta which provided the idea for the film, also echoes the literary tradition, in which the Supramonte appeared as an impenetrable world where human presence revealed “indications of an extreme, incredible primitiveness”.58 This primordial reality was the kingdom of the migratory Barbagian shepherd and the Sardinian sheep, an animal stunted “by paucity of nutrition, lack of summer and 55

Pigliaru 2000: 217 (“Il pastore barbaricino infatti non chiede a se stesso di esser prepotente, ma di esser forte, di essere uno che al nemico come al destino (e al destino come nemico) sappia ‘fronte parare’, cioè resistere validamente nella persuasione che hic et nunc l’unico modo possibile di esser uomo è quello di essere uomo forte: s’àbile, su bàlente, l’uomo che sa farsi valere e, quindi, che vale”). 56 On this film see Olla 2008: 144-148. 57 Olla 2008: 147. 58 Cagnetta 2002: 56. About Cagnetta’s Inchiesta su Orgosolo see chapter 2, section Tropes of Land: The Barbagia.

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winter shelter, gruelling drives – but highly robust and resilient, a true prehistoric animal”.59 De Seta’s shepherd thus embodied the anthropological model outlined by Cagnetta, who traced rustling and vendettas to acts necessitated by poverty and, with a note of sad irony on the bandit image of the shepherd, commented “these were the ‘bandits’ of Orgosolo, the ‘terrible brigands’ of Orgosolo: unhappy shepherds who, for as long as they could, worked day and night as shepherds”.60 He concluded thus: “Here everything is alien, unyielding, and insensitive to any world of man – a fearsome Eden! This is the Supramonte, the most isolated land in Sardinia, the heart of the Orgolese, all shrouded in the mineral, vegetable and animal world; mysterious, as obscure as the territory of another planet. In this lives the shepherd of Orgosolo”.61 Following Cagnetta, then, Banditi a Orgosolo indelibly marked the icon of the Sardinian shepherd in the European cinematic imagination as a fossil in an isolated, impenetrable – and utterly tragic – world. The divide between modern reality and that of the Barbagia, already present at the origin of cinema – as witnessed by Cenere (1916) and Cainà (1922) – thus continued to be presented, becoming one of the most influential keys to an interpretation of Sardinia. Le due leggi (Mulargia 1963), set in a Mexican-type landscape redolent of the Wild West, tells the story of a vendetta in an extremely backward socio-cultural context, closed in upon itself and far removed from contemporary living standards (these were the years of the Italian economic boom). In this film, echoing the view expressed by Antonio Pigliaru in his studies, the bandit Tolu puts the number of crimes down to the objective condition of abject poverty: “There’s much that is base in the human spirit, but if there were not so much 59

Cagnetta 2002: 61. Ibid., 62. Ibid.: “Many shepherds were thus driven to attempt illegal grazing, invading pastures and cultivations; they were forced to steal the odd sheep from their own kind. They fought fiercely among themselves. Some committed crimes themselves, others recruited the poorest and most desperate into their service. Vendettas arose, giving rise to gunfights. Arrests followed, and some shepherds became bandits.” 61 Ibid., 56 (“Qui tutto è estraneo, tetragono, insensibile ad ogni mondo di uomo: un Eden spaventevole! Questo è il Supramonte, il più isolato territorio di Sardegna, il cuore dell’Orgolese, tutto avvolto nel mondo minerale, vegetale, animale; misterioso, oscuro come il territorio di un altro pianeta. In esso vive il pastore di Orgosolo”). 60

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poverty all these killings wouldn’t take place.”62 After Cagnetta’s work, the writings of Pigliaru and Giuseppe Fiori had contributed to the dissemination of this interpretative key and provided the most direct stimulus for the bandit films of the late 1960s. The bandit characters based to varying degrees on Graziano Mesina contained all the elements peculiar to the identity of the traditional Barbagian shepherd, whose fate led inevitably to banditry and a collision with the civilised world, the clash analysed by Giovanni Lilliu under the name of the “constant of Sardinian resistance”.63 In Barbagia. La società del malessere (Lizzani 1969), based on Giuseppe Fiori’s work La società del malessere (1968), it is observed during a spectacular large-scale search of the Supramonte that “the Barbagia is the land of fighters; perhaps the Sardinian shepherds are at year zero in terms of technological civilisation, but they are certainly in the year three thousand of their civilisation, a civilisation with barbaric features.”64 This clash of civilisations was accompanied by education in the use of weapons for boys from a very early age, as a sign of continuity in the model of the tough, balente Sardinian. In an interview in Pelle di bandito (Livi 1968), Mariano De Linna (Graziano Mesina’s alter ego) declared, “Where I live the boys play bandits, no-one wants to be a copper”.65 He went on to say that boys were encouraged by adults to fight because they had to learn to defend themselves against poverty, against the cold and against ‘the law’. The violent upbringing of the Barbagian man is given detailed illustration in Lizzani’s film (Barbagia. La società del malessere) when the search and round-up sequence is interspersed with flashbacks to the childhood of protagonist Graziano Cassitta (Graziano Mesina’s alter ego) and the voice over explains the origin of Sardinian banditry. Shepherd-bandits are the product of a long-standing selection process: For centuries in the Barbagia the upbringing of shepherd boys has followed rituals which forge generations of rebels and fighters. 62

“C’è molta bassezza nell’animo umano, però se non ci fosse tanta miseria, tutti questi fatti di sangue non accadrebbero più.” 63 Lilliu 2002; see chapter 2, section Sardinia in European Literature after 1900. 64 “La Barbagia è la terra dei resistenti; i pastori sardi saranno forse all’anno zero della civiltà tecnologica, ma sono certo all’anno tremila della loro civiltà, che è una civiltà con aspetti barbarici”. On this film see Olla 2008: 161-163. 65 About Pelle di bandito see Olla 2008: 159-161.

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Graziano was initiated to bravery according to these rituals. Orgosolo: every flower taken from a grave is rewarded with a penny. A boy has to learn to overcome his fear.66

Thus the young Graziano steals flowers from graves and receives his father’s compliments for his courage. “In his adolescent years too, Graziano’s initiation follows the rules of the Barbagia: violence and silence” (Barbagia. La società del malessere). He learns to react violently to insults and never to surrender. “But Graziano is unusually precocious in the use of weapons” and shoots at those who give offence, which gets him into trouble with the law and he is sent to a reformatory. At the age of eighteen he is caught sheep-rustling and serves his first prison sentence.67 Particularly striking in this detailed

66

“In Barbagia da secoli l’educazione dei ragazzi pastori segue rituali che forgiano generazioni di ribelli e di combattenti. Anche Graziano fu iniziato al coraggio secondo questi rituali. Orgosolo: ogni fiore portato via da una tomba, un soldo per premio. Il bambino deve abituarsi a dominare la paura”. 67 “No outlaw in Italy, perhaps in Europe, has ever caused a mobilisation of forces like the one seen in March 1968. The duel seems ridiculous, a thousand against four, but on Graziano Cassitta’s side is this land, the Barbagia. The process of selection which has produced him is a very old one. For centuries in the Barbagia the upbringing of shepherd boys has followed rituals which forge generations of rebels and fighters. Graziano was taught bravery in accordance with these very same rituals. Pictures of Graziano as a child are shown to illustrate the commentary). The cemetery at Orgosolo: every flower removed from a grave is rewarded with a penny. The child must get used to mastering his fear. Graziano takes a bunch of stolen flowers to his father, a shepherd minding his flock. His father says, “Well done, son, you did what I told you”. This is followed by scenes of boys fighting). In his adolescence, too, Graziano’s initiation follows the Barbagian rules: violence and silence. Graziano with his father. His father slaps him and says: “What happened to you?” Graziano: “I fell over”. Father: “Never give in”. Graziano gets his revenge on his attackers: “I’ll kill the lot of you”). But Graziano stands out for his precocious proficiency in the use of weapons. Graziano shoots at a group of boys. Graziano with his mother before a judge, who says, “He’s a born criminal”. His mother replies, “He’s just a boy, but you can keep him. Six months in a reformatory will do him good, I can’t control him any more”). But the reformatory, as it is in Italy these days, does nothing to reform him. 1960: at the age of eighteen Graziano tries to steal a flock of sheep. Pictures of the attempted theft. Graziano is caught). His first experience of prison.” (Barbagia. La società del malessere, Lizzani 1969). The passages in brackets refer to the pictures. The rest of the text is a transcription of the voice-off commentary. The commentary is also accompanied by pictures of the landscape, 19thcentury bandits, newspaper headlines announcing kidnappings and ransoms paid,

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account of Graziano Cassitta’s upbringing is the use of the term ‘selection’, which invokes the theory of natural selection and social Darwinism, according to which only the best, the strongest and the toughest survive. The upbringing of boys in the Barbagia, based on violence, is thus identified with a process of natural selection which forges “shepherds, rebels and fighters”. The trope of an education to violence stands as an essential feature of the Sardinian shepherd, and was taken up by a large number of films. In Disamistade (Cabiddu 1988) the story begins in a courtroom, where the judge, anachronistically inspired by Pigliaru’s teachings,68 places the deeds of the accused, a bandit named Sebastiano Catte, in a social context where youths are familiar with the use of weapons: It has been observed that the Sardinian shepherd stays within the law until he carries a rifle. The origins of this cult of violence are to be traced in an upbringing that directs youths towards the use of weapons. Because of the social and family environment from which he comes, as a child Sebastiano Catte could certainly not have been alien to this upbringing, which celebrates violence as a law and imposes the use of weapons as a daily practice.69

The shepherd’s life rendered on screen thus reflected a view not far removed from the theories of late 19th-century positivism, since no chance of change or ‘redemption’ was admitted for Barbagian man, marked down from birth for a cruel, rebellious destiny in perpetual conflict with the powers of the time. The bandit image was also enriched by ideas contained in writings which pointed to the colonialist character of Italian government policy in the 1960s. As stated in Antonio Pigliaru’s formulation, the presence of the state in the Nuoro province was actually manifested as an absence – it had no popular protests in Sardinian villages and the searches and round-ups carried out by the army in the Barbagia. 68 Olla 2008: 55. 69 “È stato osservato che il pastore sardo si mantiene nella legalità fin quando non ha con sé un fucile. I germi di questo culto della violenza vanno rintracciati in un’educazione che indirizza i giovani alla pratica delle armi. Per il contesto sociale e familiare da cui proviene, Sebastiano Catte, fin da bambino, non poté essere certo estraneo a questa educazione che celebra la violenza come legge e che impone l’uso delle armi come pratica quotidiana” (Disamistade).

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liberating, democratic or progressive function, it confined itself merely to repression.70 The image of the clash of civilisations which pitted the shepherd-bandit against the Italian Army in the postunification period now continued in the icon of the indefatigable Barbagian rebel locked in his struggle against the oppression of the modern Italian state. Striking the Barbagia from outside simply with repression is impossible. This obstacle throws the central state into crisis. The police against the magistrature, the magistrature against the police. In actual fact banditry is nothing but an index of backwardness and malaise. The Barbagia, society of malaise. How do the shepherds live? Who are the pasture owners who ruthlessly exploit the work of the shepherd? Behind the great property accumulations lies the usurpation of common land facilitated by a law alien to the tradition of the Barbagia, imposed from outside by the Piedmontese kings in the last century. Usurers, predators and large-scale stock-rustlers who carved up the common land by erecting walls and arbitrary boundaries, they were the founders of many present-day worthy families. Still now, 6,000 landowners possess 56% of the land. The other 260,000 have just 5%. To this legalised injustice the poorest reacted by legalising first stock-rustling and now kidnapping, which is quicker and more profitable. But Graziano’s deeds force the Barbagia to look at itself in the mirror. Radical rejection of the structures of bourgeois society leads some people to see in Graziano and in banditry an element of subversion, an example for the guerrilla struggle, but the majority take part in a conscious and mature political struggle. Several times in 1969 students and shepherds have taken to the streets, occupied town halls and rejected banditry as a form of rebellion, but above all they reject the principle of repression, they demand sweeping reforms that will strike at the root of this evil. And there is a small radical fringe which preaches the separation of Sardinia from the Italian state. Representatives of this radical faction have made contact with Graziano and offered him the leadership of the separatist movement. (Barbagia. La società del malessere)71 70

Pigliaru 2000: 40. “Colpire dall’esterno la Barbagia solo con la repressione è impossibile. Su questo scoglio entrano in crisi le strutture dello stato centrale. Polizia contro magistratura, magistratura contro polizia. In realtà il banditismo non è che la spia di una condizione di arretratezza e di malessere. Barbagia, la società del malessere. Come vivono i pastori? Chi sono i proprietari dei pascoli che esosamente sfruttano il lavoro del 71

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A throwback to the archaic cultural cycle deriving from the state of men as hunter-gatherer-warriors – transformed into a modern-day Robin Hood and revolutionary leader – the Sardinian shepherd was the key figure in the representation of banditry in those years.72 This was also visible in documentary productions, which identified Orgosolo, the scene of a number of popular protests, as the topos of the revolt against the state.73 The protest of the shepherd-bandits thus became the symbol of the struggle for the liberation of oppressed peoples. Graziano Cassitta described himself as “king of the Barbagia” because he enjoyed popular support, indeed he admitted that “the people’s goodwill” was as essential “as the air” he breathed because “without the Barbagia the outlaw can’t live” (Barbagia. La società del malessere). He declared himself a fighter, prepared to liberate South Tyrol with his men in exchange for freedom. The idea of revolution was made explicit in the curious film Sierra maestra (Giannarelli 1968), set in Latin America but shot in a small Sardinian village, where the stories of South American pecoraio? All’origine delle grandi accumulazioni terriere c’è l’usurpazione delle terre demaniali favorita da una legge estranea alle tradizioni della Barbagia e imposta dall’esterno dai re piemontesi nel secolo scorso. Usurai, predatori e grandi ladri di bestiame che si divisero le terre comuni alzando muri e confini arbitrari, sono i capostipiti di molte famiglie notabili di oggi. Ancora adesso 6000 proprietari possiedono il 56% della terra. Agli altri 260.000 resta solo il 5%. A questa ingiustizia legalizzata, i più poveri hanno reagito legalizzando prima il furto di bestiame e oggi il sequestro di persona, più rapido e redditizio. Ma le gesta di Graziano obbligano la stessa Barbagia a guardarsi allo specchio. Il no radicale alle strutture della società borghese induce alcuni a vedere in Graziano, nel banditismo un elemento di sovversione, un esempio per la guerriglia, ma la maggioranza diviene protagonista di una contestazione politica cosciente e matura. Studenti e pastori a più riprese nel 1969 scendono nelle piazze, occupano le sedi comunali, respingono il banditismo come forma di ribellione, ma respingono soprattutto la teoria della repressione, esigono riforme decise che stronchino il male all’origine. Una piccola frangia della contestazione infine radicalizzata su posizioni separatistiche predica la disannessione della Sardegna dallo stato italiano. Alcuni esponenti di questa frazione politica riescono a prendere contatti con Graziano e gli offrono la direzione del movimento indipendentista” (Barbagia. La società del malessere, Lizzani 1969). With these words on the soundtrack, the screen shows shots of the landscape, old 19th-century bandits, newspaper headlines announcing kidnappings and ransom payments, popular protests in Sardinian villages and the round-ups carried out by the army in the Barbagia. 72 Cagnetta 2002: 84-86. 73 Olla 2008: 71-72.

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revolutionaries were actually about the ‘Italian third world’ which was to be found in the Barbagia.74 The film also featured Sardinian shepherds engaged in a protest demonstration.75 References to popular revolt are also to be found in Barbagia. La società del malessere (Lizzani 1969) and Pelle di bandito (Livi 1968). In an interview with a journalist in the latter film, Mariano De Linna explains the reasons why he took to banditry, baldly stating, “I stole out of hunger and killed for revenge”. His partner in crime, Spaniard Miguel Atienza, added, “Ours are not acts of delinquency, but social justice. The government helps the rich.” The image of the vengeful bandit was thus fused with that of Robin Hood. While these films confirmed the image of the shepherd as a historical throwback whose identity clashed with an alien, oppressive and hostile cultural system,76 a closer analysis reveals that the trope had undergone a profound transformation compared to the romantic ideal of the late 19th-century brigand, as was confirmed by the eventful biography of Graziano Mesina upon which the films of the time were modelled.77 There was a clear difference between the traditional shepherd-bandit and the modern one. What is most striking is the awareness of the new bandits with regard to the mass media and their ability to manage their image.78 The media-friendly bandit finds its apotheosis in the figure of Taddeu in the film I protagonisti (Fondato 1971): armed to the teeth, he was prepared to take money – like a circus attraction – to be seen and photographed in Rambo poses by bored, decadent tourists. The other bandit characters of the same period, such as Mariano De Linna, playing Mesina in Pelle di bandito (1968), confirmed that impression, agreeing to give interviews, interacting with the film camera, being aware of their public image and missing no opportunity to show themselves as the avant-garde of 74

Ibid., 156. The symbolic identification of Sardinia with South America may in a way be said to reappear in Paolo Heusch’s film El Che Guevara (1968). The story was set in Bolivia, but the scenes on location were shot on the Supramonte near Orgosolo and set against long-distance panoramic views of the Bolivian landscape: Olla 2008: 159. 76 Cagnetta 2002: 83. 77 That the image of the bandit, as early as in the 19th century, was the result of a cultural construction produced by writers and journalists emerges clearly from Pierangelo Loi’s analysis of news coverage of banditry in the 19th and 20th centuries: Loi 2001. 78 Olla 2008: 59-62. 75

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a social protest movement. In the final analysis, in the 1960s the representation of the bandit at the centre of public attention through the press, despite the persistence of a whole range of tropes, brought into question the prevailing idea in the collective imagination of the Barbagia as a no-go area separated from the rest of the world. The ideal of the romantic bandit was also revealed to be completely hollow. After asserting his natural calling as an executioner, Mariano De Linna was forced to admit that he had pursued a career in kidnapping so that he would “have a pension”. The Robin Hood bandit model thus revealed its truest face, that of a criminal who was not simply the product of an archaic world but one who had absorbed the modern economic mentality, attempting to maximise profits and minimise risks. The Barbagia behind the facade of otherness and archaism was actually very similar to the rest of the world. Like the film characters based in him, Mesina went to parties, had dates with escort girls, went to watch the Cagliari football team – he acted as a point of contact between the Barbagian system and the modern world, particularly the island’s coastal areas, then undergoing frenetic tourist development. The bandit image constructed along the lines of the mastrucati latrunculi79 (petty thieves in sheepskins) was taking on the appearance of the oeconomicus latrunculus (petty thief in a business suit).80 That was not all. The gulf between the real and the imagined was even wider if it is recalled that Mesina’s distant predecessors were different from those re-created in the popular imagination. The legendary late 19th-century bandit Derosas did not dress in Sardinian costume, wore a watch and personally sought out journalists to tell them the truth regarding what he said was a pack of lies that had been spread about him.81 This was a shepherd-bandit far removed indeed from the one rhetorically re-created in literature and in a host of films up to the present day. Some of the bandit films made after the 1960s, such as Dove volano i corvi d’argento (Livi 1976) and Disamistade (Cabiddu 1988), reiterated the representation of the shepherd who had no choice but to bow to the obligation of vendetta and the code of honour, bound by a 79

Cicero called the Sardinian people “mastrucati” (De provincis consularibus, 7) and “pelliti” (Idem, Pro Scauro, 45) because of their use of the mastruca. 80 Loi 2001: 64. 81 Ibid., 94-95.

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society that was archaic but felt the keen wind of modernisation.82 In Livi’s film the shepherd-bandits have nothing romantic or heroic about them, they are merely the pawns – like the outlaw Simbula – of a mysterious organisation based far from the mountains but always present and vigilant. Disamistade, whose plot covers more than a decade up to 1958, confirms the idea of the shepherds’ inevitable drift into banditry. Every one of them has some sort of score to settle with fellow villagers or with the law, so it does not take much to push them into crime. As in the films of the 1960s, the plot also emphasises the close link between banditry and the violent upbringing given to boys. Sebastiano’s father wants to teach him to hunt boar, while his mother, set against the idea of her son being a shepherd or a hunter, wants him to study to become a doctor or a lawyer. When the boy leaves to attend college, his father makes sure he has a flick-knife with him. Despite his mother’s aspirations, Sebastiano soon puts the weapon to use when he corners a cat and kills it, proving to his schoolmates that he is balente. Years later he employs the same brute violence when he stabs a rival to death.83 Two recent films – Arcipelaghi (Columbu 2001) and La destinazione (Sanna 2003) – deal with the idea of banditry as a social relic in a world that is modernised, but not completely so. In Arcipelaghi, based on the novel of the same name by Maria Giacobbe (1995), the Barbagia is a world in crisis and the bandit has been reduced to common criminal who steals to get rich, slitting the throat of a child guilty of witnessing his theft.84 What makes Columbu’s interpretation ambiguous, however, is the fact that the murderer is not a local shepherd-bandit, as he is in the book, but an outsider, Pietro s’istrangiu, as his Campidano dialect makes clear.85 The film thus reevokes the theme of the outsider as the element which disrupts the Barbagian order, while the novel highlights the direct responsibility of the local community, which connives in the terrible crime by its conspiracy of silence.86 These films thus accentuate the idea of a Sardinia that is changing, but only in part, and re-present the trope of 82

About these films see Olla 2008: 169 and 177-178. Ibid., 178. 84 About Giacobbe’s novel see chapter 2, section People: The Bandit from Hero to Anti-hero. 85 Olla 2008: 104. 86 Ibid. 83

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an incomplete modernisation – or rather a land torn between archaism and modernisation – of which the shepherd-bandit is the supreme embodiment. In actual fact this standpoint is not so very different from the views of those who deny any change and propound the idea of ‘time standing still’, because saying that nothing ever really changes in Sardinia leads to the same conclusion: an island unable to move with the times like other regions in Europe and therefore condemned to retain or renew an archaic lifestyle which is now bereft of the alleged moral solidity it originally had. Two of the most recent Sardinian-set films have produced contrasting images of the bandit which allow some conclusions to be drawn about this trope. The television drama L’ultima frontiera (Bernini 2006), loosely based on Giulio Bechi’s book Caccia grossa (2002), is a popular revisitation of the island and its banditry.87 It contains all the features of the exotic Sardinia shown on cinema screens over the last hundred years: breathtaking shots of the forestclad Nuoro mountains, bandit executioners – complete with plaited hair, as noted by Wagner!88 – living like animals among the crags of the Supramonte and rousing their countrymen to rebel against the oppressive colonialist state, a Piedmontese officer punished by being sent to the island on a military expedition to wipe out the ferocious brigands. Despite the film’s hostile critical reception in Sardinia, television viewers enjoyed this old-style ‘Southernist’ bandit spectacle.89 It should be remembered that the screenplay was a joint effort which included the contribution of Sardinian writer Marcello Fois, one of the best-known Italian contemporary authors.90 The film clearly exploits a recognisable iconographic repertoire and makes the whole thing more captivating for a shallow television audience by resorting to other well-worn strategies: a historical setting, an adventure story with goodies and baddies and an impossible love story between an Army officer and a brigand’s sister. With the help of reasonably good directing, a good production standard in the reconstruction of the settings and a decent cast (for a television drama), it has all the ingredients for success on the small 87

Ibid., 363-364. See above, note 18. 89 Olla 2008: 89. 90 About Marcello Fois see Marras 2009. 88

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screen.91 There remains only to be acknowledged the remarkable impact of certain anthropological representations on the collective imagination; they please precisely because they are familiar – though patently based on a distortion of reality – and as such reassuring. The dialogues and characters of L’ultima frontiera lay bare the entire repertoire of images and prejudices regarding Sardinia and its people built up over several centuries in European culture. This ‘savage people’ does not live in far-off lands or another continent, it lurks in the island’s magnificent and fearsome mountains, standing as an incorrigible nucleus of archaism, refusing to integrate with the civilised world. The bandit Elias Satta Pintore is thus the anti-hero to be defeated so as to free Sardinia of its ills, and the task falls to the ‘good’ Piedmontese officer (a lover of 19th-century French realist literature), the embodiment of the state and Italian civilisation. The fact that the plot is based on Bechi’s Caccia grossa takes us back at least a hundred years to the origins of cinema, when the passion for wild and exotic characters was probably the main reason for filmmakers’ interest in Sardinia, but in the present times, as Gianni Olla has observed, the characters in this particular drama would be more at home in Disneyland.92 In the character of Zuanne Malune, protagonist of Sonetàula (Mereu 2008), based on the novel of the same name by Giuseppe Fiori (19621; 20002), the strength of the shepherd-bandit model receives further confirmation but at the same time is turned on its head. Zuanne-Sonetàula conforms to the model of the young shepherd brought up, according to Barbagian custom, on the principle of personal honour and the practice of the personal vendetta, and he has the inner solitude and rebellious spirit considered typical of his kind. He is hostile to an Italian state which manifests itself only through incomprehensible and unjust laws, resulting in his father’s exile and subsequent conscription. The death of his father in the war in Libya leaves him bereft of any solid figure of reference. Zuanne thus embodies all the characteristics which have for centuries represented the island’s shepherds as an unchanging anthropological category of Sardinian identity. But while in other films the shepherds’ fate is circumscribed in a fixed world vision which denies any alternatives to 91 92

Olla 2008: 363-364. Ibid., 364.

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the Sardinians, in Sonetàula it is the shepherd’s own decisions, taken against rather than because of the dictates of his circumstances, that lead him to tragedy. Though the boy’s problems begin when he wipes out the flock of someone who has insulted him for stealing one of his sheep, as the story unfolds his outlaw life appears as the extreme, irrational and archaic choice of an outcast incapable of changing and developing with the times, while the world around him celebrates the elimination of malaria, the introduction of electricity and the improvement of living standards brought by modernisation. So Zuanne is not the hero, the model to be admired and emulated by a community jealously defending its diversity and seeing itself as a victim of foreign colonialist outrages. He is an anti-hero, uncomprehended and outdated in the eyes of those who are ready to recognise and welcome the opportunity for change with open arms. Proof of the divide between the two opposing mentalities and philosophies of life is embodied in the lives of the protagonists, united since childhood but inexorably driven apart by the boy’s destructive decision. Maddalena, though loved by Zuanne, chooses to commit herself to Giuseppino, the diminutive form of whose name fits his character – when still a boy he did nothing about the theft of a herd of pigs in his charge, showing that he was not as balente as Zuanne. Giuseppino believes he has an alternative in life, so this failed herdsman finds his ‘redemption’ by working for ERLAAS, a forestry company engaged in the anti-malaria campaign. In an encounter between the two, when Zuanne tries to enlist his assistance in an attack on the lorry carrying workers’ wages to the village, Giuseppino refuses, saying that real courage is not showing how balente you are but facing life responsibly, and perhaps less heroically. His words mark the moral damnation of his friend and rival, who then plunges into an abyss from which there is no return. Towards the end, when Zuanne declares his readiness to turn himself in so as to ensure that Maddalena gets the reward on his head, she refuses his offer, not wishing to involve herself with the bandit’s wasted life. Following the plot of Fiori’s novel, Mereu portrays his young protagonist as one of history’s losers, whose life is played out in a flash and disappears, leaving no trace but the certainty of its failure. While Maddalena and Giuseppino start a family and can hope for a hard but decent future, Zuanne, on the run from the law, dies a pointless death in complete solitude.

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The tragic figure of Zuanne-Sonetàula marks a turning point in the tradition of the bandit as the unchangeable model of Sardinian identity. This character spent the 20th century as a major cinematic figure, standing as an icon of the Sardinian people, embodying their rebellious spirit and primitive, vengeful nature. Through it the popular imagination saw Sardinia as an exotic Eden, a distant and inaccessible world, populated by barbaric hunter-warriors. The Barbagia was the undisputed kingdom of the shepherd – a world isolated, closed in on itself, incapable of evolving and knowing change. Sonetàula’s experience is comparable to that of other shepherd-bandits depicted by cinema, but the image of the Barbagia and the Sardinia in which his life is played out is completely different. The island’s heart is not merely a territory conquered by modernity, one which ‘sees the light’, or is reborn, with the arrival of electricity. On closer scrutiny it has never really been completely separate from the rest of the country but has shared the tragedies and suffering of its history. Worker’s exploitation in industry (especially in mining), Fascism, exile, the western desert campaign and the Second World War are all tragedies affecting Sonetàula’s life, compelling him to face a world in constant movement, in a community where the clamour of progress and change comes muted but cannot be ignored or disregarded. The future will tell whether the death of Sonetàula stands as the swan song of the traditional bandit, but there is good reason to doubt it. The anachronisms in the representation of Sardinia on screen have been remarked upon for a century, but certain icons have lost none of their prestige.93 It must also be said that the Barbagia – advertised to this day as a mysterious place, populated by silences, nuraghi, flocks moving through its inaccessible spaces, dominated by the upright, rigid, solitary figure of the shepherd – still constitutes one of the island’s major attractions, especially with the development of rural tourism. And modern-day shepherds, the real ones, have welcomed globalisation, putting their sheepfolds on the Internet and showing their ability to exploit the centuries-old fame of the banditexecutioners, so tourists can get on line and book excursions to the Supramonte with the flavour of a journey into the past, discovering an

93

It will suffice to mention the bad reviews given to Sardinian-set films throughout the history of Italian cinema, see Olla 2008: 107-118.

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authentic Sardinia that probably never existed but has never been as exalted and sought-after as in the post-modern era. Honour and Shame: The ‘Vendetta Barbaricina’ The most distinctive feature of Sardinians in the literary tradition is the importance they attach to personal honour and consequently to the obligation to avenge every insult suffered. According to Joseph Fues the vendetta was the Sardinians’ favourite passion, since “their thirst for vengeance reaches the farthest limits to which a man may push it”.94 A century later Max Leopold Wagner, though well disposed towards the islanders, confirmed the widespread use of this practice and its serious consequences.95 It became one of the most productive tropes of cinema, providing the main theme for a host of films, including La grazia (De Benedetti 1929), Faddjia. La legge della vendetta (Bianchi Montero 1949), Amore rosso (1952), Proibito (Monicelli 1954), Le due leggi (Mulargia 1963), Pelle di bandito (Livi 1968), Dove volano i corvi d’argento (Livi 1976), Disamistade (Cabiddu 1988), Arcipelaghi (Columbu 2001) and Sonetàula (Mereu 2008), to cite only the best-known. Mention should also be made of the two Sardinian comedies where the theme is clearly indicated in their titles: Vendetta...sarda (Mattòli 1957) and Una questione d’onore (Zampa 1966). Tradition has it that the origin of the personal vendetta is to be found in Sardinian man’s total distrust of official justice. In Proibito, Costantino Corraine explains his desire for revenge by exclaiming “I know only one law – my own”. The feud between the Corraine and Barras families is said to have been caused by the absence of any real justice. According to Costantino the obligation to exact revenge was supposed to make up for that lack: “on the day when the first Corraine killed the first Barras there was no law and no justice, only abandonment and indifference, so other men took this right upon themselves”. This is the same distrust that induces Michele, the protagonist of Banditi a Orgosolo, not to present himself to the Carabinieri to prove his innocence, but to become an outlaw instead. He is convinced that despite his innocence he could be locked away 94 95

Fues 1780: 336; 338. Wagner 1913-1914: 10-11.

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for twenty or thirty years – even his little brother Peppeddu consoles Michele, telling him he was right to go on the run. This attitude returns repeatedly in bandit films. In Dove volano i corvi d’argento the outlaw Simbula, face-to-face with the investigating magistrate, spits out his complete distrust of Italian state law because it has always been considered as a stick with which to beat Sardinians.96 The origin of the vendetta is said to be “mountain law” (Le due leggi), what Pigliaru defined in his research as the “Barbagian legal system” (1959). According to this unwritten code it is preferable “to be an outlaw than [to be] a coward” because, as Andria reminds her mother, who is intent on dissuading him from avenging the death of his brother Pedru, she “has given birth to men, not worms” (Le due leggi). In Sardinia, for he who is born a shepherd and is balente in his blood, “there is only one law: an eye for an eye” (Dove volano i corvi d’argento). This is the law invoked by old Giaime, who expects his son Istevene to avenge the death of his brother because “it’s better to be dead than dishonoured” (Dove volano i corvi d’argento). In the traditional Sardinian mentality, then, without honour men are not men. This vision is explicitly confirmed in Barbagia. La società del malessere: he who fulfils the obligation of the vendetta proves himself a man of honour and respects the community’s traditions whereby, as cogently argued by Graziano Cassitta’s mother, her son “did the right thing. What does a worthy [balente] man do if his brother is killed? He avenges him and saves the family honour.” The voice over, representing the outside world, observing and judging the act of violence produced by the law of the Barbagia, replies that “under the law of the land Graziano is a criminal”. Capturing the irreparable fracture between the ‘observed world’ and the ‘observing world’, the vendetta becomes a powerful exoticising lens through which to project the Sardinian people in a primitive and savage light, in flagrant contrast with modern civilisation. Although the historical background is conducive to the recognition of Sardinia as a peripheral area in 96

Simbula: “I’m not a bandit and I’m not a servant either, and I’ve never wanted to kill anyone. I just use them [weapons] to defend myself and not very well at that; your friends know them better than I do.” Magistrate: “The law is the law and as a magistrate I have a duty to uphold it.” Simbula: “Your law is designed to convict the poor, never to punish the real culprits.” Magistrate: “Platitudes, you’re too quick to judge.” Simbula: “That’s rich, coming from you.”

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which the state is weak and law and order are lacking – conditions facilitating the development of behaviour typified by the model of the man of honour – the films analysed here tend to confirm an original conceptualisation of the man of honour in the popular imagination rather than the recognition of a simple product of a given historical context.97 The vendetta thus appears as an unmistakable sign of Sardinian identity. On the strength of the 19th-century imagination and Deledda’s writings, in the first half of the last century it was the symbol of a closed world, unmoving and timeless. In La grazia it is Simona, an unmarried mother, who asks her father and brothers, shepherds and men of honour, to avenge her for the dishonour brought upon her by Elias Desoles. “You’re vicious animals!” Elias screams at his persecutors. As witnessed by the writings of Cagnetta, Pigliaru and Fiori and faithfully depicted by bandit films, from the mid-20th century the law of the vendetta was the mark of the clash of civilisations, between the Barbagia and the Italian state, compelled to co-exist in an unequal relationship. To amplify the sense of horror aroused by primitive and barbaric practices like the vendetta, the films resorted to showing the rituals used in honour killings. Graziano Cassitta’s brother is killed because their rival family consider him as an informer: his tongue is cut out and a fly put in his mouth is an unmistakable sign of his sin (Barbagia. La società del malessere). Implicit in the man of honour trope are the presumption of male dominance and the subordinate position of women. Simona does not get her revenge on Elias Desoles in person, she asks her father and brothers to do it for her. Vendetta and honour are basically ‘men’s things’, as disconsolately observed in Le due leggi (1963) by Maria, whose son Pedru has just been killed and whose other son has left the village to avenge his death without a thought for the trouble his departure will bring upon his family. The vendetta is thus part of a male-dominated conception of society. Yet cinema has provided a number of female avengers. Marianna Sirca in Amore rosso (1952), very different from the character in Deledda’s novel, is portrayed at the end of the film as a novice gunslinger as she pursues her enemy on a crag, despite her wounds, and kills him, dying immediately

97

Leerssen 2007e: 334-335.

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afterwards.98 Still farther removed from historical reality is Mariantonia, known as ‘Sa Reina’ (the Queen), sister of the real bandit Elias Serra Sanna described by Giulio Bechi in his book Caccia grossa.99 In the television drama L’ultima frontiera she appears as a diabolical force, endowed with enormous prestige and powers unthinkable in a Sardinian woman of the time.100 In these cases cinema amplified the distance between the island world and the ‘civilised world’, attributing to women the characteristics considered peculiar to the Sardinian man of honour. The figure who probably represents the culmination of the female vendetta is Lucia Solinas. In league with her elderly mother-inlaw, she hatches a fiendish plot and drives her son Oreste, still only a boy, to kill the murderer of his brother (Arcipelaghi 2001). The film is based on Maria Giacobbe’s novel Gli arcipelaghi (1995). The Sardinian authoress based her book on a long-suppressed autobiographical story which surfaced following a murder committed in Hamburg. Following the acquittal of the man considered guilty of the rape and murder of her daughter, the young girl’s mother avenged her by shooting him in the courtroom.101 The novel recounted a story which, though redolent of the writer’s Sardinian background, seemed to have all the universal significance of a full-blown Greek tragedy. And with its several narrative voices the book, unlike the film, is developed on the contradictions between two worlds and two civilisations – traditional Sardinia and the modern mainland.102 In the film, by contrast, references to the continental mainland and modern civilisation are few and far between, as are the differentiations of the narrative standpoint. The story is set in a village in the province of Nuoro, a community living in perfect unison in accordance with its ancient and ‘barbaric’ customs. The narrative tension turns essentially on the figure of the mother, the protagonist of the film symbolising the continuity of values and traditions. The film lacks the analytical complexity of the novel, leaves less room for interpretation and 98

In the novel Marianna is undoubtedly a character ahead of her time, independent and able to make her own decisions, but in the film she is made into something different, above all by the Wild West atmosphere permeating the story. 99 Elias Satta Pintore is Elias Serra Sanna’s alter ego in the film. 100 Olla 2008: 364. 101 Baumann 2007: 228-229. 102 Ibid., 226-227.

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transmits above all the persistence of a world still immersed in its own past, of which Lucia is the most faithful representative. This adds up to yet another exoticist vision, conveying the usual archaic and primitive image of the Sardinian people, even though there are clear signals that the island is modernising. The fact that it is Lucia who rectifies the wrong done to her family is due more to her personal circumstances than anything else. Whereas in the book her husband is an alcoholic, a weak individual from a poorer background than hers, the film lacks any father figure at all, so no-one but the mother can take up the burden of vengeance. The avenging female is thus a fairly rare narrative device which, though not entirely alien to the historical reality of the Barbagia, functions as a substitute in cases where the man cannot exact vengeance himself. The decision to assign the task to a woman has the effect of heightening the sense of horror in the audience. The female vendetta is used to underline once again the unbridgeable divide between a primitive Sardinia and the civilised world. Shepherds versus Town-dwellers and Farmers With few exceptions, Sardinian films are generally set in an agricultural-pastoral environment, dominated by traditional men. Standing in contrast to the model of the rural Sardinian – shepherd or farmer – are the town-dweller and the islander who has emigrated to the mainland, both characterised by customs and behaviour different from those typical of the island. This pair of opposites echoes the tropes of the countryman and the town-dweller and is parallel to the town-country dyad.103 The world of the Sardinian shepherd and peasant is the locus of origins, traditions and a primitive but authentic culture, whereas the town is the topos of progress and modernity, but at the same time the centre of decadence and perdition. While the shepherd-farmer embodies the essence of Sardinian identity, the towndweller has detached himself from it, has adopted lifestyles in direct contrast to traditional ones and is therefore the expression of a corrupt and decadent world. The ethical and cultural divide between these two typologies has been consistently emphasised in Sardinian cinema from the outset. 103

See Leerssen 2007a: 278-281.

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The man who seduces the beautiful Ilaria and then drives her to suicide (Le vie del peccato 1946) is the bourgeoisified, decadent and libidinous Don Mattia. Islanders who have lived on the mainland, like Marianna Sirca’s cousin Sebastiano (Amore rosso 1952), are seen by the locals as strangers who have forgotten their roots, as is Saro (Faddjia 1949), who returns from military service on the mainland and speaks of irrigation and modernising agriculture – and considers all shepherds bandits. Even the priest Don Paolo (Proibito 1954) is treated as a stranger because of his long sojourn on the mainland. The examples demonstrating the sharp distinction between country people and town-dwellers, real Sardinians and ‘continentalised’ ones – not to mention the insuperable distance that divides islanders from Italians – are legion. And they all confirm that only the inhabitant of a rural environment, traditional and respectful of local customs, is capable of giving full expression to the values of Sardinian identity. Alongside the dichotomy of countryman and town-dweller, cinema, like literature, has at times tended to give a dialectical shape to the shepherd-farmer pairing. Just as the town-dweller is the negation of the Sardinian identity embodied in the countryman, the farmer’s identity pales in comparison with that of the shepherd, the only figure in which the true essence of Sardinian identity can be identified. Max Leopold Wagner had already contrasted the Barbagian shepherds with the plainsmen, deeming the latter to be physically and morally inferior.104 The same contrast is at the centre of Faddjia. La legge della vendetta (Bianchi Montero 1949), featuring the sedentary model of the farmer in opposition to the nomadic life of the shepherd. This film did not go down at all well with the critics, partly because it was not considered to be a reflection of the real Sardinia.105 Its message veers between a vision of society in conformity with the political agenda of the governments of the time and an image of Sardinian society based on the contrast between the above-mentioned anthropological models.106 Despite such strictures, however, the film does offer points of interest in terms of the images of Sardinia it presents to the viewer. In Faddjia the contrast between the ancient pastoral world and the modern agricultural one is embodied by 104

Wagner 1908b: 245. On this see Olla 2008: 136. 106 Olla 2008: 53 and 135. 105

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Michele, the shepherd, and Don Pietro Atzeni, a wealthy landowner.107 At the beginning of the story their rivalry is introduced by a verbal exchange between Michele and Pietro Atzeni’s daughter Anna Rita: Anna Rita: “You’re nothing but a jumped-up lout who goes to sleep with his sheep and gets up with their fleas!” Michele: “Maybe I’ve got my sheep’s fleas, but you’ve got your chickens’ brains!” Anna Rita: “Get out of my sight you filthy beggar!”108

Pietro Atzeni believes in traditional values such as the defence of honour and the obligation of the vendetta (he is never without his rifle) but at the same time he is open to change and progress, which to him means producing more wheat and olive oil to combat hunger.109 Michele, together with his fellow migrating shepherds, is the symbol of a world risking disappearance with the advance of modern agriculture. Don Luisio, the oldest shepherd, is often heard to lament the passing of the old ways, of the time when shepherds could move freely and use sheep-tracks which are now fenced off because they are on private property. His struggle for the right of access is founded on long-standing customs, but “the farmers always get their own way”. The shepherd is held in contempt, as is made clear by the ‘continentalised’ landowner Saro when he remarks that between “shepherds and bandits there’s no difference”. The contrast between the two worlds and lifestyles is reflected in dress: Michele wears the typical Sardinian male costume with 107

Michele’s flock has damaged property belonging to Pietro Atzeni, who demands compensation. Michele does not want to pay because the basic cause of the problem of trespassing sheep is the appropriation and enclosure of land by the powerful landowners at the shepherds’ expense. To avoid the dishonour of default and insolvency, Michele agrees to pay damages, but he avenges the insult by raping Pietro Atzeni’s daughter Anna Rita. Compelled to flee Pietro Atzeni’s murderous vengeance, he becomes an outlaw, seeking refuge in a swamp. 108 Annarita: “Non sei che un presuntuoso villano che dorme con le pecore e si alza con le pulci!” Michele: “Io avrò le pulci delle mie pecore, ma tu hai il cervello delle tue galline!” Annarita: “Levati dintorno lurido pezzente!” 109 His wife also appreciated the benefits of progress: spinning was no longer necessary because ready-made materials could be purchased.

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boots, berritta and mastruca, while Pietro Atzeni dresses as a traditional landowner. When Michele hides out in the swamp to escape from Pietro Atzeni’s vendetta he is transformed from a sympathetic figure to a fugitive, and his appearance changes accordingly. Initially an impressive young man with no lack of female admirers, he is now dirty, dressed in rags and forced to steal food. Overall, Michele is a rather wan-looking figure – he is not a cruel bandit, nor is he a heroic shepherd. With his fellow shepherds, all dressed in costume complete with the berritta, he belongs to a world destined to disappear. All they can do is mourn the past and curse the landowners who make their life difficult by forcing them into increasingly circuitous migrations. Reinforcing the association of animal husbandry with the past are images of flocks of sheep grazing against a background of ancient monuments to the origins of Sardinian civilisation – nuraghi and the stone-age tombs known as domos de janas (abode of the fairies). The figure of Pietro Atzeni combines traditional elements of Sardinian identity with themes related to the agrarian question which was topical when the film was made.110 The film aligned itself with the Christian Democratic governments of the time, which aimed to foster agriculture and the creation of a substantial class of smallholders.111 In the end Pietro Atzeni has to agree to Michele marrying his daughter Anna Rita, who hopes to be able to bring up her son as a farmer and teach her shepherd husband how to till the land, in the interests of a secure life for them and an end to the shepherd’s wandering. In other words, Anna Rita recognises that her father’s lifestyle is the right choice to make, and Michele shows no sign of objecting to it. The closing scene is in the countryside, where a nuraghe in the background seems to seal the fate of that part of 110

That period was marked by peasant protests in the South in which agricultural labourers demanded the redistribution of land left fallow or for pasture) on the large estates there. Such a radical redistribution would have entailed a new socio-political balance in the areas hitherto characterised by large agricultural estates such as Sicily and Sardinia). Led by the Christian Democrats, the governments of the time were busy with post-war reconstruction and Italian economic recovery. There were various attempts – none carried to completion – to modernise Italian agriculture, which was still the most important sector of the economy. The Christian Democrats made a great deal of propaganda around the reforms which were supposed to modernise and relaunch the agricultural sector: Ginsborg 1990: 121-185. 111 Olla 2008: 53.

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Sardinian culture, forced to come to terms with a different future and ready to accept progress, but without relinquishing the honour and courage held to be defining characteristics of Sardinian identity. The film contains a number of ideological and cultural references typical of Deledda without being directly based on any of her works, but what is striking is the contrastive model on which it is constructed.112 Though it opens with scenes and captions which recall all the ‘classic’ Sardinian images, and the story brings out their workings in the island’s society (the code of the vendetta, the pastoral life, the various traditions), the plot reveals the questioning and decline of the classical Sardinian world through the social confrontation between shepherds and farmers, resulting in the inexorable rise of agriculture at the expense of migratory sheep and shepherds. Faddjia is thus full of images which confirm the traditional representation of Sardinians as a backward people to be redeemed in accordance with the policies of the Christian Democratic governments, designed to bring progress to an archaic, desperately poor South.113 Sardinian critics objected to the film’s portrayal of the island and its inhabitants, criticising especially the absurdity of the clash between farmers and shepherds, but it should not be forgotten that the most influential study of Sardinia available in the first half of the century, written by Maurice Le Lannou (Pâtres et paysans de la Sardaigne), saw the centuries-old struggle between peasants and shepherds as one of the defining features of traditional Sardinian society.114 Le Lannou’s scientific research, however, was not immune to literary influences, in particular those coming from Deledda.115 In ‘her’ Sardinia there re-appeared the idea of the shepherd as a nomad and “warrior by necessity”, whose peace or torment depended on the grass and the rain needed to sustain his flocks.116 The screen portrayal of shepherds in Faddjia also contains elements of the ancient nomad warrior, forced by a hostile climate to exercise the art of war and conquest, in eternal dispute with the settled world of parasitic 112

Ibid. Ibid. 114 See chapter 2, section Sardinia in European Literature after 1900. 115 See Olla 2008: 56, note 63. 116 Le Lannou 1941: 127. 113

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landowners. Times changed but the portrayal of the Sardinian shepherd did not. Years later the shepherd-warrior continued to hide behind the shepherd-bandit, in permanent dispute with the landowners. In Barbagia. La società del malessere, the bandit Graziano Cassitta tells a kidnapped boy that he is in that predicament because of his father, a wealthy, bourgeoisified landowner who enjoys great power and renown, living on the income from pastures rented to shepherds at exorbitant rates. Kidnapping has become the response – subversive but comprehensible – to the rivalry between two worlds and philosophies of life. The Sardinian Woman Following the literary tradition in its depiction of the interior of Sardinia above all else, cinema has been populated prevalently by peasants, shepherds and bandits – men in all events caught between good and evil, heroism and anti-heroism; obsessed one and all with the defence of their honour and the law of the vendetta, as a female character disconsolately observes, “they think of nothing but shooting” (Le due leggi 1967). As men dominate the action, women usually appear as second leads, confined by circumstances and rigid custom to the abnegation of their role as wives and mothers, above all forced to share the burdens and sacrifices of everyday life. Theirs is a life of solitude, spent awaiting the sudden, brief and invariably dangerous return of their men. Examples are Stefania, fiancée of the bandit Mariano De Linna (Pelle di bandito), Pamela, abandoned by her man in his obsession with avenging the death of his brother (Le due leggi), and Basilia, expecting her first child, who can only marry outlaw Simbula at night and in secret (Dove volano i corvi d’argento) and is afraid of giving birth to another balente who will bring her as much suffering. Similar roles are played by Rosetta, wife of the illegal fisherman Squarciò (The Wide Blue Road), and Domenicangela, the woman of bandit Sebastiano Catte (Disamistade). Yet they are resigned to their fate because, as the bandit Taddeu (I protagonisti) states quite openly, in Sardinia “women know how to wait”. Female characters contribute to the creation of a quintessentially Sardinian context, that is to say a setting consistent

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with the representation of an archaic and primitive culture.117 They animate the scenes of domestic life which punctuate all the films, scenes in which the camera focuses insistently on the archaic implements of country life and portrays housewives making dough for bread and cakes or working at the loom. The fact that references of this type also abound in more recent films betrays the directors’ obsessive pleasure in evoking the primitive, Southern – and therefore exotic – character of Sardinian society. As already observed, women’s clothing is another important factor in the representation of Sardinian society. In La grazia, Simona and the other women in her family are shown busy with their domestic duties (spinning, weaving, etc.) but they are wearing festive costume. The same is seen in later films: the dramatic stories of the 1940s and ‘50s (including television productions such as Canne al vento), Sardinian comedies (Vendetta...sarda and Una questione d’onore) and other works up to and including the recent television film L’ultima frontiera. While the colour of festive costume contains a marked element of the spectacular and picturesque, making it ideal for the medium of cinema, equally effective for a theme-based narrative is the portrayal of women dressed in black, or at any rate in clothes which are simple, dark and sober, and devoid of jewels and decoration. Delitto per amore opens with a series of images that unmistakably evoke the Southern character – primitive and archaic – of the Sardinian village in which the story is set. Shots of its roofs and alleys show examples of the menfolk wearing traditional black and white costume, but what catches the eye is the women; some wear the traditional white shirt, but the rest are clad in black. Such ‘apparitions’ reinforce the impression of being in some God-forsaken place at the edge of the world. In the staging of a Southern setting, their presence is a familiar and reassuring feature for the audience. It should also be remembered that female roles were influenced by the 19th-century mindset, according to which women were fragile in character and predisposed to vice and imperfection. Such weakness typically led to error and sin, as in many of Deledda’s characters, such as Olì, the protagonist of her novel Cenere.118 In the film of the same name the portrayal of Sardinian society, free of any excessive folklore, 117 118

See section Women in both chapter 1 and 2. Spinazzola 1981: 8. See also Cara 1984.

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centres on the character of Rosaria Derios (Olì in the novel): considered a sinner by common moral standards,119 she is a vagabond living free in her natural habitat of the Barbagia, where she is to be seen drinking from a stream like a wild animal. Seduced by a married man and finding herself as a mother without the sanction of wedlock, she can only atone for her sins and lift her son out of disgrace by committing suicide. The film is a vehicle for the idea of the inevitability of punishment as the only form of redemption from sin. Typical of Deledda’s philosophy, this theme was later taken up by cinema in films not based directly on her writings such as Cainà. L’isola e il continente. If Rosaria is out of line with the values of her time, an even more transgressive impression is given by Cainà, the heroine of Righelli’s film. From the very beginning of the story she is considered ‘different’ by her family and fellow-villagers because her behaviour is unbecoming to a girl: she likes to ride, play, jump from rock to rock with the goats and feel free and happy in the open air; she refuses to devote herself to household chores and does not return the love sincerely declared by Agostineddu, who wants to marry her, and so exasperates her parents, especially her mother. The fixed nature of social roles is projected into the use of spaces; female characters are usually seen at work in the kitchen, while the natural habitat for men engaged in sheep-grazing and hunting is the pastures and mountains. With her adventurous spirit and her desire to break out of the rigid confines of social and cultural convention, Cainà is the opposite of Simona (La grazia), whose dreams are those of a woman abiding by tradition: to be a faithful wife and a temperate and considerate mother so as to take on the role of “slave-queen”120 of the household. Simona’s adherence to tradition is clearly manifested when, abandoned by Elias, she sees the end of her dream of being an honest and lawfully married woman: she urges her brothers to avenge her as prescribed by the Barbagian code. The angelic figure of the traditional Sardinian woman thus reveals her primitive and barbaric face. That is not all. There is a significant difference between the end of Deledda’s novel and the ending of the film La grazia. Unlike the book, the film ends with Simona and Elias getting back together and finally being 119 120

Olla 2008: 32. Baumann 2007: 178.

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able to form a family. This ending was undoubtedly more palatable to cinema audiences, as it removed all the unsettling elements present in the original story, and a similar strategy was subsequently used in another film (Delitto per amore) based on a book by Deledda (L’edera). It should also be remembered that in La grazia the opposition of the archaic, noble and severe model of Sardinia identity to that of more developed but decadent societies is also expressed in the extreme contrast between two female models. Opposite Simona, the archetype of honest, traditional Sardinian womanhood, the film places the refined, seductive femme fatale, who lures Elias into staying with her rather than keeping faith with his betrothal to Simona. The antagonism between the two women takes on a territorial dimension in the representation of their respective homes. Simona’s house is typically Southern in its archaic Spartan simplicity, while the home of the ‘other woman’ is a showpiece of modernist fashion.121 This contrast between the two characters and the worlds they represent is part of the leitmotiv of Sardinia as a world projected into the past – closed, bound to tradition and thus a negation of the canon of modernity. Yet the repertoire of ‘defects’ inherent in Sardinian identity (archaism, primitivism, barbaric customs, etc.) becomes a virtue because it is wedded to the representation of the morality peculiar to primitive peoples. This is a strategy of ideological enhancement which had been successfully used by Sardinian writers in the second half of the 19th century, culminated in Deledda and continued to hold sway in 20th-century culture.122 Cinema adopted this vision of Sardinian society, consolidated in the European imagination through literature and the figurative arts, and so favoured morally upright female characters, or at the very least gave no quarter to those, such as Rosaria and Cainà, who rebelled against social rules. Thus the wealthy landowner Marianna Sirca refuses to marry her cousin, against the wishes of her family and the dictates of ‘common sense’, rejects the advice of father and all those – as is repeatedly observed in Deledda’s novel – who try to make her “see sense” (Marianna Sirca 1915), but in the end is unable to fulfil her dream of a life with the former servant, now bandit, of whom she 121 122

See Olla 2008: 131. On this theme see chapter 1, section Sardinia in European Literature before 1900.

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is enamoured. The “bella Ilaria” (Le vie del peccato) atones for her sin of betrayal with suicide and Agnese (Proibito) has to relinquish the man she has loved since childhood because he decides to follow his religious vocation. A happy ending is allowed only to women who conform to the ‘bourgeois’ and traditional dream of marriage and motherhood, even in preposterous stories such as Faddjia. La legge della vendetta, where the young Annarita sets up home with Michele, the man who raped her and made her a mother. Perhaps the only real exception among the rebel female characters is Fabia in ...con amore, Fabia, a promising artist considered different and maladjusted in the oppressive society of her village. After enormous efforts she manages to break free from her family, to overcome the obstacles set before by the community, to fly the coop and to go to mainland Italy to enrol in an art school. The story is based on Deledda’s autobiographical novel Cosima, which reveals her uncontainable desire to devote herself to writing and the inner strength which enabled her to become a famous author. Hers was an optimistic and ambitious life plan tenaciously pursued, as was the case with Maria Teresa Camoglio, who directed the film. Though it has an open ending charged with hope and expectation, however, even this film conforms to the idea of a Sardinia still closed and hostile to change: to pursue her dreams Fabia has no choice but to move away and leave everything behind. And perhaps it is no coincidence that the film was directed by a woman. Though times had changed, Camoglio was able to identify with the young Deledda struggling against the wishes of her family and the malevolent stares of respectable people, or at least manifested the same need to leave her environment in order to pursue new and unconventional ambitions. Female characters have not changed a great deal in more recent productions. They continue to embody the traditional model of wife and mother (Il figlio di Bakunìn, Arcipelaghi, La destinazione, Ballo a tre passi, Sonetàula), sometimes in settings that, in the tradition of local folklore, take on a magical dimension – one such case is the docu-fiction Panas (Pani 2006).123 Yet their function, as will shortly become clear, is anything but secondary because their presence alone is sufficient to evoke the cultural tradition that lies at the heart of 123

Olla 2008: 194.

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every Sardinian narrative. One problematic example is Maddalena in Sonetàula (Mereu 2008), the girl who rejects the love of bandit in favour of a ‘normal’ boy who wants nothing to do with the tradition of violence and vendetta, so as to build a quiet bourgeois life together. In Fiori’s novel she helped unmask the falsehood of the heroic aura of the bandit: in rejecting his advances she distanced herself from the values – or rather non-values – for which he lived. In the film Zuanne Malune is also unable to conquer the girl, which stands as a telling measure of his sense of failure. Whereas women before Maddalena suffered in silence beside their shepherds, bandits and outlaws, she on the other hand has no hesitation in choosing another future and turning her back on life with the bandit and all he has to offer. From this viewpoint Maddalena cannot be considered a traditional female character in keeping with the standard portrayals of Sardinian society; even though she acts in a traditional narrative setting she calls it radically into question. The same may be said of the roles of mother (Sono Alice), young women (Pesi leggeri, Jimmy della Collina), and even young girls (Sono Alice) in recent films set in an urban environment. Given the lack of any reference to the primitive pastoral and agricultural world of the Sardinian interior, the heroines of these films are free of any vestige of traditional Sardinian identity, and even though they find themselves in real and recognisable island settings they purport to represent the lives of contemporary women with no specific ethnic or cultural labels. Were it necessary to identify a character type ever-present in Sardinian-set films, one which stood as a female archetype in the island’s cultural universe, the choice would probably fall on the role of the mother. It has already been observed that in 20th-century Sardinian narrative the figure of the woman is crucial because it encapsulates a symbolic reworking of the idea of national identity.124 Sardinian literature manifests “in terms of content, an unfulfilled need for the mother”, who symbolises the island not as a place but as ‘the place’ par excellence of the Sardinian people.125 The maternal figures that embody that model include the protagonists of three of the most significant Sardinian novels discussed in the second chapter: Cenere (Deledda), Il disertore (Dessì) and above all Il giorno del giudizio 124 125

Chapter 2, section Women. Rudas 2004: 52.

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(Satta). The first two, as has been seen, gave rise to two major films dominated by mother figures.126 Though it has not been able to reproduce the depth of meaning expressed by literature, in some instances the film medium has managed to produce some archetypal female characters totally devoted to their families and as such representatives of the traditional Sardinian model of womanhood. In its literary and cinematic form the role of the mother takes on a clear symbolic meaning: as the guardian of tradition and the collective memory the mother embodies the very concept of Sardinian identity and becomes the icon of traditional culture (Pelle di bandito, Barbagia. La società del malessere, Il disertore, Disamistade, Arcipelaghi, La destinazione). Before proceeding to an analysis of some emblematic mothers in Sardinian films, however, it should be recalled that such a symbolic reworking had already been conducted in the figurative arts in the 19th and 20th centuries. Here too Grazia Deledda played a crucial role. In the early days of cinema Deledda turned regularly to Sardinian artists for the illustration of her work in the main Italian journals127. The pictures they produced contributed to disseminating and reinforcing the image of Sardinia that emerged from her writings, even though it was interpreted by the individual sensitivity and style of the artists engaged.128 In their creations the figure of the woman played an essential role precisely because of her evocative and symbolic power. This is exemplified in the illustrations made by Giuseppe Biasi for the short story La festa del Cristo and the novel L’incendio nell’oliveto.129 In the former the demeanour and appearance of the female figures, rendered with a swift impressionist touch, are consistent with the literary representation of women in Sardinian literature: arms folded, head covered in a scarf or shawl that is sometimes wrapped around the chin and mouth in the Bedouin style, face inclined downwards, a rigid pose, whether standing or sitting.130 Biasi successfully represents the central theme of L’incendio 126

On the film Il disertore see chapter 6. On this theme see Ciusa 1992: 121-128. 128 Ciusa 1992: 121. 129 Ciusa (1992: 124-125) points out that the story in pictures is made up of forty tempera plates published in groups of three or four per episode between June 1917 and April 1918. 130 See plate 7 in Ciusa’s article quoted above: ibid., 137. 127

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nell’oliveto – the inevitability of the clash between the traditional world and modernity131 – through his portrayal of the matriarch Agostina Marini: a heavy, unmoving, awkward body confined in cramped space, not unlike a prison cell, expressing the character’s dual role as victim and executioner.132 Agostina’s role as domina is also reflected in the positioning of other characters with respect to the social hierarchy: in one illustration the young Annarosa appears at the feet of her matriarchal grandmother.133 In Biasi’s conception too, then, the woman was an iconic figure, a symbol of Sardinian identity.134 These few examples serve to give an idea of the influence exerted by illustrations on readers’ perceptions of Sardinia. Travel writers also augmented their narratives through the pictorial medium, in some cases with great success. The stylised figures in Juan Juta’s plates illustrating Sea and Sardinia stand out in and are defined by the few colours used in the composition. From a modernist standpoint this apparently simple and direct style served to depict a primitive world perceived as diametrically opposed to modernity.135 The two watercolours by Biasi reproduced in Crawford Flitch’s Mediterranean Moods (1911), stand as a significant testimony to the artist’s ideological vocation: no less than Deledda, he was driven by a desire to render on canvas his national aspirations for the Sardinian people.136 It is therefore fair to say that certain tendencies seen later in cinema were present in other artistic forms in the early 20th century, and among them the figure of the woman and mother constituted a staple resource for the Sardinian imagination. Since Sardinian heroes are usually bandits, outlaw shepherds and men bent on vengeance, and everyday life is often depicted as harsh and cruel, portrayals of women do not show the happy, graceful and comely characteristics considered peculiar to the female sex; they are used rather to define the profile of a tragic figure subjected to the trauma of losing her man or the fruit of her womb, and as such one who feels the emptiness of life and her own existence (Le due leggi, Dove volano i corvi d’argento, Il disertore, Arcipelaghi, La 131

Ciusa 1992: 125. Ibid. 133 Ibid. 134 Altea and Magnani 1998: 74-75. 135 Juta’s plates can be seen in the Italian edition of Lawrence’s work: Lawrence 2000. 136 Altea and Magnani 1998: 40; 62. 132

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destinazione). The predominance of violent deaths and lives lived dangerously explains the absence of delicate mother-and-baby images, which are virtually unknown to the Sardinian imagination;137 in their place are women struggling to protect the lives of their sons, often of adult age. When in trouble, the son turns not to a man – his father or another relative – but to his mother, to whom he can entrust all his secrets; in one of Deledda’s stories she is characterised as the only woman a bandit can trust.138 Prominent among such figures, some of whom are clever and manipulative, implacable in their execution or justification of the vendettas carried out by their relatives, are the mother of Graziano Cassitta in Barbagia. La società del malessere, who forgives her son for committing murder by virtue of the obligation incumbent on Sardinian males to be men of honour, and the mother of Sebastiano Catte in Disamistade, who collects the reward when her son gives himself up. She thus exalts the value of custom and the code of the community over her private grief. This explains why the mother of Efisio Porcu in the comedy Una questione d’onore offers him a rifle to exact revenge against his (allegedly) adulterous wife.139 Rather more tragic, as will be seen below, is the case of the widow Lucia Solinas, who is prepared to use her young son Oreste to avenge the death of his brother Giosuè (Arcipelaghi). Portraying a Sardinian mother on screen thus means first of all showing a woman experiencing the tragedy of bereavement, afflicted by unassuageable grief over the loss of her husband, or above all of her son. Her appearance on screen immediately evokes a series of impressions and values which may be traced to the topos of the atavistic South, in the sway of barbaric laws like that of the vendetta. Within the rigorous geometry of her black or dark attire, the woman is an image communicating an archaic sense of composed solemnity reminiscent of the Mediterranean mother goddess. She is also the bearer of the ever-present premonitory sign of the tragic destiny of the Sardinians, of the “unlucky star” that looms over the people of the

137

Rudas 2004: 255. See chapter 2, section Women. 139 It is a matter of record that reviewers found Sardinia an unconvincing setting for a murder stemming from adultery, but the fact remains that in this context the character of the mother is a vehicle for the expectations of a community which approves of murder in defense of honour. 138

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nuraghi.140 The woman in mourning is not just a symbol of grief caused by personal violence, she breathes life into the icon of a barbaric Sardinia which rises against all forms of subjection. The cinematic representation of the mother is thus a confluence of several traditions and images: that of the pre-classical Homeric people described by Father Bresciani; that of the superstitious, obscure Mediterranean south, the trope of the South prevalent in postunification Italy; and that of an impulsive, violent and vengeful race typical of the primitive societies that live under the code of honour and the vendetta. One of the most striking examples of absolute motherhood, redolent of the archaic image of statuettes of the mother goddess produced by a matriarchal society, is found in Disamistade (1988). The young Sebastiano Catte can rely on nothing but the support of his mother, who, after trying in vain to keep him away from the village feuds, making sure that he has the chance to study to be a doctor or a lawyer, is left alone and helpless after her husband’s violent death. Sebastiano is unable to avoid sliding into crime: he ends up avenging his father’s death, as required by the code of the Barbagia, and goes on the run. From that moment he relies on his mother above anyone else. Her maternal love is a calculating one, and she is not above resorting to a stratagem to save her son – their bond is based on a complicit silence which becomes a powerful defensive weapon. The two of them hatch a plot to make sure that the mother receives the reward offered for her bandit son, involving his girlfriend in the plan – only afterwards does she realise she has been used. A crucial role in the creation of a character with the mythical aura of motherhood may be played by casting. The mother in Disamistade is played by Maria Carta, a talented folk singer but above all a figure considered as a champion of traditional Sardinian culture. Her selection betrayed a clear desire to invest her character with great symbolic power, as exemplified in the fusion of the sacred and the profane in the film’s opening scene. It is dominated by the rigid, upright and solemn figure of a middle-aged woman, dressed in black, walking down a steep stairway. The frontal angle of the shot reinforces a sense of mystery and distance, an almost sacred dimension of this feminine apparition – a sensation intensified by her 140

Giacobbe 2001: 132.

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downward movement, as if she were symbolically returning to earth. An image which elicits respect and awe, it also emanates a sense of mystery because she appears to be the repository of a hidden truth, unspoken but unmistakable and unchangeable, which will be wholly revealed only at the end of the story. In places such as pastoral Sardinia, where men are often absent or die violent deaths, women play a predominant role in the family because they find themselves compelled to rely on their own resources. Still a part of the island’s mentality to this day, this configuration of the female role expresses its full dramatic power in the film Arcipelaghi (2001), based on Maria Giacobbe’s novel Gli arcipelaghi, which is centred on the character of Lucia Solinas. Possessed of astonishing tenacity, Lucia conceives a diabolical plan to avenge the death of her son Giosuè, a child killed for having witnessed the theft of some livestock. She incites her other son Oreste to avenge the death of his brother and at the same time provides him with a cast-iron alibi, though at the end of the film it becomes clear that she is the one who has shot her son’s killer. But according to her plan, Oreste is accused of the crime and then acquitted. Taking its cue from Giacobbe’s book – in which Lucia is called “a black bird”, an explicit symbol of bad luck141 – the film offers the tragic characterisation of a mother completely obsessed by the need to avenge the death of her son to give peace to his soul, which would otherwise be destined to wander in eternity. But above all it reveals a creature whose identification with the values of her community is so all-encompassing as to instil in her – as a man of honour – the absolute obligation of the vendetta, failing which she would face ostracisation. Worthy of a Greek tragedy, Lucia thus embodies absolute fealty to the most archaic and violent elements of Barbagian culture, dramatically representing its limitations and its more sinister aspects. Although in the novel Lucia is not a widow, her husband never appears; since he is a weak man and an alcoholic, she is ‘compelled’ to take responsibility for the vengeance that would otherwise be his to exact. What is more, the presence of an inadequate husband undermines the myth of the classical Sardinian balente, investing the female character with all the destructive force inherent to the Barbagian tradition. In the film, Lucia’s widowhood makes her the 141

See chapter 2, section Women: Physical Appareance and National Charachter.

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head of the family and as such the natural avenger of the death of her son. Another difference between the book and the film is of enormous significance. In the former, Lucia’s plan for vengeance is opposed by her daughter Cassandra, whose scruples mark the cultural distance separating her from the values to which her mother subscribes.142 In the film this antagonism is entirely absent, and with it any element of dissent towards the Barbagian philosophy. No-one expresses any doubt or uncertainty about Lucia’s moral obligation to exact vengeance, indeed the whole village supports her with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence. The only attempt to go against the community’s moral code is made by the young doctor Rudas, compelled by her mother – connected to the Solinas family by longstanding ties – to perjure herself in court to protect Oreste from the charge of murder. But even this attempt at dissociation proves futile, as she ends up doing exactly as her mother demands, testifying to Oreste’s innocence before the judge and thus covering up Lucia’s role in the crime. Without resorting to cliché, Arcipelaghi presents a problematic vision of Barbagian society through a highly symbolic and archetypal model of Sardinian motherhood. Strengthening this vision is the fact that Lucia’s code of behaviour is shared in its entirety by the other mothers in the film: firstly by her own mother, with whom she hatches the plot for revenge, and also by Mrs. Rudas, who enables her to carry it out with no risk of punishment. What is probably the most disturbing and interesting aspect of the film is that its criticism of supposedly outdated customs such as blood feuds is expressed through the actions of a mother who interprets her duty of faith to common values as absolute and unbreakable, to be adhered to at all costs. Another recent film has also exploited the evocative power of the grieving mother to lay bare the contradictions of Barbagian society. In La destinazione, Mrs. Tanda is widowed by the murder of her husband, who tried to prevent some thieves from stealing his sheep. Complicating the situation is the fact that her son witnessed the murder: he is aware of the risk he runs in a community which considers reporting a crime as cowardice and condemns to death 142

About the relationship and the ideological conflict between Cassandra and her mother Lucia Solinas in Giacobbe’s novel see Baumann 2007: 229-236.

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whoever commits such an outrage. Anxious to secure his testimony, the Carabinieri ask his mother to persuade him to talk. After much hesitation she manages to convince her son to name his father’s killer, but her attempt to cooperate with the agents of Italian law carries a terrible price. She finds her son hanged on Good Friday, the day on which the Church commemorates Christ’s suffering and death but also celebrates the vengeance visited upon Judas the traitor.143 As the priest recalls Mary’s grief for the death of her son Jesus, Mrs. Tanda – as if struck by an awful revelation – rushes home and finds her son dead. Here is yet another instance of Sardinian motherhood unable to shake off the traditional Barbagian model, still compelled to come to terms with the tragic and unnatural experience of the death of a son. The figure of the mater dolorosa had already appeared in literature in Giuseppe Dessì’s Il disertore (1961), and was re-created in the film of the same name (1983) directed by Giuliana Berlinguer.144 In the novel the personal story of protagonist Mariangela Ecca is played out against the background of an interpretation of the problems of Sardinian history and the relationship between the island’s culture and national identity. The tension between internal and external culture, the Sardinian world and the other world, is reproduced in the film through the representation of contrasting settings: on the one hand the village of Cuadu as a symbol of modernity, and on the other the pastoral mountain environment as the topos of the traditional world. The character of the mother, Mariangela Ecca, is a concentration of symbols and concepts typifying traditional Sardinian society. She stands as one of the most emblematic and mysterious mother figures in Italian cinema, partly by virtue of the smouldering gazes and silences distinguishing the performance of Greek actress Irene Papas.145 Her physical appearance and on-screen actions evoke the quintessence of archaic, pre-classical Mediterranean motherhood so often evoked in 19th- and 20th-century literature to describe Sardinian women.146 Invariably dressed in black – or rather in a worn-out bluish black, as Dessì specifies in the book147 143

Olla 2008: 105. About the novel see chapter 2 and Rudas 2004: 251-271. 145 Olla 2008: 358. 146 See chapter 1, section Women. 147 Dessì 2004: 65. 144

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– Mariangela perceives herself exclusively as the woman assigned the task of looking after her son Saverio, who has escaped the fighting in the Great War to make an illegal return to his homeland. Her life makes sense to her only as a function of her role as a mother. Her allencompassing relationship with her deserter son which is the centrepiece of the novel has been interpreted in psychoanalytic terms as a symbol of the Sardinian people’s unconscious desire to re-unite with their inevitably lost motherland and, by extension, as their need to keep faith with their cultural identity.148 Mariangela’s stubborn determination to protect her son and her refusal to accept his death have been interpreted as symbols of the islanders’ collective desire to defend themselves against the succession of foreign invaders who have occupied their land.149 These elements are visible in Mariangela’s film presence, dominating the scene with the obstinate defence, silent but unmovable, of what she holds dear. In her role the appearance of the Mediterranean woman dressed for mourning – an iconic popular image of the South – is fused with a wilful and stubborn nature, as unshakable and resistant as that traditionally ascribed to the Sardinian people in literature. She stands as a woman-island, completely absorbed and withdrawn within herself, impenetrable and unreachable. In her pain destined never to subside – as time passes her son Saverio’s widowed wife may find peace and make another life for herself, but how can that be expected of a mother who exists only through her son?150 – the character of Saverio’s mother recalls the image of Francesco Ciusa’s Madre dell’ucciso: a woman in the act of grieving for her dead son manifests the tragedy of her personal condition but above all evokes the timeless sorrow of a people oppressed but unbowed by misfortune.151 Strengthening the evocative and symbolic power of the mother figures analysed above – Mariangela Ecca, Sebastiano’s mother and Lucia Solinas – is the casting for the film roles, assigned respectively to Irene Papas, time-honoured symbol of the Mediterranean woman, Maria Carta, a legendary figure in Sardinian music and culture, and Pietrina Menneas, the most prestigious actress in contemporary 148

Rudas 2004: 256-257 and 268-269. Ibid., 261. 150 Dessì 2004: 46. 151 See chapter 2, section Women: Physical Appearance and National Character. 149

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Sardinian cinema, renowned for her acting ability and dramatic presence. In all three cases the women’s physical appearance contributes to making them representatives of the model of Mediterranean womanhood. It is perhaps through them that cinema has been most effective in portraying motherhood as conceived in Barbagian culture, accentuating and making explicit the legacy of barbarism considered peculiar to Sardinian pastoral society. The mother as a faithful custodian of tradition is thus a powerful film icon in evoking the primitive roots of Sardinian civilisation and unleashing the exotic fascination of a land still unshakably anchored to its past. The ‘New’ Sardinian People For a long time the image of Sardinia in films was dominated by the figure of the bandit-shepherd, which is to this day a potent force in the representation of Sardinian identity, as shown by Salvatore Mereu’s most recent work, Sonetàula. Until the late 1980s very few films did anything to question the pastoral, bandit-ridden representation of Sardinia, and those that did placed fisherman or miners at centre stage. Interest in the mining industry goes as far back as the dawn of film-making, as witnessed by a number of the Lumière brothers’ documentary clips.152 This trope returned to the fore under the Fascist regime with the propaganda film Oro nero (Guazzoni 1942). Here the topos of the primitive, exotic island was still prominent, though the inclusion of some ‘typical’ Sardinian scenes, such as the regulation flock of sheep – whose shepherds speak Roman dialect – and a contrived local dance, made the reconstruction of an archaic Sardinia a complete sham.153 These evocations served to provide a contrast to the modernity embodied by the mechanisation and urbanisation produced on the island by Mussolini’s far-sighted policies. The film is in two parts, the first for ‘before’, and the second showing ‘after’. The latter features a close-up of Carbonia, the mining town founded by Mussolini, and the work of the Sardinian pitmen fitted out with advanced equipment to minimise their fatigue and maximise production. The Sardinian setting does not really add much to the piece, other than to confirm that even this benighted island has finally 152 153

Olla 2008: 15. Ibid., 132.

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found the way to modernisation and well-being thanks to Fascism. The importance of the mining trope to the regime is reflected by contemporary newsreels, which gave a lot of space to the foundation of Carbonia.154 But it was largely ignored by post-war films, which returned their focus to a Sardinia populated by inland shepherdbandits able to attract a public hungry for melodramatic adventure stories. The stream of films on the agricultural-pastoral Sardinia was momentarily interrupted by The Wide Blue Road (1957), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo and based on Franco Solinas’ “visual novel” Squarciò (1956), whose homonymous protagonist was a clandestine fisherman in the Maddalena islands.155 The novel aroused little interest, precisely because Solinas depicted a Sardinia different from the image predominant in the popular imagination in the 1950s.156 Its only enthusiastic reviewer was Manlio Brigaglia, who remarked on the novelty it represented in Sardinian literature,157 also drawing attention to the points in common between the clandestine fisherman and the traditional figure of the shepherd-bandit. Squarciò’s decision to break the law seemed inevitable, no different to the tragic fate suffered a few years later by Michele, the shepherd in Banditi a Orgosolo, ‘compelled’ by circumstances to become an outlaw and a sheep-stealer. Yet the novel contained an image of Sardinia unprecedented for its time, in complete contrast to the traditional representation of historical immobility.158 The conflicts depicted in the fishing community reveal a situation of flux, characterised by social demands typical of the phase of development in which Sardinia began to come to terms with the modern world. However, the critics did not fully perceive the powerful message in the book and in its transposition to the screen much of its innovative force was also lost. In La terra trema – on which Pontecorvo’s film was modelled – the courageous casting of the dialect and the fishermen of Aci Trezza 154

Ibid., 41-45. This stands as confirmation of a trend observed even in the earliest cinematic experiments in Sardinia, since one of the first short films ever made there recorded the visit of the Royal Family to Sardinia and their tour of the mines at Monteponi: ibid., 15. 155 See chapter 3, section Sea and Tourism: Coast as Interface. 156 Marci 2006: 266. 157 Brigaglia 1958: 53-56. 158 Olla 2008: 58.

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as protagonists had given the film a firm grounding in reality, so much so that Visconti’s work became a paradigm of the image of Sicily. But The Wide Blue Road did not have the potential to do the same for Sardinia. The Maddalena archipelago was in fact the Dalmatian coast, and the leading characters were played by heart-throbs Yves Montand and Alida Valli, who were far removed from anything the humble fisherfolk of the time could have been. The film was shot in colour, even though Pontecorvo would have preferred black and white. He said that such choices were forced on him by the producers,159 but more than anything else it is the screenplay which betrays the ideological manipulation of Solinas’ text. His Squarciò was an extreme (anti-)heroic figure, a tragic and romantic character who, even at the moment of his death, remained true to himself and so died alone, with no consolation. The film’s protagonist, by contrast, undergoes a conversion before he dies: he acknowledges his mistakes, repudiates his individualism and recognises that the fishermen’s cooperative is the only means they have of freeing themselves of the wholesalers’ abuses.160 In so doing he acts as a mouthpiece for contemporary left-wing politics, of which Pontecorvo was himself a supporter. While the aspirations of the cooperative movement, and in more general terms the theme of working class unity as a means of social emancipation, are central to the film’s narrative, the cultural, historical and geographical context is left so vague that the story could have taken place in almost any coastal area. The absence of any symbolic representation of the traditional Sardinia in the film marked a novelty that found no echo in cinema either – the island’s familiar image continued to hold sway. Only a few years passed before the release of the emblematic Banditi a Orgosolo and almost twenty years later Padre padrone provided yet another confirmation of the archaic pastoral world. It was not until 1980, with the release of Massimo Pupillo’s Sa jana, that Sardinian fishermen were featured in another film. Sa jana was loosely based on Giuseppe Fiori’s work of investigative journalism Baroni in laguna, which drew public attention to the plight of fishermen in Cabras, in the province of Oristano, engaged in a struggle with landowners for fishing rights in the lagoon of San 159 160

Olla 2008: 143. Ibid.

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Giovanni. By the time the film was being shot, however, the dispute had been settled through the intervention of the regional government.161 The story is seen through the prism of the family of Pietro, son of a clandestine fisherman, whose grandfather passes down to him his love for nature and his knowledge of popular traditions, including the stories of the janas, the fairies. Legend had it that these mythical creatures made themselves visible only to people who were truly good. The film expresses an organic, positive vision of a Sardinia based on the strength of its past and its traditions, but also able to find the impetus to evolve towards new forms of social organisation, breaking the chains of injustice which had bound its people for so long. Unlike The Wide Blue Road, Pupillo’s film abounds with references to Sardinian culture and traditions, which constitute the fulcrum of the story. As observed in the preceding chapter, the detailed depiction of festivities and collective rituals confirms the bond between the fishing community and traditional culture, as a result of which that community does not appear alien to the image of Sardinia but as one of its many facets, alongside the pastoral one.162 The film is striking above all for its design to put popular traditions together with historical development in a single vision of Sardinian identity which encompasses all islanders on the strength of their common cultural root constituted by the civilisation of the nuraghi. This vision is expressed through the words of the priest who takes the children, representing the nation’s future, to visit a nuraghe: he tells them that the Sardinian people must be proud of their origins and feel inferior to no-one, since they are the heirs of a history worthy of being known, revered and conserved. Furthermore, Pietro’s decision not to resort to violent reprisals to avenge the death of his father, killed by rifle fire from the guards keeping watch over the lagoon, expresses an explicit rejection of a familiar model of Sardinian identity. Despite the loss of his father, Pietro, inspired by the fairies of which he has been told, persuades his father’s friend not to avenge his death and thereby fall into an unending cycle of violence, but to get involved in working to improve the lot of the community. In the boy’s courageous decision we can thus glimpse the 161 162

Ibid., 174. See chapter 3, section Sea and Tourism: Coast as Interface.

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prospect of a future different from that of the shepherd-bandit, unable to escape his tragic destiny of vendetta and death. Made only a few years after Padre padrone, Sa jana reveals the desire for an informed reassertion of an idea of Sardinian identity still fettered by traditionals and rituals redolent of the trope of an archaic world, but which appeals to its nuraghe origins as an inspiration for possible redemption in the future, just as the island’s intellectuals and politicians were at the same time trying to launch the model of a modern Sardinia based on the image of “the golden age of the nuraghi”.163 Pupillo’s film was thus an opportunity to contribute to the debate on Sardinian identity in a cultural context that was particularly sensitive to this theme. A similar debate was the context for Il figlio di Bakunìn (Cabiddu 1997). Deemed to be a “turning point” in the tradition of Sardinian-set films,164 it was based on the novel of the same name by Sergio Atzeni, an authoritative contemporary writer who has done much to revivify Sardinian literature.165 The book explores the urban environment and the mining community through a fragmented narrative made up of a number of voices, all of which tell of the main character, Tullio Saba, who never speaks for himself. He is a controversial figure whose identity remains uncertain, corroborated only by contradictory accounts. The Sardinia pictured here is a land undergoing profound transformation. Not only does the novel sweep aside the trope of the timeless immobility that characterised most of Sardinian culture until the second half of the 20th century, it turns precisely on the dynamic relationship between the past and the present.166 It allows us to feel the vibration of History – with a capital H – in all its tragedy and especially its hope. The development of Gianfranco Cabiddu’s film is different to that seen in the novel.167 The character of Tullio Saba becomes increasingly central, outstripping the importance of the witnesses, and takes on an epic significance. The various testimonies add up to a wide-reaching choral narrative of the 20th-century history of the 163

Lilliu 2002; Jünger 1999. Naitza 1997, quoted in Olla 2008: 182 and Floris 2001: 54. 165 About Sergio Atzeni see Marci 1999a; Marci and Sulis 2001. 166 Marci 2006: 19. 167 On the adaptation of the novel by Cabiddu see Floris 2001. 164

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Sardinian people, starting from the mining industry, chosen as the topos for the passage from antiquity to modernity.168 This amounts to the first epic film on Sardinian history, in which the recovery of historical memory is accompanied by a reflection on the modern world. Following the pattern of the novel, the film’s plot is constructed on two levels: Sardinia as it was during Tullio Saba’s lifetime and the island as it is today, embodied by a son – whose face is never fully revealed but whose pony-tail and earring are glimpsed – in search of his father’s identity. Tullio Saba goes through the 20th century at the forefront of events: after a comfortable childhood he experiences poverty and the hard life of a miner, becomes a leader of the workers’ struggle and is sacked for being a trade union militant. Having earned a living as a wedding-party singer he returns after the war to the class struggle, taking part in the occupation of agricultural land and then going into politics. Gradually taking on the characteristics of an epic figure, he shows no signs of ageing, despite having lived through all the tumult of the 20th century, characterised in Sardinia – as everywhere else – by dramatic epoch-making changes.169 Though sublimated by its epic tone, his experience is rooted in the historical reality evoked by the testimonies of those who knew him. There emerges a Sardinian epic whose image, anchored in history, is sharply different from the one traditionally transmitted in Italian literature and films. The difference between the book and the film seems even greater if it is borne in mind that Cabiddu’s work is a manipulation of a text by an author with a particular and original position in Sardinian literature.170 Atzeni had gradually developed a critical conception of Sardinian history and culture which was visible in embryonic form in his first novel, Apologo del giudice bandito (1986), and expanded in his subsequent writings to reach full expression in his most recent work, Passavamo sulla terra leggeri (1996). Here the epos of the Sardinian people is centred on the idea of an ethnos which is mixed from its very beginnings, the fruit of a fusion of a range of races and cultures. This flies in the face of the concept of uniqueness upon which a national myth usually rests, but corresponds to a narrative 168

Floris 2001: 71-78. Ibid., 127. 170 See note 167 above. 169

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approach found in a number of post-colonial literatures.171 The distance between the novel and the film is also reflected in how they deal with the question of Tullio Saba as an alleged father. While the book leaves it open, in the film all the doubts are finally resolved and the boy makes it clear that Tullio Saba is in fact his father.172 This alteration of Atzeni’s text is of considerable symbolic significance. An individual’s search for his father is a metaphor for the collective rediscovery of a national memory in which Sardinian history is at last rejoined to that of Europe and the wider world.173 The director thereby reaches his goal of revealing the ‘paternity’ of the Sardinian people, recognisable in a past built on shared values and a starting point for constructing a common project for the future. Besides the now-mythicised figure of Sergio Atzeni and the media interest that surrounded the making of the film, its success can probably be attributed to the recognisability of the places and experiences evoked for the people who lived through those times, but more particularly to its ability to make tangible and ‘present’ the origins of people who were born later and had never had the opportunity to come to terms with the past. The desire to make a choral film representative of Sardinia also influenced the choice of the cast, composed entirely of local actors, some of whom made a successful move from stage to screen.174 The director also put together a repertoire of images of Sardinia hitherto unseen, including glimpses of Cagliari, a town almost ignored by cinema for a century. On the strength of its reception in Sardinia this film may be said to be the realisation of a dream for a people which was finally able to identify with the image of itself projected on the big screen after sitting through dozens of films it considered false and frequently offensive. Whether that representation is ‘objective’ or corresponds to reality is of course a matter for discussion, nevertheless the film shows an image of Sardinia very different from the one offered by the rest of Italian cinema, as is also revealed by a new island geography. The shift of the setting from the Barbagia to the mining areas and Cagliari

171

Pala 2001: 111-132. Floris 2001: 88-90. 173 Ibid., 107. 174 Olla 2008: 182. 172

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in the island’s south stands witness, in terms of space and landscape, to a desire to show a land farther from myth and closer to reality.175 Cabiddu entered the identity debate under way on the island at that time to send out a message exalting history and the collective memory through a heroic Sardinian figure. This also explains why Tullio Saba was given characteristics which were absent in the novel but were of particular symbolic value to the advocates of Sardinian identity. 176 One of these is the unconvincing conversion of Saba – initially an anarchist, then a communist – to the cause of Sardinian identity, and his passion for Emilio Lussu, a key figure in 20th-century Sardinia and the embodiment of the island’s identity.177 Cabiddu’s story thus stands as a full-blown epos, at last noble and positive, for a people long seen in the popular imagination as a primitive, savage and lawless race with no history or national identity. After the turning point of Il figlio di Bakunìn, cinema began to produce new stories populated mainly by contemporary Sardinians, no longer set in the Barbagia but in an urban context, forming an image closer to the socio-cultural reality of modern-day Sardinia. They present characters such as aspiring artists, singers, judges, miners, failed and successful boxers, marginalised and hopeless youngsters, sad and solitary old people – new and unfamiliar protagonists created by Sardinian writers and directors explicitly intent on recounting their origins.178 The change in Sardinian-themed films was perceptible even in those which revisited the traditional shepherd-bandit figure, because the subject was approached differently, as demonstrated by Arcipelaghi, La destinazione and Sonetàula. More striking, though, are the films set in urban environments, especially Sassari (Un destino 175

It was no coincidence that Atzeni himself pointed out the need for a description of the city of Cagliari and southern Sardinia, since literature had clearly focused on depicting the Barbagia and its shepherds (Marci 1999: 30-31). 176 Floris 2001: 85. 177 Ibid. 178 Italian critics also speak of a ‘Sardinian school of cinema’ on exactly the same footing as other regional schools. After decades in which cinema had been an industry gravitating around Rome – as exemplified by the hold that Cinecittà exerted over a doyen of Italian film-making like Federico Fellini – the ‘new Italian cinema’ began to explore individual regions and the stories they had to offer: Zagarrio 2001: 44-45; Sesti 1994. Cinema thus began to provide its own interpretation of what Sardinian literature and culture were exploring in those years. See Floris 2001 and notes to section 6.

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impossibile) and Cagliari (in Enrico Pau’s films), populated by a humanity which would until recently have been unthinkable in a Sardinian film, but nonetheless close to the sensitivity of other contemporary works. Exemplary in this regard is the work of director Enrico Pau.179 His debut film, a one-reeler called La volpe e l’ape, presents a Cagliari – his native and still home town – which is completely real but at the same time assimilable to the general category of the contemporary metropolis. The main character, a street singer, plays himself and speaks with a clearly identifiable Cagliari accent; he spends his days on street corners and in city districts immediately recognisable to a local audience. Yet the sense of solitude, anonymity and indifference that hangs over those places and their inhabitants takes us to the quintessence of a dehumanised urban modernity whose dimension is much broader than that of Sardinia alone. This duality – the construction of characters taken from reality who move in realistically-depicted spaces, in contrast with their exemplary and universal dimension – is key to the interpretation of Pau’s next two films, both full-length. Pesi leggeri and Jimmy della Collina feature characters on the margins of society, of various extractions and ethnic membership. Their desires are those of the young people of our time who feel unhappy and try to find some way out of their situation: Maddi wants to get married and start a family, Nino and Giuseppe try to make it as boxers, Jimmy dreams of running away to Mexico, Claudia devotes herself to voluntary service in a young offenders’ detention centre to give some meaning to a life disfigured by sexual abuse and the murder of her rapist father. Some set themselves a specific aim, others just seek a utopian escape, the only solution they can see to their misery. These characters are present-day people, ordinary people we could meet in the street or at the bus-stop. In their way of acting and thinking there is no reference to traditional Sardinian society or the pastoral world of the Barbagia. They do not know the code of the vendetta, nor have they ever worn a mastruca or played the launeddas – they experience the anxieties and insecurities common to our modern world, one which has perhaps become smaller but certainly no easier to live in. In these characters facing the urgent problems of 179

Olla 2008: 102-103.

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present-day Sardinia – unemployment or lack of job security, juvenile deviancy, existential boredom, pollution – we recognise western youth in general, not a fantasy-inspired re-creation of an exotic island. From the earliest times the cinematic representation of Sardinians started from the assumption of an insuperable distance between the observer – the world beyond the island – and the observed – the island and its people. Films such as Pau’s have completely overturned this perspective. They remind us that on closer scrutiny Sardinians are not very different from the others, in fact they are quite similar to the rest of mankind. Further confirmation of the obsolescence of the concept of Sardinian identity as an existentialist ethnic condition, unchanging and isolated from any outside influence, is provided by the attention shown by contemporary directors for the heterogeneous ethnic and social composition of the Sardinian people. There is now a clearly perceptible multi-culturalism in the port district of Cagliari, where true-born locals rub shoulders with Chinese, north Africans and Pakistanis. This socio-cultural variety is reflected in minor characters such as the young Moroccan-born convict with a passion for rap (Jimmy della Collina) and the young African training as a boxer in the gym (Pesi leggeri). The idea of Sardinian identity emerging from these films is very different from that served up for so long by literature and cinema, which exalted the myth of a pure, indigenous, ‘resistant’ nation-community. This Sardinia appears perfectly integrated in a network of contacts, at the centre of population flows, in a permanent process of synergy and fusion involving men and women from a variety of cultures – a world in movement, not static and closed, as it was long portrayed. At times the odd memory does surface of a history marked by foreign domination and the notoriety of being a land of exile and punishment, but the prevailing focus is on the encounter and interaction – for better or for worse – with the Other. This diversity is embodied in the social fabric of Cagliari, as if to confirm the vision of Sardinian history propounded by Sergio Atzeni.180 A vision which identifies mixed blood, the fusion of the self with the Other – not the alleged ethnic purity of the Barbagia – as the basic principle of Sardinian identity.

180

Marci 1999: 42-43; 109-110.

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Conclusion Films set in Sardinia have an undisputed protagonist: the shepherdbandit, a primitive man living in the wild, an expression of an archaic society ruled by the code of honour and vendetta. This is the same anthropological model found in literature: a proud and often unfortunate anti-hero who will stop at nothing to defend his name and his freedom. To portray him, it is not difficult to find analogies with other figures living on the margin of civil society, suspended between civilisation and barbarism: from the Wild West outlaw to the First World War deserter. Since most of the films in question revolve around the theme of (masculine) revenge, female characters live in the shadow of their men, but they are an essential part of the representation of traditional Sardinian society. They are depicted as the custodians of community values, revealing the contradictions of the society to which they belong, but also its absolute and unchanging nature. The portrayal of Sardinian women’s manual skills – an essential characteristic of the literary tradition – is a way of evoking the lore of an ancient civilisation. But it is above all when misfortune descends upon the family – a situation recurrent in stories of vendetta – that the female character, shut inside her pain, plays her leading role, that of the mater dolorosa. In contrast to situations of loss and bereavement stands the village festivity, in which traditionally-dressed female characters are the most important element in exciting the fascination of audiences. In other words, the forms of representing the Sardinian woman on screen are centred, as is the case with her male counterpart, on the most exotic features of island life; film characters reproduce the images disseminated in literature and are never used as a vehicle for a critical reflection on Sardinian identity. When a literary female model expresses a critical, or at least alternative, position towards the traditional Sardinian world cinema reproduces her, but leaves out any disruptive element.181 The decision to deprive female characters of their subversive dimension stands as confirmation of a desire to give a cinematic account of the Sardinian character as immobile and unchanging, consistent with the representation of the primitive island.

181

On the female figure in the Sardinian novel see Baumann’s analysis (2007).

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Only in some recent films set in urban environments do characters seem to depart from the traditional model of the Sardinian character; bereft of any trace of folklore, they reflect a model of humankind devoid of ethnic connotations, and contemporary audiences may find it easier to identify with them. In the selection of landscapes and characters alike, in recent years the repertoire of themes on the Sardinian identity has broadened, but without completely abandoning the topos of the archaic, primitive and exotic population which still appears to represent an irresistible attraction for the cinematic imagination.

 

5. Sardinian Identity on Screen

Most of the features of the Sardinian world that captured the attention of writers were subsequently taken up by the cinema; appearing in every story as marks of Sardinian culture, they have contributed to the construction of a national character profile. Many of them have been reproduced in a standardised form on film, and their appearance has invariably appealed to widespread preconceptions long consolidated. Sardinian festivities, dance and song, and traditions such as the mourning of the dead (attitu) – depicted in Cenere, Cainà, Proibito, Una questione d’onore and La destinazione, among others – and the vendetta have transported cinema audiences unequivocally into the Sardinian world. Examples are legion, but this section focuses on four aspects of the island’s culture which have bulked large in literary discourse – the festivity, traditional costume, prehistoric monuments and the Sardinian language – to see whether and how they have been exploited on the big screen to evoke the idea of Sardinian identity. The Festivity as an Icon of Sardinian Identity Resting on a long and consolidated tradition, the symbolic representation of the festive occasion reached its culmination in the art and literature of the 19th and early 20th century, by which time it had become a celebration and mise-en-scène of Sardinian national identity.1 In addition to the ideological factors that had promoted an increasing interest for manifestations of folklore in Europe, its ideological and symbolic resonance and spectacular visual impact made the theme of the festivity perfect for exploitation on screen by the cinema. It was no accident that, in developing a possible Scenario sardo per il cinema (“Sardinian scenario for the cinema”), Grazia Deledda set her story in the celebrations for the festivity of San Francesco, and envisaged the opening scene in the procession to the                                                              1

Paulis 2006: 209.

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sanctuary.2 The ‘performance’ of the festivity, embellished with other signs of Sardinian culture, was thus perceived from the earliest days of cinema as an invaluable narrative resource. Hence its repeated appearance in film plots, preferentially featuring the ballo tondo performed to the accompaniment of traditional instruments and melodies. Though always consistent with a primitivist perspective, the cinematic image of the festivity varied greatly in its significance. In the more complex cases it functioned as a manifestation of selfcelebration and national identification, but it was sometimes little more than a shallow, ostentatious display of customs, ornaments and attributes considered ‘characteristic’, which were bereft of any cultural content and placed in the shop window like facile souvenirs. The effectiveness of the theme depended on the objectives behind it and the strategies used to enact it, as the following examples are intended to show. One of the most complex and significant portrayals of this leitmotiv is to be found in the village festival in Cainà. L’isola e il continente. The scene occurs at a turning point in the story: having decided to leave Sardinia to discover the Italian mainland for herself, the heroine Cainà takes advantage of the presence at the celebrations of some sailors – welcomed by the villagers with the Sardinians’ proverbial hospitality – to smuggle herself aboard the ship which is due to set sail for the continent shortly afterwards. The scene was constructed with great care, a semi-documentary fragment similar in many ways to the ethnographic footage being shown in Europe at the time. Introduced by an explanatory intertitle (“The village festivity”), it opens with the striking of a bell.3 People leave the church in which the service has been held and walk through the streets to gather in a forecourt where, forming themselves in small groups, they drink, eat and chatter in a carefree manner. The camera follows the men and women crowding the venue, dressed in their smartest clothes, the expression of a culture extraneous to the modus vivendi of early 20th                                                            

2

The manuscript of the Scenario sardo per il cinema has been published in the miscellaneous volume edited by Olla 2000. The text appears on pages 106-117. Olla (2000: 26-27) notes further testimony to Deledda’s interest in the cinema. Lina Sacchetti said at the time that Deledda was busy writing the story for a film to be set in Sardinia which had been publicised with headlines along the lines of: “The fascination of the land. People, costumes and places of Sardinia in the cinema” (ibid.).  3 Intertitle: “La festa del paese” (Jaccarino 2001: 81).

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century Europe. As it moves among the participants it gives the impression of happening upon the primitive ritual of a mysterious tribe which inhabits an unknown and far-off land.4 The scene culminates in the dance, introduced by another intertitle which makes no reference to its customary name (ballo tondo) but confines itself to emphasising the collective nature of a ‘ritual’ traditionally attributed with a national value.5 The attention of the sailors – outsiders and guests of the community who are identifiable by their foreign demeanour – is captured by a group dancing in a circle.6 Observing the dancers’ movements, the captain starts to nod his head in time with the music. The sailors then exchange looks of surprise and approval at how the dancers execute their steps in time to a quickening rhythm. The dance develops in a circle which contracts, expands, multiplies and forms a long chain; the line of dancers disintegrates and re-forms in different shapes, but the abiding impression is that the ability of the individual dancers would mean nothing without the perfect coordination of the group. The camera focuses on the fluid movement of legs and feet; the dancers are not professionals, but their performance is perceived as true and authentic, not just convincing. At times the focus shifts to the musicians and their archaic instruments, and towards the end it rests on a male choir performing traditional chants a cappella. In Cainà the dance stands as the ideal fulcrum of the living portrayal of Sardinian identity – a community living according to a cultural model which was different from the standards of the time. According to Orano Sardinian traditional dance and song are peculiar expressions of Sardinian primitivism.7 Both Orano’s concept and the representation of Sardinian dance in Cainà can be clarified by the words of Tobing Rony, when she analyses the meaning of dance in ethnographic films:                                                             

4

See chapter 1, section Charachter: A People in “Perpetual Celebration”. Intertitle: “Vorrei vedere il ballo di gruppo” (“I would like to see the collective dance”): Jaccarino 2001: 81. 6 The dance is the reason why the captain wanted to go to the celebration in the first place, and one of his sailors asks explicitly to go with him to see the “collective dance”. The whole scene is thus presented as an ethnographic crescendo, which culminates in the vision (perceived by the sailors and, secondarily, by the cinema audience) of the Sardinian dance. 7 Orano 1896: 106. 5

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Dance was almost always represented as spectacle: to be watched at a distance. The public as well as scientists were fascinated by the bodies of indigenous peoples, and dance film showed how those bodies moved, how masks were worn. Moreover, an iconography is formed: the native – as we have seen in Regnault’s conception of the langage par gestes – is identified with the body. Dance by indigenous peoples were projected as wild, ‘savage’, frenzied movements by people lacking rationality: an image which became a popular stereotype in commercial film.8

The dance in Cainà is thus a typical example of Sardinian ethnographic spectacle;9 this scene is perceived as authentic en realistic, however it is the very result of an alien gaze which projects its values and prejudices on screen. The people dancing and singing on screen are not the ‘real’ Sardinian; they reveal themselves as a primitive people; the movement of their body tells us more about who watches them than about the Sardinian people. Commercial films as Cainà show thus the same ideology that Tobing Rony has described in ethnographic cinema.10 The approach to Sardinian primitivism ‘performed’ with the village festivity is intrinsic to the whole story, which is peppered with gestures, exchanges and habits from the daily life of a society traditionally defined as primitive and archaic.11 Evident from the opening shots of the film (the icons of the mountains and the nuraghe), the discourse is developed in a series of set pieces in keeping with its ideological assumptions: men and women are captured at various junctures in their daily lives, and it is in this routine punctuated by customary acts that the timeless dimension of Sardinian life is exalted. Confined to their own realm (the home, and the kitchen in particular), women sift flour and bake bread; the men, characterised by the geometrical juxtaposition of the black and white of their costume, their long caps and Biblical-looking beards, move around armed on horseback, devoting their time to sheep-herding and hunting mouflon.                                                              8

Tobing Rony 1996: 65. See chapter 1, section The ‘Ethnographic Spectacle’. 10 Tobing Rony (1996: 111): “[e]thnographic cinema is above all a cinema of the body: the focus is on the anatomy and gestures of the indigenous person, and on the body of the land they inhabit”. Following Tobing Rony, we may say that Sardinian films as Cainà are a “cinema of the body”. 11 Olla 2008: 127. 9

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The part of the film following the dance also culminates in the depiction of a ritual – a sad one, but here it is a collective expression of solidarity as well. After being found dead in the open country, the body of Cainà’s father is carried by the men of the village to his house, where he is grieved over by the women in accordance with the custom of the attitu – the ritual mourning of the dead. This event is also introduced by a intertitle to emphasise the semi-documentary presentation of the scene (“As required by custom, the women mourn the dead”) and, as in the earlier part, the act expresses the unity of the community and its fealty to a shared lifestyle which guarantees solidarity and mutual recognition for its members.12 A different fate is in store for Cainà, whose life on the mainland is marked by solitude and nostalgia for her life on the island. She is unable to overcome her isolation even when she finally returns home; rejected by her family and community, in vain she seeks shelter in the mountains where she had been happy looking after her goats. The film thus concludes with the death of a woman irrevocably excluded from family and collective life – an ending which symbolically asserts the impossibility of living outside one’s own cultural and moral context, a world identified in the film with acts and signs as loaded with symbolic meaning as the ballo tondo and the attitu. The film fully captures the taste for the primitive then predominant in European culture, and its scenes are strongly redolent of the Sardinian festivity rendered in literature: the Sardinians’ visceral passion for festivities, the primitive, Homeric character of their dance, the gravity of the dancers’ movements and demeanour, the merely apparent simplicity of the steps, the musical accompaniment of primitive instruments such as the launeddas. The images in Cainà recall a number of observations made by Paolo Orano in Psicologia della Sardegna, particularly concerning the tribal and primitive nature of the dance and its consistency with the Sardinian national character.13 The dancers’ upright and static pose, however, the rigidity of the upper body in contrast to the precision and fluidity of the leg movements had not only given rise to contrasting opinions among travelling observers, they had been embraced and recodified in a national dimension by early 20th-century Sardinian literature and painting, with the aim of exalting the simple nobility of                                                              12 13

Intertitle: “Le donne, come vuole l’usanza, piangono il morto” (Jaccarino 2001: 99). See chapter 1, note 469.

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an archaic and primitive people, a quality which painter Filippo Figari defined as the Sardinians’ “moral solidity”.14 The depiction of the festive celebration in Cainà thus stands as the product of a long literary tradition which, fuelled by travellers’ books, had been relaunched at the end of the 19th century by the school of criminal sociology and further promoted by First World War propaganda extolling the savage, primitive heroism of Sardinian infantrymen. Although the portrayal of the island world was ‘realistic’ and consistent with the poetic world of Deledda and other authoritative Sardinian voices of the time, Sardinia was offered up above all as an exotic and primitive scenario, terrible and fascinating, able to stimulate incredible fantasies in its alienness to the developed and optimistic Europe which had just been shattered by the catastrophe of the Great War. The quality of the festivity scene in Cainà was only rarely equalled in later films, yet a similar documentary approach – no less primitivist in style – is also to be found in one of the most important films ever to be set in Sardinia, Banditi a Orgosolo.15 In keeping with its Neorealist viewpoint, the film shows director De Seta’s desire to provide first-hand documentation of a world considered distant and mysterious without resorting to the spectacle of traditional costume, so his portrayal of the ballo tondo appears as an understated one.16 Rather than in a public setting loaded with significance for the community, such as a village square decked out for the occasion, the scene is set in a private house.17 The camera shows the dance for what it is in its primordial essence: a series of steps in time to the rhythm of a musical accompaniment as a form of codified expression on the part of a community. Those taking part in the dance are glimpsed through the doors and windows opening on to the courtyard, and the camera concentrates on their legs and feet as they execute their moves and steps with practised ease. What is most striking in these unusual shots is the housewives’ slippers and the men’s dust-covered boots. De Seta                                                              14

Figari’s term (“quadratura morale”) is quoted by Paulis 2006: 215. In this instance the dance is part of an unspecified private celebration and does not coincide with any religious festival. 16 It should be borne in mind that by 1960 traditional costume had been replaced by modern dress, so the absence of the former in Banditi a Orgosolo is consistent with the film’s realist intent. 17 On the other hand, in the Sardinian popular imagination the house is tantamount to a sacred place, since it is the setting for the essential events in the cycle of life. 15

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shows a Sardinian identity manifested not as an external factor, culminating in the colourful spectacle of stunning costumes, but in a profound sense of belonging to a community which celebrates itself in the intimacy of the family, repeating time-honoured acts which are felt to be natural, passed down from one generation to the next. That dance expresses the same identity as the one manifested in the ability to make bread, go hunting for mouflon and recognise individual sheep. The dancers’ feet beating time and raising the dust on the floor describe a symbolic decorative pattern, but more than anything they reveal a world which has remained poor, simple and morally intact. The people whose faces we glimpse have no name or recognisable individual identity, but we can imagine the daily toil they have to bear; the time their feet spend suspended in mid-air between steps seems to expand, evoking the millenary destiny of an ancient race, so that past and present are brought together in the ritual of the dance, enshrining the uniqueness and unity of the Sardinian people. It thus stands as a negation of the search for the picturesque that in the early 20th century still drove intellectuals and artists who wished to discover the true soul of Sardinia and its people. But at the same time, albeit with great dignity and honesty, it is a reiteration of the exoticising ethnographic gaze which captures in the Other a different being projected into a world inevitably distant from that of the observer. A few years after Cainà the festivity made another brief appearance, but although the film in question – La grazia – was also a primitivist work, the results were completely different.18 Screen renditions of country festivities generally featured dance, song and music, but this film, loosely based on the short story Di notte, confined most of its focus on celebrations to a Mass held in a mountain sanctuary.19 That scene is preceded by a cumbessia in which some of the assembled novena celebrants perform the ballo tondo. Attention then shifts to the people walking up to the sanctuary, located at the top of a mountain whose impressive face is presented for the admiration of the audience. Inside the building the faithful are crowded together as they kneel in prayer. The image is not one of                                                              18

Most of the film was shot in the studio in an attempt to present Sardinian society as a “museum piece”, in keeping with the contemporary promotion of the island’s folklore by its craft industry: Olla 2008: 131. On the story’s adaptation for opera before its subsequent reworking as a screenplay, see ibid., 28-30; 130-131. 19 The sanctuary depicted in the film is very probably the one on Monte Gonare, near Nuoro, the site of a well-known religious celebration (Olla 2008: 131).

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serene devotion, however – among the pilgrims appealing for the Virgin Mary’s protection are prostrate wretches suffering in body and spirit, bearing deformities and injuries.20 The audience has the impression of witnessing a primitive religious manifestation which could have taken place elsewhere in the South and is therefore in keeping with the representation of a backward society still bound to instinctive and excessive forms of behaviour.21 In the sanctuary, as in the film as a whole, the references to Sardinian folklore typical of Deledda’s model serve to construct a discourse on the island’s life as a variation of Southern primitivism. As ‘scientifically’ demonstrated by scholars such as Ferri, Sergi and Niceforo, the Sardinians may be categorised as an archaic and barbaric society typical of the South, still governed by the codes of honour and vendetta – an alien world diametrically opposed to a developed Europe, a humankind that finds deep religious belief as a resource to restrain its barbarism.22 In the post-war period, dominated by Neorealism, the ‘Southernist’ viewpoint is discernible in most films depicting Sardinia, some of which were based on Deledda’s stories. Like Sicily and other southern Italian regions, Sardinia belonged to a world distant in space and time, characterised by traditions and lifestyles unconscionable to a modern society. In that framework the theme of the festivity acted as an important element of cultural contextualisation, though it was sometimes merely evoked rather than explicitly shown, as in Delitto per amore. Keeping faith with the novel L’edera, the film makes no facile concessions to folklore, but from the outset it plunges the audience into a setting clearly marked                                                             

20

After a time in the church the camera focuses on the hero Elias Desole, betrayer of Simona, the woman he had promised to marry, wallowing in his solitary guilt. Subsequently he is found by the brothers of his betrothed and taken to their house, where they intend to kill him in revenge for the insult to their family. 21 The religious theme of atonement for sins and grace – so important in Deledda’s poetics – returns at the end when the heroine’s daughter, apparently killed by lightning, comes back to life. 22 In the film La grazia the scene of Christmas Eve in Simona’s house conforms in some ways to the model of Sardinian society – at various points we see traditional male costume, the rifle as a male accessory, hospitality, a shared drink, roasting meat, the launeddas. Moreover, it features elements extraneous to the island: the men playing the launeddas are dressed as bagpipers, a sign of southern-ness, and the prickly pear bushes (made of papier mâché) and the sheep providing a generic southern background to the encounter between Simona and Elias, are not peculiarly Sardinian.

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by southern characteristics.23 In other films the rendition of the Sardinian setting is more explicit and authentic, including the festivity scenes. One such film is Faddjia. La legge della vendetta (1949),24 though in this case the celebration is not religious but marks the distribution of land to the peasants, with the evocative presence of a nuraghe in the background landscape.25 After the priest’s blessing the people begin dancing the ballo tondo, while the camera closes in on the launeddas players and then dwells on situations depicting island customs: some men are shown playing morra, others strike acrobatic poses on horseback. These are sketches of country life put together to create a ‘Sardinian composition’, in keeping with the trope of Southern society. The most spectacular results of the Southernist approach are to be found in Proibito, whose plot is a confluence of stories, characters and themes drawn from a number of Deledda’s works and catapulted into the Sardinia of the 1950s.26 The narrative is strewn with signs of island traditions, the most noteworthy of which are the shots of the pilgrimage to the church of San Francesco and the festivities, made particularly striking by the use of colour to highlight the decorations and designs of the traditional costumes.27 While                                                             

23

The most striking example is S’Ardia, the horse race held during the feast of San Costantino (Santu Antine) at Sedilo. See also chapter 3, note 82. 24 In this case the authenticity of the setting – the village of Riola was used as the location – contrasts with a plot which the film’s critics considered bizarre, since it is based on a clash between peasants and shepherds. On the socio-political background to the film, see chapter 3, sections North-South and Mountains and Landscape. 25 The same explanation may be used for repeated references to the domus de janas which, like the nuraghe, represent the continuity of Sardinian civilisation from its origins. 26 The screenplay contains a number of easily recognisable features in common with La madre (cited in the film’s opening credits) and also with earlier works by Deledda, such as Elias Portolu, Cenere and above all Colombi e sparvieri. While Elias Portolu contains a detailed description of a festivity, the novel Colombi e sparvieri presents a virtually complete panorama of the image of Sardinian life, including many details used subsequently in the film. 27 The procession is accompanied by chants, in which male and female voices are heard. The way the throng moves in file – on foot, on horseback or on carts – until it gathers at the sanctuary recalls descriptions written by travellers, such as that of the procession of Tonara witnessed by Lawrence (2009: 116-119). The location used in the film is the countryside near Sassari, specifically the medieval basilica of Santa Trinità di Saccargia, one of the most spectacular monumental settings on the island. Enlivened by singing, dancing and feasting, the celebration is given a nocturnal setting in which the camera work crafts pictures of rustic life enhanced by the telling use of scenery and lighting.

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professing a desire to represent the reality and the stories of simple people, cinema thus exploited the Sardinian setting to portray the South in accordance with categories well consolidated in the popular imagination (the topoi of archaism, primitivism, shepherd-bandits, etc.). As the examples above indicate, the representation of the festivity, in its more convincing and less realistic renditions alike, stands as a sign of Sardinian identity and national character on screen, but its specific meaning depends on how it is staged and on the general context of the story. This may be exemplified by a comparison between two comedies, Vendetta...sarda and Una questione d’onore; though they use elements of island folklore in different ways, they both confine themselves to depicting a celebration (a village festival and a wedding feast respectively) as little more than a colourful and shallow appendix, exterior to real life. The festivity scene in Vendetta...sarda is clearly bogus, as is the tarantella-like music, which has little to do with Sardinian melodies. The dancers’ costumes are anything but true to the Sardinian tradition, and the physical features, behaviour and ornaments featured throughout the film amount to a grotesque distortion.28 And in Una questione d’onore, although the costumes and the music are a ‘realistic’ representation of Sardinian tradition, the protagonist’s wedding feast is nothing more than the standard slice of folklore shoved into most films set on the island.29 The dance scene is a shot of a banquet with a small group of dancers behind it, performing against the background of a breathtaking coastal landscape – confirmation that Sardinian dance, taken out of its ‘national’ context, had by that time become a piece of folklore to be used as a tourist attraction. Yet aside from their apparent conformity to the topos of an alien and authentically archaic Sardinia, the two comedies contain a series of elements which call into question such a stereotyped view. The ‘prehistoric’ inhabitants of the Nuoro area depicted in the films – shepherds and bandits as required by tradition – seem ready for modernisation, welcoming hordes of foreigners                                                             

28

The music and dance are recognisable as the tarantella, which does not belong to Sardinian musical culture. The hilarious pursuit scene at the end of the film features, among other things, oversized ornamental objects which help render the bizarre character of Sardinian life. 29 The film depicts a number of unusual features of Sardinian tradition. Olla (2008: 152) points out that the screenplay is the fruit of painstaking research, evidently including a study of Pigliaru’s renowned work on the Barbagian code of the vendetta.

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attracted by the myth of the noble savage, all too easily forgetting the duty of the vendetta in order to enjoy the new comforts available to tourists.30 Having lost any resonance in terms of identity, seen from a viewpoint that anticipates globalisation rather than confirming the myth of a timeless land, festivity and dance thus become a fleeting apparition, a pleasant note of flamboyant colour, serving to corroborate a reassuring version of Sardinian primitivism made to measure for the new tourists. In the second half of the 20th century the festivity as a set piece continued as before: like dance, music and traditional song, it was a sign of the archaism, immobility and otherness of Sardinian culture.31 The more these themes were exhibited – especially if accompanied by traditional costume at a time when modern dress had replaced it – the more they seemed incongruous and bereft of meaning, reduced to nothing more than audience-catching decoration. However, they did have some ‘national’ resonance in films which contributed to the debate on the clash between Sardinia – in particular the Barbagia (seen as backward, impenetrable and lawless) – and the Italian state. One such case is to be found in one of the films about banditry produced in the late 1960s, when crime in Sardinia attracted a great deal of attention from the press. In Pelle di bandito the scene depicting traditional dance and song is full of symbolic references, and is based on the idea of the island’s cultural archaism. Having watched the performance of a flamenco by Miguel, his Spanish-born partner in crime, Mariano De Linna (alias Graziano Mesina) invites his fellow outlaws to show the ‘foreigner’ how Sardinians dance and sing. The scene is set in a symbolic place – the Nuorese mountains considered since time immemorial to be the heart of the island and its cultural identity. There we see a group of men gather in a circle, move to the rhythm typical of the ballo tondo and sing a harmonised melody with no instrumental accompaniment. The composed repetitiveness of the dance and the monotony of the chant – in such contrast to the                                                             

30

In Una questione d’onore Leandro prefers to spend his holidays by the sea to carrying out his duty of vengeance; see also chapter 3. 31 Sometimes the festivity is represented not by a dance scene but by recourse to another characteristic feature of Sardinian folklore: the Carnival-like costumes of the Mammuthones. Whether presented simply as a performance for tourists (as in I protagonisti and Una questione d’onore), or with more relevance to the story (Arcipelaghi), it is used to give substance to the primitive and the archaic in Sardinian culture.

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explosive passion of the flamenco – evoke a simple, archaic and primitive life which the dancers embody to perfection.32 The men’s spontaneous performance is experienced as an exhibition of their identity, something in which outsiders cannot really participate. Initially an interested observer, Miguel joins the group, but when he does so his radiant expression betrays the ideological distance between his attitude to dance and that of his Sardinian companions. And although he joins the circle of the ballo tondo, he remains excluded from the singing because he does not speak Sardinian and does not know the chants. For contemporary Sardinian film-makers festivities and dance continue to provide narrative solutions for evoking a stereotyped image of the island. In La destinazione, a film based on the topos of an immobile, timeless Sardinia, the dance scene – in itself of no great import for the plot, taking place at a wedding reception – is part of a discourse replete with signs of archaism which arouse the astonishment of the protagonist (a mainlander) at the differences between life on the island and in the rest of Italy.33 Further evidence of the continuing iconic character of the festivity is available in a recent film directed by a Sardinian: Ballo a tre passi has an episodic format, in which the third story features a young nun called Francesca who takes leave of her convent and returns to her family for the wedding of her niece Simona. She chose to abandon everything for the sake of her vocation; returning to her birthplace she is confronted with what she relinquished and struggles to find peace of mind as she re-lives feelings and memories that she thought she had buried.34                                                              32

Olla 2008: 160. In La destinazione, the protagonist peers through the open front door of the house where the wedding celebration is taking place and sees a group of dancers and the bride and groom in traditional costume. The custom of getting married in costume has now all but died out even in the villages of the Barbagia. A dance scene set in a wedding feast also appears in other Sardinian-directed films. Disamistade has two festivity scenes (a wedding feast and a religious celebration), both of which feature Sardinian dance as an essential element in the collective celebration of a ritual, but traditional costume is absent, in conformity with the historical context of the story. Sa jana, a film built around the topos of an archaic and timeless Sardinia, shows the festivity in honour of San Giovanni, the ballo tondo and the ritual of the companionship (comparatico). Though not making use of traditional costume, the scene is part of the discourse on Sardinian identity which runs through the narrative. 34 The experience of a nun – an individual who gives up everything for her religious vocation – may of course be put into any context, but the choice of a Sardinian setting and the abundance of signs of island life throughout the film are so evident that this 33

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The recovery of Francesca’s Sardinian identity takes place through her gradual reintegration in family and village life through the sharing of acts and customs recognisable as typically Sardinian, starting with a scene symbolically constructed as a full-blown immersion in the world (alias her identity as a Sardinian and Barbagian woman) she decided to leave. The first step is her entry into the area in the bride’s family house designated for the reception being held on the day before the wedding; as she walks in, the guests begin to sing a Sardinian version of Ave Maria. Passing through the rooms among the people enjoying themselves drinking and singing, Francesca feels uneasy; she recognises the faces but they belong to a part of her suppressed by her life as a nun, and she is particularly unsettled by the brazen stares of the men who look at her. First accompanied by a niece and then in the reassuring presence of her old father, Francesca finds her composure and in the end allows herself to be persuaded to join the singing. This marks her real return home; welcomed into the group, singing with her family and friends, she is one of them once more. During the wedding reception at the end of the episode she also takes part in the dancing, but continues to grapple with the decision – to live in a convent – which prevents her from experiencing her femininity to the full and compels her to relinquish the principle role of a Sardinian woman: being a wife and mother.35 The culmination of the episode is reached in the ballo tondo; although it is performed in the story’s realistic style, it takes on a symbolic character. Interrupted by a sudden shower that threatens to ruin their open-air party, the participants find shelter and resume the dance indoors. In the celebration of a dance that defeats even the elements, director Mereu shows us a community celebrating itself in its fealty to traditions which pass intact from one generation to the next. Although at first sight Ballo a tre passi portrays a credible present-day Sardinia in which modernity and tourism co-exist with                                                                                                                                  episode may be legitimately interpreted at least in part as a discourse on Sardinian identity. 35 The end of the story shows Francesca returning to her convent by coach. Through the window she sees a lorry carrying a couple of newly-weds and hears the music typically used in Sardinian festivities. The coach and the lorry are moving, symbolically, in opposite directions: Francesca knows she has chosen a destiny which is different from the one marked out for ‘normal’ women. However, her life in a convent, adopted as a free and informed choice, is also a confirmation that individuals can choose their own identity. Sardinian identity is subject to change, it is not the absolute and unchangeable monolith preached by cultural nationalism.

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tradition, the film’s focus on certain features of island identity (the timeless dimension of its life, the importance of the figure of the shepherd, boys in the Barbagia being taught to use weapons, the ideological clash between the island and the mainland, the weight of the Sardinian language and popular traditions, etc.) confirms that it is rooted in the thematic repertoire of an archaic and authentic Sardinia. Thus, even in the cinematic language of a contemporary Sardinian film-maker the ballo tondo persists as an expression of unity, as a performance of Sardinian identity, even though it is set in an island now marked by the unmistakable signs of globalisation. National Costume Travellers’ accounts were sometimes embellished with coloured illustrations, and subsequently photographs, that highlighted the combination of austerity and elegance, primitivism and colour, that distinguishes traditional Sardinian costumes.36 Travel literature has recorded the “surge of bright colours” produced by the crowd leaving the church at Sennori, “in a fascinating evocation of a time that is no more”, above all because of the enormous discrepancy between the richness of their clothes and the poverty of their homes.37 Traditional costume, or rather the variety of costumes described in such detail in literature, was assiduously exploited by cinema for its remarkable visual impact and particularly for its iconic value. The films in which the characters wear costume, faithful to the traditional model or imaginatively reinterpreted for the camera, are not tied to a particular period, though the 1920s and 1950s were marked by a distinct ‘realist’ and ethnographic tendency.38 Clothing is also significant in terms of the characterisation of the bandit. In some films the figure is represented according to the model of the southern brigand (I briganti in Sardegna, 1905), but it was generally identified with the shepherd, wearing traditional costume augmented by the inevitable sheepskin jacket (mastruca), and subsequently a velvet suit. By the 1960s stories with characters still wearing colourful traditional costume would have been completely                                                             

36

Beside Juta’s plates (chapter 4, section Women), see also the illustrations in Vuillier 1893 and the photos in Wagner’s works. 37 Vuiller 1893: 382. 38 Olla 2008: 26.

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anachronistic, so they virtually disappeared from the screen, even in films dealing with banditry. In actual fact, a closer look at the islanders’ habits shows that in their daily lives they did not usually wear extravagant clothes adorned with embroidery and jewels. In any village only a couple of people could afford to do so, and everyone else dressed very humbly. Changing tastes made themselves felt on the island too, where the traditional male costume was superseded by a velvet suit or, in the case of more affluent urban classes, formal suits. Recent films featuring traditional costume have consciously offered a fictional image of Sardinian identity, a recovery of the ancient in which the exotic angle is made even more evident. From the late 1980s traditional costume was shown when the story was set in the past, as in Disamistade (1988), whose story ends in 1958, or in the staging of obvious museum-style fictions such as the television drama L’ultima frontiera (2006), set in the Barbagia during the time of the military expeditions against bandits (1899) recaptured in the book Caccia grossa (Bechi 1997). The use of costume has thus become an ethnographic cameo, often bogus, just as in modern-day Sardinia traditional festive costume has been reduced to an exhibit of Sardinian identity, merely exterior, conceived for the benefit of the tourist crowds who flock increasing numbers to village festivals and folklore entertainment events.39 Although this revival of popular traditions has in recent years been driven by tourism, and thus by economic considerations, the fact remains that from the very beginning clothing was a key element in the representation of the Sardinian identity on the screen, a way of highlighting the huge divide between the world observed and the world of the observer. Even though literary sources demonstrated the opposite, by virtue of its alleged antiquity traditional costume evoked archaicism and was seen as a sign of Sardinian immobilism.40 From the earliest films (In terra sarda, Cainà, La grazia) it was male dress – geometrically distinguished by the alternation of black and white in the various garments, completed by the “scruffy sheepskin” (mastruca) still considered as the national costume at the end of the 19th century and the long berritta, the woollen hat folded in various imaginative forms – which allowed the identification of the                                                              39 40

Angioni, Bachis, Caltagirone and Cossu 2007: 170-172. See in this chapter, the section The Festivity as an Icon of Sardinian Identity.

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shepherd-hunter-bandits featured in them as Sardinian.41 This mark of recognition appeared even in the youngest characters. The berritta worn by Anania, son of Rosalia Derios (Eleonora Duse) in Cenere, looks even bigger and more awkward because it is on the head of a child. To the eyes of foreign travellers, in any case, Sardinian national costume stood as an unmistakable sign of a nation of “barbarians from ancient times”.42 In the post-war period Sardinian costume was used in various ways in southern-themed films. In some cases it was entirely absent (Le vie del peccato 1946) or appeared only in festivity scenes or was worn by minor characters, since the settings of these films were based on a generic concept of the South. In Delitto per amore (1950) the well-off Don Paulu, like the rest of his family, wears bourgeois clothes, whereas his underlings – all minor characters – training for the annual horse-race known as the Ardia are shown in traditional male costume. In Amore rosso (1952), by contrast, irrespective of their social station all the main characters wear costume, except Sebastiano – he has lived on the mainland, so his clothing marks the distance that separates him from the community.43 In other cases outward appearance served to represent the social contrast between shepherds and farmers, an expression of the backwardness of the                                                              41

Lawrence 2009: 56: “How handsome he is, and so beautifully male!”. “How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression. – And how perfectly ridiculous it is made in modern clothes” (ibid.). See also ibid., 57. A train journey gave Lawrence the occasion to emphasise the coarse, vigorous and determined appearance of traditionally-dressed Sardinians, entirely unwilling to bow to the modern world and so attached to their long caps that they seemed part of their egos (ibid., 83). Male virility is set in contrast to feminine appearance and behaviour (ibid., 60), so that the meeting of the sexes has a wild flavour to it which leaves no room for sickly modern conventions (ibid., 60-61). “And the flash of the black and white, the slow stride of the full white drawers, the black gaiters and black cuirass with the bolero, then the great white sleeves and white breast again, and once more the black cap – what marvellous massing of the contrast, marvellous, and superb, as on a magpie” (ibid., 56). “I love my indomitable coarse men from mountain Sardinia, for their stockingcaps and their splendid, animal-bright stupidity. If only the last wave of all-alikeness won’t wash those superb crests, those caps, away.” (ibid., 84). See also Vuillier 1893: 447. 42 Vuillier 1893: 447. 43 Having spent a period on the mainland away from the Barbagia, Anania, now an adult, returns to the island in search of his mother – his bourgeois appearance reveals his detachment from Sardinian society. In the television drama Canne al vento, Giacinto goes to the house of his mother’s family, where he is also considered an outsider because of his city clothes.

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former and the progress of the latter: in Faddjia (1949) shepherds wear their traditional costume and the landowners wear bourgeois suits.44 In comedy films the use of costume was widely adopted as an unmistakable symbol of Sardinian identity. In Vendetta…sarda (1957) the Sardinian protagonists land on the island wearing costume, while the mainlanders wear ‘normal’ clothes and Lulù – an Italian stylish beauty –, much to the dismay of the local villagers, wears a bathing costume. Similarly, in Una questione d’onore (1966) the difference between traditional characters and ‘modernised’ ones is expressed partly through clothing. The main character wears the standard shepherd’s black-and-white and travels on a donkey, as does Agostino, the embittered old man whose only thought on his release from prison is wreaking vengeance on his enemies. His nephew Leandro, by contrast, intent on enjoying his holiday on the Costa Smeralda rather than performing his duty in the family feud, wears normal clothes. Prehistory as a Topos of Sardinian Identity By virtue of the remarkable density of prehistoric structures on the island, Sardinia is often characterised as an open-air museum; it is indeed unthinkable that the imposing presence of nuraghi, domus de janas (‘fairy houses’) and tombe dei giganti (‘giants’ tombs’) in the landscape could escape the attention of any traveller. Although the interest they have generated has produced a discourse consistent with the image of an archaic and primitive land, their presence on film is fairly limited. Where they do appear it is mostly in films made during and before the 1950s, in which their function is to localise the story in a Sardinia still wild and unspoilt. Cainà opens with a sequence of shots which lead the audience on an imaginary journey through space and particularly time: the mountains (“the island’s giants”) and a nuraghe, silent witness to a glorious but inevitably lost age, are the                                                             

44

A shot from the film, reproduced in Olla 2008: 204, shows a group of shepherds sitting on rocks in the country landscape as in a 19th-century advertising poster. An incongruous element in the composition is the modern figure of Don Pietro Atzeni, the well-dressed landowner with the ever-present rifle over his shoulder. In Altura (Sequi 1949), a film about the struggle between a shepherds’ cooperative and a landowner, the shepherds – even in a period of progress, as witnessed by the project of a cooperative – wear traditional costume.

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signs of being transported into a mysterious place, extraneous to modern civilisation.45 In the comedy Una questione d’onore the blurred profile of a nuraghe appears behind the opening credits as an unmistakable sign that the story is set in Sardinia; it stands as one of many features of the man-made landscape presented in a film built around the caricatured image of an island in which primitive and barbaric customs still survive. The nuraghe is a recurrent element in Faddjia. La legge della vendetta; its first appearance is in an opening sequence of images typical of the Sardinian (and Southern) landscape and above all it returns to the screen at crucial moments in the story. One example is in the scene depicting the sale of lands for centuries given over to collective use and exploited by shepherds as pasture. The whole village looks on as local landowner Pietro Atzeni purchases a particularly valuable parcel of land overlooking the hill of the domus de janas. As the parcels of land are blessed following their sale, a nuraghe stands in the background. This is followed by dances in traditional costume and other amusements. Built on the opposition between the archaic (pastoral) world and the modern (agricultural) one, this film confirms the prejudice whereby shepherds, here depicted as capricious, unreliable and outdated, are the expression of a bygone age, whereas the future is tied to the intelligence of landowners, able to produce affluence and bring about real progress on the island. Yet even the apparently progressive Pietro Atzeni does not shrink from deciding to settle a personal dispute by means of vendetta, appealing to his people’s traditional code of conduct, while the scene continues to be dominated by a solitary nuraghe, as if to remind the audience that the story is a Sardinian one after all. In the end Atzeni is dissuaded from enacting his vendetta and angrily walks out of the community, leaving that silent building behind him to dominate the scene on its own. The unconsummated vendetta seems to confirm the hope that an archaic Sardinia may at last progress by virtue of its rejection of the barbaric laws of pastoral-nuragic civilisation, making way for a peaceful agricultural society able to encompass and modernise the vestiges of the past. A different impression is created by the vision of the nuraghe in Proibito, where the imposing tower turns out to be the hideout of an outlaw and his band. In this film the nuraghe appears as the sun sets,                                                             

45

See chapter 3, note 54.

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surrounded by its last fiery rays. A stunning piece of photography, this vision symbolises the intrinsic unity between nuragic (pastoral) society and Sardinian banditry. The overall sensation is that of witnessing a scene containing the most familiar icons of Sardinian identity: it closes with a view of the nuraghe, blurred by the blazing colours of the sunset, on top of which sits a man holding a rifle at the ready, while the soundtrack plays a traditional song performed a cappella. The only Sardinian film to present a fully elaborated discourse on Sardinian identity with prehistory as its historical and symbolic fulcrum is Sa jana, which contains a number of explicit references to the past. To start with, the title recalls the domus de janas, the underground sepulchral monuments held by folklore to be the homes of fairies (janas). The film opens with a visit to one of these mythical abodes by a child and his grandfather, who recounts the legends shrouding these mysterious places, thus symbolising the people’s collective memory being passed down from generation to generation. As the story unfolds the old man’s folk wisdom, though the fruit of a simple tradition and unschooled learning, proves to be a highly useful asset; this is confirmed by a priest, who tries to convince the boy not to believe folk legends but at the same time urges him to know, love and value his roots. The aim of priest’s rationalism is not the loss of traditional memory but its informed communication, based on historical knowledge rather than myth. The importance of the discourse on identity is rendered explicit in a scene where the priest takes a group of children from the village to visit an archaeological site dominated by a magnificent specimen of a nuraghe. What the priest tells his charges is designed to give the young generation a rational, historically credible awareness of the past, in the conviction that such a memory is an essential condition for development and improvement. In the words of the priest-guide, the people who built the nuraghe were identified with a pastoral civilisation which had to undertake a tremendous effort to construct such monumental buildings. A civilisation different from that of cars and televisions, it was nonetheless indispensable because it made subsequent development possible. Nuragic civilisation thus represents the true roots of the Sardinians – a people of ‘normal’ men, not the giants depicted by tradition, but worthy of admiration and pride. The ideas expressed in the film are consistent with the vision of nuragic

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civilisation and the island’s history as a whole most forcefully represented in the second half of the 20th century by Giovanni Lilliu.46 Produced with funding from the regional government to highlight the work of its local administration, the film is marked by its contemporary cultural climate, characterised by a desire to promote and assert Sardinian history and identity. The theme of the nuraghi and the domus de janas has a different significance compared to its treatment in previous films, which all represented an external perspective: rather than evoking the image of a land still barbaric and primitive, in accordance with the familiar trope, the appeal to the past is designed to trigger a discourse on the Sardinian people in line with the political and cultural claims being advanced at the time. Sa jana is thus a politically committed film, one which expresses its ideological aims all too clearly and partially obfuscates the decision, appropriate though it was, to set the story in a marine environment, which is the film’s real point of interest.47 The agricultural and pastoral world, the traditional setting for films portraying Sardinia, makes way in this case for a fishing community, yet even this novelty is weakened by a vision of Sardinian history which recognises pastoral-nuragic civilisation as the true roots of the Sardinian people. Apart from the above examples, the presence of the nuraghe on screen fades by comparison with the more potent and compelling icons of the Barbagia of the shepherd-bandits and the Eden of the Costa Smeralda. The old and the new of Sardinia intertwine and sustain each other in a narrative whose traditional stock of tropes remains intact. The predominance of the pastoral theme entails, among other things, the inevitable appearance of specimens of the shepherd’s hut (pinnetta). Besides serving to contextualise a story, it stands as a specific sign of cultural belonging. In the literary tradition it was considered as a product of nuragic civilisation, as is confirmed by its round shape and its arrangement of dry stone rows.48 The pinnetta thus acts implicitly as a trigger for the memory of prehistoric Sardinia. Since the past continues to perpetuate and renew itself in the pastoral world, the temporal dimension tends to cancel itself out, because where there is no historical development, nor room for any clear distinction between the various ages, everything which has been                                                             

46

See chapter 2, section Tropes of Land: Wilderness and Primitivism. Olla 2008: 175. 48 See chapter 2, note 665. 47

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is perceived as still current, still contingent, as witnessed by the nuraghi and to a lesser extent by the domus de janas and the “giants’ tombs”. Italian and Sardinian on Screen Language is usually considered one of the most distinctive characteristics in a people’s identity, but when a film is being made decisions concerning language are determined primarily by production requirements and are not allowed to stand in the way of the film’s commercial prospects. This has induced film-makers to use Italian even when the story’s setting would have justified a different choice.49 The same is true of films set in Sardinia, since Sardinian was (and to some extent still is) the language most used in the home and private relations, above all in the rural areas in which most of the stories are narrated. Yet in the Sardinia depicted on film the prevalent language is Italian, not only in silent film intertitles (Cenere, Cainà, La grazia) but in the overwhelming majority of later works as well, including those made by Sardinians. An emblematic case is Banditi a Orgosolo, which De Seta was forced by production requirements to present in Italian, even though he wanted to shoot the film in Sardinian. Although the authentic speech of the Orgolese shepherds is lost, the ‘natural’ accents of the non-professional actors, all local people, bespeak their origins, which at least helps make the depiction of the setting less contrived. The lack of Sardinian in the films of the corpus is partially compensated for by speech, which reproduces an actual linguistic situation in Sardinia and may be defined as a regional variant of Italian. The regional marking consists mostly of the island’s typical accent, easily recognisable to an Italian audience by virtue of certain specific features (the absence of mid-vowels and a tendency to pronounce post-accentual consonants as doubles), while the grammatical structure of Italian remains almost intact. Put to increasingly widespread use after the Second World War, this                                                             

49

The most emblematic instance of an Italian film in dialect is La terra trema (1948), for which Luchino Visconti chose his cast from the villagers of Aci Trezza and allowed them to speak in the only language they knew, their local form of Sicilian, as stated in the opening credits. It should also be borne in mind that the choice of Sardinian, as of any other linguistic variation, would have required the assistance of speakers of that language in writing the screenplay.

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linguistic strategy was frequently used in films that were shot in other parts of Italy as well.50 The adoption of Sardinian regional Italian varied in extent. In some cases it was confined to the lines given to minor characters, while the leads – usually played by Italian actors or well-known foreigners – spoke in standard Italian (Delitto per amore, Amore rosso, I protagonisti, Sequestro di persona, etc.). The result was a linguistic mix such as the one heard in Delitto per amore, when rich landowner Don Paolo is speaking to an employee of his called Gavino. The former uses grammatically and phonetically standard Italian, while the latter has a strong Sardinian accent. A similar situation obtains in the dialogues between Marianna Sirca’s cousin Sebastiano (played by Vittorio Foa), Italianised in his habits and dress, and her elderly father, who always wears traditional costume (Amore rosso). In this case the linguistic contrast serves to mark the distance between the cultures respectively embodied by the two characters (Italian and modern by Sebastiano, Sardinian and archaic by Marianna’s father). In other films the use of Sardinian regional Italian is more complex, including regional lexis and Sardinian grammatical features such as placing the verb at the end of a phrase (examples are found in Una questione d’onore and Barbagia. La società del malessere). The above examples make clear a desire to exploit the symbolic force of language as an ethnic and cultural marker, though in most cases it is a sign of identity which is continually evoked rather than a full-blown use of Sardinian. The most common approach has been the inclusion of a range of codes and resisters, an operation assisted by the casting of Sardinian actors in leading roles (Banditi a Orgosolo, Pelle di bandito, Sa jana, Una casa sotto il cielo, Caccia grossa, Sos laribiancos, I dimenticati, Disamistade, Il figlio di Bakunìn), not forgetting a few sporadic lines or dialogues in Sardinian (Una questione d’onore, Il disertore, etc.).51 The effects of the use of Sardinian regional Italian are clear nonetheless: a working compromise has been found to solve the problem of the incomprehensibility of Sardinian, ensure a certain degree of fidelity to the reality depicted and above all contribute to re-creating the                                                             

50

On the evolution of Italian cinema from the 1980s, see Sesti 1994 and Zagarrio 2001. 51 See chapter 4, note 25.

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Sardinian world. A character speaking in that language embodies another world, where the concept of otherness may imply a negative value judgement or at least activate a series of associations regarding Sardinia and its inhabitants. Sometimes Sardinian regional Italian sounds less than authentic. This occurs when the accent is overdone, which may be the result of a non-Sardinian actor’s inability to imitate the island accent properly, or a deliberate ploy on the director’s part for the purposes of caricature. One example is the character of bandit Graziano Cassitta in Barbagia. La società del malessere, played by Terence Hill, whose pronunciation sounds terribly forced and is entirely at odds with his physical appearance.52 But the contrived nature of his speech is partially offset by the variety of language registers used in the film, corresponding to the characters’ various cultural identities: the standard Italian used by the off-camera voice representing the national press and public opinion; the regional Italian of educated Sardinians, Italian-speakers with a Sardinian accent; Sardinian as spoken by the Barbagian shepherds, sub-titled in Italian. In the two comedies set in Sardinia the language policy works effectively to enhance the local colour, though it is done in different ways. The predominant form of speech in Vendetta...sarda is standard Italian, also spoken by the Sardinian characters with the exception of the dishwasher Porcheddu, whose spoof Italian includes a mish-mash of Sardinian, Sicilian and Spanish expressions.53 In Una questione d’onore the Sardinian characters speak in regional Italian, while the protagonist, played by renowned comic actor Ugo Tognazzi, goes                                                              52

The casting of Terence Hill as a Sardinian bandit does appear rather questionable, given his appearance – blond, blue-eyed and slim. He later became famous for his roles in spaghetti Westerns and has recently returned to the spotlight as television detective-priest Don Matteo in the series with the same name. Equally curious is the casting of Don Backy, a popular singer of the time and therefore a prominent media figure, as Pedro, Mesina’s Spanish-born cellmate and subsequent partner in crime in the Supramonte (Olla 2008: 163). 53 Here are some of the dishwasher’s lines. He starts out with “Io soy sardu no sardegnolu, capidu?”. Later he remarks: “Si no li sporcu (i piatti), comu li lavu?”; “Zittu, ca lu babbu mi narrai che lo silenzio esti d’oru”; “A babbo appu giurado de estare mudu”. To give an idea of the sort of language involved, an equivalent, and not unfamiliar, figure for an English-speaking cinema audience might be a caricatured Scotsman, here contaminated with a touch of Geordie: “Hoots mon, I be Scots and no Scotch, ye got that?”. Followed by: “If I dinnae dirty the dishes, how’m I gonnae wash them the noo?”; “Hush yer mooth, ‘cos me Da telt us that silence is golden”; “Howay, as a bairn I sweared tae me Da tae keep mum.”

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much further, producing a caricatured mix of Italian and Sardinian exemplified in the following lines: C’è nisciuno? (Non c’è nessuno? Is anybody there?); Bairindi! (Vattene! Get out!); Aundi è Giglio? (Dov’è Giglio? Where’s Giglio?).54 There is also a short fragment spoken in Sardinian, when a man confesses to carrying out a revenge killing. As might be expected, the mainlander Carabiniere’s inability to understand the spontaneous confession adds confusion to the story, which, in addition to making the audience laugh, inevitably confirms the distance which continues to separate the island from the mainland. In some films the symbolic significance of the language policy is consistent with the view of Sardinia presented. In Il disertore the presence of a range of linguistic codes is a response to the need to represent the characters in their various social and cultural dimensions. Protagonist Mariangela Ecca, an elderly villager like her husband Gregorio, speaks exclusively in Sardinian; the children move with ease between Sardinian and Italian; the local bourgeoisie, Canon Pau and the schoolmistresses, representing educated Sardinians and the hierarchies of power, know Sardinian but generally speak Italian, rendering a credible image of the imaginary village of Cuadu in terms of the island’s actual situation in the aftermath of the First World War. Dessì’s novel, like all his books, is written in Italian, but in Giuliana Berlinguer’s film the linguistic alternation, though sometimes unsuccessful,55 is consistent with the vision of a writer who portrays a society moving towards modernity and involved in epoch-making events such as the Great War, the birth of the movement for autonomy, workers’ demands and the rise of Fascism, in line with the rest of Italy, but still profoundly bound to tradition and primitive ways of living. Mariangela, who represents a naturalistic, magic-primitive conception of life, and whose maternal instinct coincides with the struggle for survival, is the vehicle for the signs of an archaic Sardinia going back to the dawn of time, marked by its symbiosis with the                                                              54

The film caused something of an outcry in Sardinia. The image it presented was judged to be false and demeaning on the grounds that honour killings to avenge betrayal do not exist on the island, and some of the language was considered rather foul (Olla 2008: 151). 55 A criticism of the language policy used in the film is found in Olla 2008: 358. Saverio, for one, is played by a non-Sardinian actor, Matteo Sbragia, whose rendition of Sardinian is extremely poor. And Omero Antonutti, a highly experienced actor, does not have the Sardinian cadences to be expected in the speech of Father Coi.

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environment and almost suspended outside time.56 Both in the film and in the novel, Mariangela is an inaccessible character, withdrawn inside never-ending grief for her sons; she speaks very little – language is held to be a mark of a rational, logical and modern civilisation – and is identified with nature, being compared in the novel to animals in her sure-footed movements through the woods and hills. In the film her voice reproduces this primordial dimension; it is more a whisper emerging from some mysterious depths than a real human voice. Her language can be none other than Sardinian, the original medium of communication of a people living in harmony with nature since time immemorial. But hers is reduced to a bare minimum, broken by long silences, rising to the surface in short utterances; only when she discovers the death of her second son does she explode in a curse shouted at the sky, and then withdraws into an even deeper silence. In this film the alternation between Italian and Sardinian thus seems to work, not only to re-create the actual bilingual condition of the island, but to evoke the topos of a primordial, tragic, Mediterranean Sardinia, tellingly embodied by Greek actress Irene Papas in the role of a grieving mother. Exploration of the various options offered by regional Italian, in combination with standard Italian and Sardinian, has proceeded with increasing conviction up to the present day. A strategy which takes account of the actual diversity characterising day-to-day communication, it has been favoured by the casting of Sardinian actors who express themselves naturally in their own regional Italian (as in Il figlio di Bakunìn, Sa jana, Caccia grossa, Sono Alice, La volpe e l’ape, Pesi leggeri and Jimmy della Collina), although in some cases – especially large-scale productions – non-local actors have been preferred, forcing them into reproducing a Sardinian accent (one case is the role of the bandit Elias Satta Pintore in television drama L’ultima frontiera).57 Such linguistic diversification has opened the                                                              56

On the character of Mariangela Ecca see Maxia 2004. It should be borne in mind that the stories feature characters with a range of geographical origins, so the presence of different forms of speech, now widely accepted by audiences, corresponds to the situations depicted in films. In Un delitto impossibile, set in the northern town of Sassari, the protagonist is a non-Sardinian magistrate who is sent to the island to investigate a murder and thus finds himself working with local officials. Some of the Sardinian characters, however, are played by mainland Italian and foreign actors (Lino Capolicchio, Angela Molina) and use standard Italian.

57

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door to Sardinian in films made by Sardinians responsive to a widespread desire for the recovery and enhancement of popular traditions; this is part of the rediscovery of minorities which acts as a counterpoint to globalisation, finding in Sardinia an audience highly receptive to the theme of identity. In some cases the use of bilingualism in films, as in La destinazione, is justified by the presence of characters and situations traceable to different cultural contexts, but above all it contributes to the creation of a dichotomised vision of the Sardinia and the outside world.58 In other films the exclusive choice of Sardinian has to be explained by deeper motivations. One such case is Arcipelaghi, based on a novel written in Italian by Maria Giacobbe, whose story is set in village near Nuoro torn apart by violent crimes and vendettas. All the characters communicate in their natural language, Sardinian, and Italian is only heard in short sequences set in the courtroom, where the judge and witnesses speak in the language of the foreign power, though their Italian is marked by a Sardinian accent. The film’s story is built around the ideas of truth and justice. In the village where a revenge killing has taken place there are two kinds of justice: the one laid down by Italian law and the inevitably more effective one of the Barbagian code. Each is expressed in its own language: in Italian and Sardinian respectively. The truth told by the witnesses in the courtroom is a pretence, but it works to see that justice is done according to the unwritten rules of the community. Not for nothing does the Carabiniere, speaking in Sardinian, admit that Italian law will be prevented by the conspiracy of silence (omertà) from finding the culprits and urge the boy’s mother to seek them out by speaking to the people she knows in the village. This triggers a trial sui generis conducted by the mother, with an investigation and a clandestine collection of testimonies from the villagers – all in Sardinian. This linguistic split serves to emphasise the gulf separating the two cultures and reinforces the image of Sardinia as the land of the vendetta, the relic of a primitive and savage age. Another important linguistic element in the film derives from a modification in the screenplay which constitutes a departure from the plot of the novel. Whereas in Giacobbe’s book the boy’s killer was a villager, in the film it is Pedru s’istrangiu, Pietro the stranger, whose origins are unmistakably confirmed by his variation of Sardinian,                                                             

58

See Olla 2008: 104.

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typical of how it is spoken in the south of the island.59 The attribution of blame for the boy’s killing to an outsider safeguards the ethical unity of the community, which is configured as the collective victim. But seen from closer up, in fact the film accuses the whole village, which has contributed in various ways to the child’s death, has done nothing to assist in the identification of the culprit and subsequently covers up the mother’s murder of her son’s killer, because his death by vendetta is consistent with the Barbagian code of justice.60 In addition to the representation of the landscape, in Ballo a tre passi the depiction of identity is achieved above all through language, song and Sardinian dance. The decision to favour Sardinian – or rather the various forms it takes on the island – over Italian reflects contemporary cinema’s desire to explore marginal lives, peripheries and specific local characteristics.61 This choice is reinforced by the employment of non-professional Sardinian actors who perform in their natural mode of speech. Mereu has devised some scenes in the film where the alternation between Sardinian and Italian entails a specific reference to Sardinian identity, and multi-lingualism becomes an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between language and power. As already observed, Sardinian is generally felt to be the islanders’ mother tongue, especially outside urban areas, and is prevalent in informal and family situations. Italian is imposed from above, and is therefore identified with the state authorities. In the first episode of Ballo a tre passi, otherwise shot completely in Sardinian, a locallyborn policeman uses Italian to reprimand a lorry-driver who is on his way to pick up some sand from a restricted military zone.62 In this                                                              59

Ibid., 104 and 188. Ibid., 61 See Olla 2008: 103. Examples are the Campidanese dialect used by some characters in the second episode, the Nuorese spoken by Father Michele and his fellow villagers in the third, and the Cagliari dialect spoken by the protagonist in the film’s fourth episode. 62 In most Sardinian-set films dealing with killings and vendettas, the ever-present Carabinieri are mainlanders. Only in recent years have screenplays put Sardinians in such roles and shown stations manned by locals and outsiders alike – an arrangement reflecting reality but also a sign of the symbolic fusion between the Sardinian and Italian identities. However, the decision to portray a Sardinian Carabiniere using his mother tongue to question local people or in other circumstances while on duty presents a contradictory signal. If the Carabinieri are Sardinian, it is hard to perceive them as complete outsiders, yet their use of Sardinian and the way they communicate with and live in the community reiterate the image of a community reluctant to bow to the alien rules of the Italian state. This state of affairs is depicted clearly in 60

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context the language difference marks the separation between the community and authority, which appears as something hostile. This distance is rendered in visual terms by the policeman’s absence from the screen as he speaks – the camera dwells on a group of children hiding in the lorry who respond to the prohibition with vulgar gestures.63 Their response expresses an attitude of rebellion completely internalised by the community, which means to say that it represents an acquired and shared social behaviour, symbolically reiterating the Sardinians’ propensity to revolt against state power, which is felt to be hostile and inimical. Equally evident in the film is the identification between the Italian language and modernity, while Sardinian is associated with the past, the traditional, the humble and the primitive. Massimo, the barman in the second episode, makes this clear when he says that Italian is the key to communication in today’s world. As a knowledge of languages has been shown to be useful for economic survival and globalisation, his speech is peppered with foreign words, usually mispronounced. In contrast to the barman’s jokes and ramblings is the silence of the shepherd Michele, who keeps quiet when he cannot use Sardinian; only when pressed does he venture to utter a few words in ‘proper Italian’, as Massimo is eager to point out. The fact that Michele speaks no foreign languages and even feels Italian to be alien to his nature seems to confirm the vision of a Sardinian identity left unresolved, consistent with the trope of the Barbagian shepherd cut off from the rest of the world and hostile to whatever comes from it. This interpretation is brought into question, though, when Michele falls in love with a French tourist, breaks his policy of silence and tries to establish some sort of contact with her.64 The relationship between language and cultural identity is also explored in the third part of the film, which features a nun named                                                                                                                                  Arcipelaghi and La destinazione. In the latter film there is an exemplary scene in a Carabiniere station, where an officer is questioning the mother of Cortes, wanted for the murder of a shepherd. Aside from their use of Sardinian, during the exchange there is the clear impression that their words and gestures are part of a behavioural code culturally embedded in the community in which the story is set. 63 About this scene see Urban 2011: 91. 64 Michele also appears in the first and third episodes. Free to express himself in Sardinian with his fellow-villagers, with whom he feels perfectly at ease, in these scenes he shows no sign of the silence in which he is paralysed when he meets Solveig. On the contrary, his behaviour expresses complete adherence to Sardinian tradition, as when he initiates a group of children to the use of weapons.

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Francesca.65 This episode probes the inner torment of a character torn between past and present; her return home is an opportunity to rediscover her roots. Unused to speaking much in a convent where silence predominates, and using Italian for the few words she utters there, she struggles to find a balance between Sardinian and Italian and what each of them represents. Finding herself among wedding guests on the day before the ceremony, in the end Francesca abandons her inhibitions and responds to a question in Sardinian, whereupon her father wryly observes that she has not yet forgotten ‘their’ language. The symbolic value of this exchange is made explicit as the story continues, developing around a series of unmistakable signs of Sardinian identity – the traditional language, dance, and song.66 Their iconic force is strengthened by the context in which they are seen, as the story is played out in two emblematic settings. One is the home: the temple of human life, traditionally closed in upon itself and the symbol of the individual’s private dimension. The other is an open-air location in the country, away from the village, which recalls the traditional cumbessias, the communities where the faithful gathered on festive occasions and engaged in their most intense form of group socialisation.67 The entire episode is punctuated by Sardinian music. Francesca enters her family home to the tune of a song a tenores resounding through the rooms in an atmosphere charged with mystery and religion; then hesitantly accepting an invitation to sing a traditional melody, she takes her first step towards readmission to the life of the community. The process is completed on the day of the wedding, when she joins her relatives and old friends in dancing the ballo tondo, the ritual whereby she is definitively welcomed back into the group and again feels part of it. The decision to make Sardinian the only language in Mereu’s next film, Sonetàula, based on the novel written in Italian by Giuseppe Fiori, was made virtually obligatory, as the director himself stated, by the selection of a non-professional local cast.68 But this should not                                                             

65

See the section National Costume above. The dance referred to in the title is the ballo tondo. Initially the film was supposed to be called E tutti risero, but for copyright reasons the title was changed to Ballo a tre passi, which in the screenplay was the title of the third episode, where the ballo tondo stands as a metaphor for the dance of life. In this regard see http://www.frameonline.it/ArtN18_Mereu.htm, accessed 18th November 2008. 67 Paulis 2006: 212-213. 68 Olla 2008: 195. 66

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obscure its ideological significance. While the topos of the banditridden pastoral land is again the most powerful force in the film’s imagery, the exclusive use of Sardinian is crucial in the depiction of an archaic, violent and terrible place. Acting as a barrier which forces the spectator to follow the subtitles, the language throws up a cultural frontier which separates Sardinia from the audience beyond the Tyrrhenian Sea. In so doing, it perpetuates the trope of an insuperable division between the island and the mainland.69 Conclusion The analysis of the ways in which cinema portrays basic features of Sardinian history and culture (festivities, traditional costume, nuragic civilisation and the language) produces results consistent with what has been observed with regard to the investigation of landscapes and characters. Even taking account of the characteristics and limitations of the medium, aimed at a wide – at least nationwide – audience, and its need to present its content in a recognisable and attractive language, the films here considered make an exploitative use of ethnocultural factors. Frequently their interest is predominantly the spectacular, in which case they confine themselves to snapshots of folklore; at other times their depiction of Sardinian life is part of an attempt to (re)discover cultural roots; in other cases they respond to a need to imitate reality. Aside from their artistic merits, in the first two cases the inclusion of ethnographic elements in the cinematic narrative is based on the conviction that Sardinia embodies a different model of civilisation, one opposite to that inhabited by audiences – it is precisely for this reason that a Sardinian setting depicted around the topos of the primitive and the exotic is considered likely to meet with public approval. Where the decision is made to abandon the trope of the primitive and exotic Sardinia, the path chosen is that of normalisation, bringing the images of the island to a generally recognisable reality universally shared, replicable elsewhere and devoid of ethnic or cultural distinctions. In this case the result is twofold: firstly, there are no more references to folklore, and                                                             

69

The sensation of extraneousness is even more powerful for Italian-speaking islanders who neither speak nor understand Sardinian. Unable fully to identify with the world portrayed in the film, they adopt the viewpoint of those ‘beyond the Tyrrhenian Sea’.

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secondly, the desire to represent reality as it is leads to linguistic mimesis involving the use of languages other than standard Italian, such as Sardinian regional Italian or Sardinian full blown.

 

6. Cases

By way of a conclusion, this chapter presents an analysis of seven films. Attention will focus mostly on the strategies used in cinematic narration to put the Sardinian world on screen and the stereotypes indicated in earlier chapters. The films vary in terms of story, audience (some were made for cinema, others for a television audience), period of production, themes and focus, yet it will be clear that despite such differences they all offer a very specific vision of Sardinia. La grazia (Aldo De Benedetti, 1929) A stranger named Elias Desole arrives in a village in the Sardinian interior to visit the lands he has inherited from an aunt. On his property is a cave which is said to contain a hidden treasure. When he enters the cave, he encounters a shepherd girl who behaves very coldly towards him. Having spent Christmas Eve wandering aimlessly around, in the village he is welcomed into the home of a local family, where he again meets the girl, called Simona. The two fall in love and spend the night together. When Elias leaves he promises to return and marry her, but on his journey he is hit by an avalanche. He regains consciousness in a well-appointed house where he is cared for by an attractive woman, who inveigles him into staying. But he has not forgotten Simona and prays to the Virgin Mary for help. Meanwhile Simona has had a child, and her family decides to exact revenge for the insult suffered. Her brothers seek out Elias and take him to their house. When he discovers that he is a father he begs to see his daughter before dying, and when his plea is refused he pronounces a curse. At the same instant the child, at the top of the stairs, falls dead after a flash of lightning, but when Elias takes her in his arms she comes miraculously to life. The event is interpreted as a sign of divine

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grace. Simona forgives Elias and her father allows them to live as a family.1 Based on Grazia Deledda’s story Di notte,2 the film is a typical example of how Sardinia is usually represented: taking their cue from Deledda’s poetic world, all the principal tropes are there. Before being adapted for the screen, the story inspired a three-act opera for which Antonio Biasi assisted in the writing.3 Modelled loosely on Cavalleria rusticana, the libretto highlighted the distance of the world depicted on stage from the public.4 The opera confirmed the topos of primitivism, which was being promoted at the time by a series of initiatives designed to enhance the standing of the island’s folklore.5 The result was a “conscious operation of setting Sardinian popular culture to music”.6 The film followed suit in depicting Deledda’s vision of an archaic society far removed from European civilisation, and reconstructed it according to the modernist spirit of the time. But, as will become clear, substantial changes were made to the plot, accentuating the features of a primitive representation of Sardinia and its inhabitants. In terms of landscape, La grazia is set in a geographical context similar to the one used in the previous silent films known to us (Cenere and Cainà. L’isola e il continente). In a magnificent desolate mountain setting, Elias surveys the lands he has inherited, calling them “stones and snow”. The film opens with the most important topos of the Sardinian landscape (the mountains, alias the Barbagia as the location symbolising Sardinia), but in actual fact the scene was not shot on the island; the mountains seen are an artificial background, and thus counterfeit.7 The view of the mountain peaks is followed by a scene in a cave, where the shepherd girl has found shelter with her flock. This is a scene whose compositional elements (prickly pear, the cave itself, the sheep) evoke the Southern Italian countryside. As a counterpoint to the topos of the mountainous Sardinian interior is the                                                             

1

On this film see Olla 2008: 129-131. Deledda 1996a: 117-134. 3 Olla 2008: 130. 4 Ibid. 5 Olla 2008: 131. 6 Ibid. 7 The story Di notte is also set in the mountains of the Barbagia, of which mention is made of the “snow-covered hills”, the “steep gorges” (Deledda 1996a: 122) and the “wild solitude of the hills” (ibid., 123). 2

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coast, symbolised by the perpetually sunny seaside village in which Elias was born.8 This place is often mentioned but never seen. As demanded by tradition, the Sardinian interior and the coast are configured as separate, opposite and distant – to Elias the former is cold, stony and inhospitable, the latter warm and sunny. Compared with the original story, which takes place in Simona’s home and where previous events are recounted in flashback, the film presents events and places in chronological order. The audience sees Simona’s village, a set made especially for the film, and a few street views and interiors, all modelled on the traditional image of the South. The tavern to which Elias pays a visit is festooned with baskets, hams and other objects redolent of peasant culture, and the home interiors glimpsed from outside feature the rugs and wallhangings typical of Sardinian handicrafts.9 One of the most important elements of the setting is Simona’s home, which is not simply a contrived reconstruction of a traditional abode, but symbolises the heritage of values and beliefs peculiar to the Sardinian people. This is particularly true of the kitchen, where domestic activities are carried out (cooking the roast, wool spinning and carding, donkey-powered milling) and great show is made of the utensils typical of the island’s culture and traditions: a bag decorated with a lozenge design, a saddlebag, launeddas, wine, a carved stick whose chicken motif is echoed in the wooden (chairs), textile (rugs, wall-hangings, apron) and ceramic decorations. This setting is seen for the first time through Elias’ eyes; as soon as he enters the house, the guest (and the audience) finds himself before a group of traditionally dressed people sitting around a large table. In this rustic space, punctuated by the rhythm of the stones, the pillars and the wooden supports, the camera reveals the unmistakable signs of a rural habitat, the symbol of a archaic world, the opposite of the modern urban one to which the audience belongs. The camera shows the people at the table turning to observe Elias, and in so doing                                                              8

Elias speaks of it in the following terms: “My home and where I grew up are by the sea”, “My village is always sunny. I could never live away from the sea”, “It’s too cold here” (including a metaphorical reference to Simona’s initial coldness towards him). Intertitles: “La mia casa e le mie terre sono in riva al mare”, “Il mio paese è pieno di sole. Non potrei mai vivere lontano dal mare”, “Qui fa troppo freddo”. 9 The mixture of elements from the stock of Southern images and Sardinian stereotypes may be observed in the scene where men playing the launeddas appear in Simona’s home dressed as bagpipers.

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they metaphorically look at the audience; the situation thus created is one in which an ‘us’ seems to stand in symbolic contrast to a ‘you’ (Sardinians and the others, that is to say the audience), after which the camera shot changes completely. The stranger enters the room and the camera dwells on some of the people in it, whose appearance recalls that of Sardinians posing for the photographs accompanying the accounts of European travellers on the island. The paterfamilias wears traditional shepherd garb and is distinguished by his long white beard and severe ‘Biblical’ demeanour; his sons Pietro and Tanu wear the ‘national costume’ as well – the former sports a mastruca, the unequivocal sign of Sardinian pastoral society. Contrasting with the humble, archaic and picturesque appearance of the shepherd girl’s home is the residence of the femme fatale. Elegant, sophisticated and furnished in accordance with the fashion of the 1920s, it does contain elements of Sardinian handicraft decoration, but they are revised in line with the modernist trend (such as the use of overblown and twisted lozenges in the decorative designs).10 It is also diametrically opposed to Simona’s house in a metaphorical sense because it is steeped in seduction and moral corruption. The representation of the antithesis between the primitive and modern worlds – and by extension between the rural and the urban – thus corresponds to the canons:11 the archaic embodied by island culture is associated with the morality and religiousness of the Sardinian people, contrasted with a corrupt and decadent image of modernity. Like the settings, the physical features and behaviour of the characters contribute to establishing the opposition between the two worlds. In Deledda’s story the physical description of Simona’s father and brothers evoked a model of humanity which was simple and hardworking but also proud, barbaric and savage because it was prey to uncontrollable passions: The grandfather and uncles – three tall, sturdy, dark men whose dirty threadbare clothes bespoke a miserable existence of unrelenting toil, whose deep, sullen eyes told a sad story of ignorant souls not

                                                             10 11

Olla 2008: 131. Leerssen 2007a: 280.

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mortified by poverty but seething with grim, ardent and painful passions – had come home and were sitting around the hearth.12

Like the other characters in the film, the men in Simona’s family wear traditional costume and thereby evoke the anthropological model of the shepherd, behaving in a way commensurate with the social conventions of their community. The head of the family, Simona’s father, is an old man – bearded, haughty, severe. Her brothers are shepherds and always have their rifles slung over their shoulders, as required by tradition. Being men of honour, bound by the local code of behaviour, they consider the enactment of a vendetta to be a sacred duty.13 They are the literary embodiment of the Sardinian soldier, a figure celebrated by the publicists of the time for his primitive heroism.14 Equally consistent with stock images of Sardinia is Simona: her appearance recalls the beauty of the Arab features described in Deledda’s original character, but it is particularly her use of traditional costume – one of the most powerful icons of Sardinian exoticism – which creates a kind of collection of the images of island female folklore. The clothing she wears varies somewhat during the story, particularly her headwear, of which the most distinctive type is a dark headscarf arranged so that part of her face is hidden; recalling the costume worn by Bedouin women, it is exactly this variation which made its artistic mark in a number of female portraits by Antonio Biasi.15 The symbolic value of her costume is lent further strength by certain poses adopted by Simona: apart from the style of acting in vogue at the time, her demeanour reflects a model of behaviour                                                              12

Deledda 1996a: 119 (“Il nonno e gli zii – tre uomini alti, robusti, bruni, il cui costume consunto e sporco rivelava una misera esistenza di lavoro continuo e faticoso, i cui occhi cupi e profondi narravano la triste storia di anime ignoranti non avvilite dalla povertà, ma turbinate da passioni tetre, ardenti e dolorose – erano tornati e stavano seduti intorno al focolare”). 13 For Simona’s father and brothers, avenging an insult suffered is a duty set in stone. The original story describes them as they “prepared to kill a man [Elias] with an almost religious concentration, certain that they were performing a duty, convinced that to forgive would be to fail in it, heads held high before that God whose maxims they ignored, who they assumed to be as cruel as them...” (Deledda 1996a: 133). Vendetta is the norm in a primitive, barbaric society. Confirmation is provided by the characters’ physical appearance: Tanu, one of the brothers, has “two rows of bright white teeth – strong, feral, shining in the firelight” (ibid., 121). 14 See chapter 2, section People: The Sardinian Soldier. 15 Chapter 2, section Women.

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codified in Sardinian society,16 one which was also found in the female figures depicted in postcards and photographs of the period.17 Simona is the incarnation of Sardinian women and the traditional values of her people: when she is not tending the sheep she is confined to the privacy of the kitchen, performing the household duties imposed upon her by her social role. Her behaviour makes it clear that she is serious, haughty, proud and respectful of custom.18 When her family discovers her pregnancy she asks her brothers to avenge her, as required by Barbagian tradition. The role of the woman in archaic Sardinian society is identified with the maternal figure, she who devotes her life to her family, conserving its memory and traditions to pass them down to the coming generations. It is a model antithetical to that of the femme fatale, who is interested solely in her own wellbeing and pleasure, living in luxury and lust. The film contains a number of situations not present in the original story which reinforce the traditional image of Sardinian society. Particularly important is the festivity held at the rural sanctuary, a familiar leitmotiv in Sardinian culture and in Deledda’s writings.19 The novena participants are shown dancing in the square of the sanctuary, after which they enter its church, where the faithful throng together in prayer. The various stages of the festivity are depicted according to the literary tradition and provide a representation of popular customs which is consistent with the trope of the atavistic South. Like the story, the film is based on a conception of life dominated by destiny and sin, a life which may be redeemed by divine grace alone – the same vision informing Deledda’s work. It is a conception which underpins the whole story: Elias attributes the                                                             

16

Examples are to be found in the girl’s contemptuous attitude, her habit of holding her hands together below her apron and her lowered gaze. 17 Simona is described by Deledda as “young, beautiful, with that strange Arab beauty found in many Sardinian women”, “with her hands folded on her knees, barefoot and in shirtsleeves – loose Oriental-style sleeves, narrow at the wrists and gathered on her elegant shoulders” (Deledda 1996a: 119) (“giovane, bella, di quella strana bellezza araba che si incontra in molte donne sarde”; “con le mani incrociate sulle ginocchia, scalza e in maniche di camicia, larghe maniche all’orientale, strette sui polsi e increspate sugli omeri eleganti”). Evident here is the appeal to the stereotype of Sardinia as a variation of the mysterious and exotic East. 18 In the original story it is Simona who urges her brothers to avenge her (Deledda 1996a: 121). In the film she conceals her pregnancy, and only when it is discovered by her father does she ask the family to exact revenge. 19 On this scene see chapter 5, section The Festivity as an Icon of Sardinian Identity.

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accident which takes him away from Simona to adverse destiny, and the ‘resurrection’ of the baby girl is interpreted as a sign of divine grace.20 The vendetta stands as one of the most distinctive and attractive themes in the popular image of Sardinia, but in the film it is overdone as a result of significant modifications which are made to the original story and its combination with another characteristic considered peculiar to the Sardinians: their sacred sense of hospitality. Deledda’s story is set many years after the birth of Simona’s child. Elias is not a stranger from afar but “wears the village costume”21 and is already betrothed to Simona, besides being an old friend of her brother Pietro.22 When on a short journey, not long before the day set for the wedding, he suffers an accident caused by bad weather and is taken into the house of a young, well-off unmarried woman living in the Barbagian village of Fonni. She falls in love with him and persuades him to marry her. The femme fatale herself plays no direct part in the story and there is no mention of the modernist style of her house; the story is played out within the traditional Sardinian world and what it stands for. Elias’ ‘betrayal’ is the metaphorical expression of an evil which is intrinsic, rooted in the community and not the result of the wickedness of any outside agent.23 In the film Elias is a stranger to whom Simona’s father opens his doors, welcoming him in the name of the hospitality Sardinians hold sacred, showing the admirable and noble side of the people to which he belongs. Elias betrays the trust placed in him, and his act can be made good only by vendetta. The film thus confirms the dichotomy usually used to construct a discourse on the character of a people, based on apparently irreconcilable features (in this case hospitality and the vendetta); it also presents the image of Sardinia as a closed world, inaccessible and morally inviolate. Besides placing the root of evil within the community, Deledda’s story does not have the film’s happy ending. The child is saved but Elias, though escaping the                                                              20

Elias attempts to justify his failure to return with the following words: “I was happily making my way back when I was struck by a curse” (Intertitle: “Stavo tornando tutto contento quando mi ha colpito la maledizione”). On seeing the miracle Simona’s father exclaims “My children. It is the grace of God!” (Intertitle: “Figli miei. È la grazia di Dio!”). 21 Deledda 1996a: 120. 22 Ibid., 122. 23 Olla 2008: 131.

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vendetta, cannot be reconciled with Simona because he has married the woman he met in Fonni. In overall terms the film is less complex and problematical than the original story and does not try (or if it does, it fails) to render the elements in which the book breaks with tradition. Rather, it relies on the above-mentioned narrative and rhetorical devices to accentuate the stereotyped portrayal of the island and its inhabitants. The end result is a product designed to meet the expectations of an audience fascinated by the idea of the exotic and the primitive. Sequestro di persona (Gianfranco Mingozzi, 1968) Dealing with the subject of banditry, this film was made at a time when Sardinia, and the Barbagia in particular, was put at the centre of national attention by repeated cases of kidnapping.24 The figure of the shepherd-bandit, such an important element in the literary and cinematic image of Sardinia, is presented in a context of cultural and socio-economic transformation, as witnessed not only by the development of the tourist industry but by a change in the dynamics of crime as well, which was no longer attributable simply to the deviant behaviour of shepherds. The portrayal of the island uses stock Sardinian symbols, such as the topos of the primitive, pastoral and bandit-infested land, but alongside them are new images which at first sight seem incompatible with the traditional repertoire. The story opens with the kidnapping of Francesco Marras, son of a well-off Sardinian family, immediately after his arrival on the island in the company of his mainland friend Cristina. The girl wants to report the matter, but the boy’s family tries to obtain his release by paying the ransom without involving the police. Cristina finds herself particularly at odds with Gavino Dorgali, a childhood friend of Francesco’s acting as a trustee for the family, who puts pressure on her to keep her mouth shut. Meanwhile, Francesco’s father has to find the money to pay the ransom, set at 80 million lire. After being persuaded to act as go-between and delivering an advance of 15 million, Cristina is so disgusted by the affair that she decides to report it. The result is a blanket police presence, searches and mass arrests. It is the traditional strategy of repression which the state employs to stamp out banditry, but the large-scale deployment of the forces of law                                                             

24

Se Olla 2008: 154-155.

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and order does nothing to stop the family’s clandestine negotiations with the bandits. Gavino begins to suspect that somebody from outside the pastoral environment is guiding the kidnappers in their choice of targets, and his suspicion focuses on Salvatore Osilo, an accountant. He is buying up the properties that the kidnapped people’s families are forced to sell at ridiculously low prices, concentrating on the acquisition of land on the coast whose value is being pushed up by the interest being shown in it by businessmen in the tourist industry. Mr. Marras is prepared to sell all his properties, including those by the sea, but he wants proof that his son is still alive. The bandits agree to put Francesco in a lorry and drive past Gavino so that he can catch a glimpse of him. Shortly afterwards, the lorry fails to stop at a roadblock and in the resulting shoot-out Francesco is killed, but nobody apart from the kidnappers is aware of his death. Reassured by his glimpse of Francesco, Gavino decides to test his theory by presenting himself as bait for the kidnappers. After having his father’s properties made over to him, to prevent their sale in the event of his kidnapping, he is abducted by the bandits. Once he is in their hideout, he informs their chief, Giovanni Podda, of Osilo’s duplicity: he is using the kidnappers to get hold of property destined for tourist development instead of procuring the pasture sought by the shepherdbandits. After confronting Osilo, Podda understands that Gavino is right and ‘gives’ him the accountant, who in the meantime tries to escape. Shortly afterwards he gets into a car containing Cristina, Francesco’s father and Gavino’s father. Gavino also manages to get in. The car is driven towards a secluded spot where it may be assumed that the vendetta will strike Osilo, considered responsible for Francesco’s death. Realising what is about to happen, Cristina jumps from the car and hopes, in vain, that Gavino will do likewise. The car drives off towards the mountains in the distance. The film’s first shot is of the coast: the Costa Smeralda, an earthly paradise on an island considered mysterious and unknown until a few decades earlier, but by this time one of the favourite haunts of the international jet-set. Sardinia as a holiday playground is thus established as the new topos of an island usually identified with its inland areas (the topos of the Barbagia), but in fact it is nothing more than an updated variation of the trope of a wild and exotic land. Francesco and Cristina arrive from Rome by air. Their youthful, fashionable appearance recalls the 1960s and the economic boom which has produced the concept of leisure time and new forms of

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individual hedonistic freedom, here represented by Francesco’s convertible racing along a winding road in a way similar to the theme of Dino Risi’s Il sorpasso (1961), an archetypal film of that time.25 Before long, however, the coast is left behind and the island reveals its traditional identity as an arid mountainous land. The opening credits finish with a shot of the convertible as it drives towards the mountains along a dusty road in a deserted landscape; the car gives the impression of crossing an invisible border and disappearing in the centre of the screen.26 Landing in Sardinia – a response to the new ephemeral needs created by the consumer society – retains the characteristics of a journey to the edge of the civilised world. Speed is pointless in a context seemingly immobile and unchangeable, represented by an unspoilt, harsh and mysterious habitat. As the car proceeds between imposing outcrops of rocks, shot from close up, the background music stops. The view of the landscape, over which an expectant silence now hangs, evokes contrasting feelings: wonder is mixed with a sense of impending danger, which suddenly materialises when the car runs into a flock of sheep. Speed, one of the icons of the motorised society, is literally halted by one of the most important iconic signs of the Sardinian world. As far as Cristina is concerned, a sheep killed by accident is simply an asset whose loss can be paid for, but Francesco, aware of the cultural context in which he finds himself, perceives that the incident was no accident – it bears the unmistakable signs of a trap. He looks around him in search of a human presence to confirm his fears: the voice which shouts his name and gives him orders has no face, it is identified with the rocks, the stones and the Mediterranean scrub which surrounds him. It is the topos of the bandit-ridden pastoral Sardinia, mysterious and unfathomable, revealing itself to the spectator in all its ancient fascination. The story is played out in places loaded with symbolic significance, in which the dichotomy between ancient and modern, respectively expressed in the topos of the mountains (alias the agricultural and pastoral world) and the coast (alias the modern world) is territorialised. The pastures and other locations forming the habitat                                                             

25 Olla 2008: 155. A sense of carefree liberty is expressed in the same scene by Cristina, when she stretches out her hand holding a headscarf which flies in the wind. 26 This is a familiar setting. Among previous instances, an exemplary case is the opening scene in Proibito, which shows a coach driving along a dusty road through a mysterious rocky landscape towards the mountains in the background.

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of the shepherds and bandits coincide with the traditional image of Sardinia, that of the code of honour and the vendetta; at the opposite extreme is the Costa Smeralda which plays host to Cristina and her friends – an outpost of the new cultural colonisation typified by the rituals of amusement enacted by a bored mainland bourgeoisie dancing to contemporary pop music.27 Then there are the villages which are home to the landowning class: owners of the pastures rented out at exorbitant rates to the shepherds but also of coastal properties which are becoming the object of speculation with the expansion of the tourist industry. In the villages we see the centres of power (the bank, the ‘reading club’ frequented by the local elite) and above all the interiors of the landowners’ houses (of the Marras, Dorgali and Osilo families) – closed private spaces where the affluence of everyday life, built on the exploitation of landless shepherds, is kept from prying eyes. The adoption of an urban lifestyle, however, does not imply the abandonment of the indigenous cultural model; the traditional value system continues to drive the actions of men suspended between archaic models (the code of honour and the vendetta) and modern ones (speculation, capitalism and the profit motive).28 The film thus produces a disturbing new geo-symbolic map of Sardinia; questioning the primacy of the topos of the Barbagia, it replaces the interior-coast dichotomy with a conception in which ancient and modern are no longer distinct and distant realities but coexist and cooperate synergetically until they are fused into an indivisible whole. This vision constitutes a break with the literary tradition in which the ancient pastoral Sardinia represented the virtuous alter ego of a civilised but deeply corrupt and decadent                                                             

27

It is interesting to note that the music accompanying the opening credits and the protagonists’ arrival on the island up to the moment before the abduction is the same as that playing in the hotel where Cristina is dancing with her friends. These two scenes are assimilable because they belong culturally to the modern (mainland) world and are alien to Sardinia. Like the journey from the mainland, the hotel on the Costa Smeralda is a symbol of the economic boom, of a consumer society far removed from the rhythms and ethics of island life. 28 Such as the opportunity given to the scions of this class to attend university on the mainland. Familiarity with continental Italy (the fathers of Gavino and Francesco both try to conceal their sons’ abduction by saying that they are in Rome) confirms the adoption of a modern lifestyle and thus constitutes a negation of the principle of the cultural distance between the island and the mainland and the preconception of the closed character of Sardinian society.

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Europe, or a mythical place in which humankind had managed to remain wild but pure. Another factor accentuating the contrast between the island and the elsewhere is the juxtaposition of two antithetical viewpoints – the Sardinian one and the continental (Italian, European, modern) one – producing a contrast between what may be termed an inside view and an outside view. Cristina is the personification of the continental mentality, extraneous to the island’s culture; unlike Francesco, she fails to realise immediately that they have fallen into the bandits’ trap and refuses to accept the silence which the Marras family tries to force on her because she considers it a form of complicity. From the traditional viewpoint the Barbagian code of behaviour is the result of the mistrust produced by centuries of foreign domination and the feeling of hostility towards the current foreign power hiding behind the concept of Italian ‘justice’. It is predicated on a vocation for unflagging resistance to everything which is perceived as foreign and imposed from outside. This is the viewpoint represented by Gavino, with whom Cristina enters into a conflicting relationship, confirming the cultural gulf between them. This is apparent in their first exchange: Gavino: “Is this your first time in Sardinia?” Cristina: “What does it matter? The first or the tenth... I’ve seen all I need to see and I don’t understand you people.” Gavino: “Are you fond of Francesco?” Cristina: “Are you?” Gavino: “We grew up together.” Cristina: “He’s a friend of mine at university.” Gavino: “Do you want to see him again or not?” Cristina: “You and your questions! Do you realise you’re all playing the bandits’ game? This mentality of yours, you’re all the same! The one who took Francesco, I’ll never forget his face.” Gavino: “But if you report it you’ll be signing his death warrant.” Cristina: “So what do you think I should do?” Gavino: “That’s why I’m here.”29

                                                             29

Gavino: “È la prima volta che viene in Sardegna?” Cristina: “Che importa? La prima o la decima... ne so quanto basta e non riesco a capirvi.” Gavino: “Vuole bene a Francesco?” Cristina: “E Lei?” Gavino: “Siamo cresciuti insieme.”

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Gavino expresses his adherence to the Barbagian spirit right to the very end. He can see no way out of the island’s woes and in his view the shepherd-bandit represents the stereotype of the Sardinian resistance fighter. He defends, or at least explains, banditry in terms of the poverty to which the shepherds have always been subjected. His identification with the indigenous culture is total – he knows he must have his revenge because he is a man of honour, and he asserts his intention to adhere to the Barbagian code: Cristina: “Let’s get out of here. Please, let’s go.” Gavino: “It’s easy to say let’s get out of here. Here everything’s a closed circle. Violence calls for violence – yesterday, today, forever.” Cristina: “Why don’t you fight it?” Gavino: “The shepherd fights, the bandit fights. I am Gavino Dorgali, son of Santo who is son of Renzo. They paid for these lands with their blood and I’m duty-bound to defend them.” Cristina: “That’s all very well for your father, but you’re young.” Gavino: “Maybe you’re right. But first I’ve got a score to settle.”30

The same contrast in viewpoints arises when the two talk about rustling. A shepherd has been stopped by the police because he is in possession of some sheep of which he has no written proof of ownership. In Cristina’s view the sheep must be stolen, but Gavino sees it as a form of compensation – when a shepherd loses some of his livestock, he takes animals from another shepherd to make good some of his losses. This interpretation is consistent with the Barbagian                                                                                                                                  Cristina: È un mio compagno d’università.” Gavino: “Ma vuole rivederlo o no?” Cristina: “Bah! Che domande! Vi rendete conto che siete voi a fare il gioco dei banditi? Questa vostra mentalità e ragionate tutti nello stesso modo! La faccia di quello che ha preso Francesco non la dimenticherò.” Gavino: “Ma se lo denuncia lo condannerà a morte.” Cristina: “Insomma, secondo voi che cosa dovrei fare?” Gavino: “Sono venuto per questo.” 30 Cristina: “Andiamocene via di qui. Andiamo via, ti prego.” Gavino: “È facile dire andiamo via di qui. Qui tutto è chiuso in un cerchio. La violenza chiama violenza, ieri, oggi, sempre.” Cristina: “Perché non ti ribelli?” Gavino: “Il pastore si ribella, il bandito si ribella. Io sono Gavino Dorgali, figlio di Santo che è figlio di Renzo. Queste terre le pagarono col sangue e io ho il dovere di difenderle.” Cristina: “Questo può essere vero per tuo padre, ma tu sei giovane.” Gavino: “Forse hai ragione. Però prima ho un conto da regolare.”

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mentality as described by Pigliaru and Fiori, but remains unjustifiable in the eyes of a mainlander, for whom taking other people’s property is not an act of courage (balentìa), but theft pure and simple, as laid down by Italian law.31 Equally incomprehensible to Cristina is the policy of silence (omertà), even though it is accepted and shared by the community; as she explains to Gavino (“Bandits! That’s what you are, a bandit like them! You’re all bandits!”) Cristina represents the official view of the Italian government, which chooses police repression as a strategy for combating banditry, and she accuses the Sardinian people of conniving with criminals. This was a stance which came in for fierce criticism on the island in the 1950s and ‘60s, as exemplified in particular by Antonio Pigliaru. In his judgement, by taking the form of a repressive force the presence of the state was actually manifested as an absence, an inability to bring justice, democracy and real progress to the Barbagian community.32 This insider’s view is articulated by Mr. Marras when he is summoned by the police to tell them what he knows about his son’s kidnapping. Refusing to cooperate, he is disdainful of Italian justice and is accused by his interrogator of complicity. Mr. Marras: “You won’t get anywhere with these methods. When are you going to understand that?” Captain: “But if you continue in your refusal to cooperate, you can’t complain when things don’t change, can you? Or don’t you want them to?” Mr. Marras: “Let me save Francesco and then you can do what you like. Or do you know another way to make sure my son will be safe?”33 

  The above dialogues reflect the contrasting views that had characterised the entire politico-cultural debate on banditry since Italian unification and which returned dramatically to centre stage at                                                             

31

Fiori 2001; Pigliaru 2000. See chapter 2. 33 Sig. Marras: “Con questi metodi voi non otterrete niente. Quando lo capirete?” Capitano: “Ma se voi continuate a rifiutarvi di collaborare, poi non vi dovete lamentare che le cose non cambiano, chiaro? O non volete che cambino?” Sig. Marras: “Fatemi salvare Francesco e poi scatenatevi pure. O Lei conosce un altro modo per garantirmi la vita di mio figlio?”. The same mistrust of Italian justice is expressed in other films; one example is Arcipelaghi. 32

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the time of the film’s release, when news of kidnappings bulked large in the mass media. The novelty provided by the film is the idea that the traditional positions adopted on the question of banditry (from both viewpoints, inside and outside) were both blinkered. The story delineates a new type of ‘criminal emergency’ which cannot be explained away by reference to the classical banditry of the romantic tradition, in which the shepherd-bandit is the victim of an unjust world and his needy condition. It is the product of new economic forces and directly involves the Sardinians who have adapted to the mainland lifestyle. The conceptual heart of the film is the idea that there exists a criminal organisation composed of perfectly respectable men who exploit the labour of shepherd-bandits for the exclusive purpose of making money for themselves. It becomes harder to accept the stereotype of a closed, immobile and timeless Sardinia when the suspicion grows that not everything that is rotten comes from outside by definition but is to be sought within the island itself. This analysis clearly emerges when Gavino speaks to his father: Gavino: “Have you noticed that it used to be just a question of sheep and pastures?” Father: “What do you mean?” Gavino: “Now everything’s changing. What have shepherds got to do with properties on the coast? I mean there must be someone directing the bandits, someone watching, judging events and people, and when the time is right he’s the one who decides where to strike.” Father: “Even if that’s true, what can we do? Stand up to them?” Gavino: “It’s easier to catch a hyena by using cunning.”

During this exchange, the pictures propound an image of a two-faced Sardinia in which the pastoral topos and that of modernity – embodied by property and tourist speculation on the Costa Smeralda – are in synergy. We see a group of shepherds enjoying a traditional lunch: a spit-roast, a cork chopping board, wine – and in the background an old song in Sardinian. The faces shot in close-up arouse the same troubling question: are they just simple shepherds or are they bandits as well? The question seems to be a legitimate one, since shepherds “can become bandits overnight, almost without realising it” (Banditi a Orgosolo, opening scene, voice over).34 Having observed the world of the shepherds the camera turns its gaze towards the coast, where                                                             

34

See chapter 4.

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bulldozers are working on building sites for new hotel complexes and seaside villas. It is the prelude to a new affluence – unfamiliar, quick and easy – but one which will bring no benefit to the shepherds; they will be exploited as the pawns of a modern, seemingly respectable, criminal organisation. Though it is true that Gavino and Cristina embody the contrasting viewpoints of the inside and the outside, as the story unfolds the girl does develop some doubts. When she is summoned to identify the kidnappers and sees Gavino among the men arrested, she realises that the policy adopted by the state will not be able to save Francesco. So she decides to keep silent and not help the police. But although she tries to understand Gavino’s point of view (making the Sardinian perspective her own), she cannot fully accept the rules of the Barbagian code. When at the end of the film, before the vendetta against Osilo is carried out, she shouts “I want to get out”, she expresses her absolute and final rejection of the vendetta, which she sees as the relic of an outdated system of customs with no possible justification in the present.35 By the same token, Gavino’s refusal to relinquish the past and his decision to act as prescribed by local custom confirm the viewpoint of those who think that Sardinians are unable to progress towards civilised co-existence. The attempt to reconcile the inside and outside viewpoints is thus revealed to be temporary and fragile. The cinematic depiction of the bandits is also delicately poised between the two viewpoints. The presence of outlaws is made clear from the outset in the abduction scene. Shortly afterwards a car is seen carrying some well-dressed men who are understood to belong to the gang of kidnappers, though it is never stated explicitly. Also decently dressed, and thus perfectly camouflaged in the ‘normal’ world, is the man who picks up the bag containing the advance on the ransom. Later the bandits take on outlaws’ faces when they appear on the wanted signs put up in the streets specifying the prices on their heads. One of them shows a photograph of Giovanni Podda, the gang leader who Gavino meets after he is kidnapped. The location of the bandits’ hideout takes the action into a pastoral mountain setting, where the scene opens with a shot of an armed shepherd and a flock of sheep –                                                              35

She makes this clear in a dialogue with Gavino, when she implies that times have changed and what was all right for the older generations need not remain so for ever. See above.

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the classical image of Sardinian banditry. Giovanni Podda emerges from the sheepfold-cum-hideout wearing a sort of hooded cloak that shepherds use to keep out the cold and the rain when they graze their flocks in the mountains. Mingozzi tried to remain true to reality by casting Sardinians in the shepherd and bandit roles and making their clothes credible for the period.36 The actor playing Podda is one of those. His appearance is consistent with the pastoral life lived in the late 1960s; his clothes, his headgear, his unkempt beard, his weapons, his violent behaviour and the filth and squalor of the hideout confirm the primitive nature of the outlaw’s life. He is convinced that he enjoys the support of the shepherds and the local community, that he is thought of as a hero, a rebel against exploitation by the landowners. His ethics are those of the Barbagian man, the balente (worthy man) who is aware of the tragedy of his condition but is prepared to face his problems a fronte parada, head held high.37 But his collaboration with Osilo, the linchpin of the kidnapping enterprise, renders hollow the myth of the romantic shepherd-bandit, and the kidnappings cannot be interpreted as a revolt of the shepherds against, or as their compensation for, the exploitation they suffer at the hands of the landowners. To conclude, opposed and irreconcilable preconceptions are set face-to-face in this film and some stereotypes are called into question, but there is not a total rejection of the classical stock of Sardinian clichés. Its depiction of banditry breaks with the traditional topos of the tragic and romantic bandit hero, showing criminal activity driven by the profit motive in an advanced capitalist economy.38 Giovanni Podda is the shepherd-bandit who sees himself as a Robin Hood in the struggle against the ‘masters’, but in fact he is nothing but a pawn in their hands. The end of the film confirms the disturbing co-existence of primitivism and modernity on the island, but the vision of a Sardinia on the cusp between the past (archaic and uncivilised) and the present (modern and civilised) is simply another possible interpretation of the topos of the primitive Sardinia. The film’s final images close the circle which was opened with the scene described above: entering Sardinian territory, Francesco’s car symbolically crosses the border into an unknown world (savage and uncivilised)                                                              36

Olla 2008: 154-155. Pigliaru 2000: 218. 38 See Olla 2008: 60-61. 37

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and enters a territory redolent of the Wild West, where the bandits’ ambush is waiting. The scene has its counterpoint in the ending, which evokes the enactment of the vendetta, the restoration of ‘justice’ in accordance with Barbagian custom: the car containing Gavino, his father, Mr. Marras and Osilo drives into an arid scrubland with the mountains looming in the background. The camera shows the rear view of the car driving away towards the focus of the shot, as in the opening scene. We have reached the (foreseeable) end of the journey which began on the mainland and concludes at the edge of civilisation, in the ‘true’ Sardinia: the topos of the mountainous and bandit-ridden Barbagia as the symbol of a land still primitive and wild continues, despite everything, to serve its function as the undisputed icon of the island. Scarabea (Hans Jürgen Syberberg, 1969) This film is based on Tolstoy’s short story How Much Land Does a Man Need? (1886).39 The decision to set it in Sardinia is justified by the fact that the protagonist attempts to get his hands on pieces of land for tourist development in a place where it is usually said that there is no such thing as private property and that land belongs to whoever is able to appropriate it by whatever means.40 It tells the story of Gottfried Wilhelm Bach, a middle-aged German who has fetched up in Sardinia with his vintage car. First he falls victim to a fake kidnapping, engineered by an attractive female photographer to whom he gives a lift. Then, having been taken in by the people in a village, he accepts the challenge offered by an old man who lives there: all the land he can cover on foot in a day will be his if he returns before sunset. If he fails to return he will forfeit what money he has and his car. At dawn the next day he sets out on his hike, taking photographs of the places he explores, and arrives at a beach. Land on the coast seems the most attractive, because he will be able to develop it to create a “Costa Bach” to outshine the Costa Smeralda. Awaiting him he finds the photographer, who has prepared a mouth-watering banquet. After gorging himself, however, he eschews the attractions of the photographer and decides to continue his walk so as to increase the land he will receive. As he proceeds on his laborious tour of an                                                             

39 40

Olla 2008: 157. Ibid.

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unspoilt natural environment, the local population is being used for the shooting of a documentary film, showing traditional dances, music and games as well as the rituals of archaic life such as the slaughter of a sheep and a pig. A specially organised festivity in the village of Orgosolo is watched by tourists, gaping in wonder at the island folklore. The director is disgruntled and thinks of abandoning the documentary for something different, but the only thing that comes to mind is a bandit film, for which he resorts to the local inhabitants. Bach finally returns from his walk, wins the bet and collapses to the ground. The director wants to film his return and gives orders for the scene to be re-enacted, but Bach has passed away, so all the director can do is stop filming. The journey in Sardinia visually re-created in this film takes its cue from the classical idea of the wild and beautiful island common to all the narratives of European travellers, including those written in the 20th century.41 But unlike the literary model, from the outset Syberberg’s film lays bare the lie hiding behind that myth.42 The first scenes appear to trot out the trope of the wild, mysterious land: the protagonist drives along a dusty track immersed in a desolate landscape, with the shape of a nuraghe standing out in the distance. Dotted around him in this fascinating landscape he observes cork trees, sheep and donkeys. Bach turns off the tape player in his car when the voice on it says “Come to Sardinia! The land of nuraghi and bandits”. But immediately afterwards he is the victim of a fake kidnapping attempt and the sight of a camera team confirms the impression that a film is being made. Speaking to the local people, Bach reiterates his admiration for the island, but he admires all its natural beauty through the prism of his thirst for success and money – his ambition is to build there the tourist empire he was unable to establish in Germany. Bach’s hike thus stands as the metaphor for a full-blown reconnaissance with a view to the conquest of Sardinia, no different to what was done in the past by colonisers and in recent decades by entrepreneurs in the tourist industry. This explains the juxtaposition of the two most important geographical topoi of the Sardinian landscape: on the one hand the mountains, the realm of shepherds and bandits, and on the other the coast, the icon of tourist Sardinia – the setting is the east coast, rock cliffs fall vertically into                                                              41 42

See chapter 2, section Sardinia in European Literature after 1900. Olla 2008: 157.

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the sea and provide coves and inlets of breathtaking beauty. The film features the island’s symbolic places: the villages of Orgosolo and Oliena – of which the former achieved international renown in Vittorio De Seta’s film – with the Supramonte, the symbol of bandit country, and in contrast to them are the coastal town of Dorgali and the beaches of Cala Luna and Cala Sisine.43 Bach’s walk reveals to the spectator the pure limestone of the rocks, the fine sand on the beaches, the solitude typical of a mysterious landscape awaiting discovery: Sardinia is revealed to the camera as the unrivalled domain of a primordial and unspoilt nature. And such beauty goes hand-in-hand with the setting of an archaic world steeped in tradition. The narrative is strewn with acts and situations redolent of agricultural and pastoral culture: the making of crisp carasau bread, the Sardinian roast banquet, the omni-present donkey, maggoty cheese, the ritual of mother’s milk.44 An exemplary portrayal of this folklore is the slaughtering of the sheep and the pig, in which the animals slowly bleed to death and are then flayed and disembowelled.45 The killing of the pig is made all the more harrowing by the screams it emits in its death agony. Such a sequence, which could easily have come from an ethnographic documentary, is highly unusual in narrative cinema, which has always preferred to show the nicer, more reassuring, features of traditional life such as its dances and costumes.46 It is easy to imagine the disgust felt by the continental cinema-goer (Italian and European) before such a spectacle: rather like the photographer woman – intent on capturing characteristic Sardinian scenes, she runs off in horror at the sight. The film also presents another powerful topos of the traditional world: the country festivity. Generally bound to a religious celebration and poetically re-evoked many times by Deledda, the festivity is held to be one of the most significant ways of asserting Sardinian identity. By contrast, in Scarabea it is laid on especially for the benefit of the                                                             

43 Cala Luna was used as the location for some scenes in the most famous film to be set in ‘holidaymakers’ Sardinia’: Lina Wertmuller’s Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare di agosto (1975); Olla 2008: 168-169. 44 Sardinian tradition has it that milk coming from a mother’s breast can restore vigour to a faltering man. This piece of folklore was presented for the first time on the big screen in Una questione d’onore (1966) and appeared later in Scarabea (1969) (Olla 2008: 157). 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid.

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tourists – a piece of play-acting designed to meet the needs of the tourist industry. As required by tradition, the event comprises the typical shepherd’s lunch: roast meat, wine and cheese. This ‘primitive’ menu is much appreciated by the sophisticated visitors, one of whom exclaims, “What a day! I wish it could go on forever!” But the true face of tourism is revealed in the scene which Bach lets himself go at the banquet on the beach. At a table laden with a veritable cornucopia, the German entrepreneur stuffs himself without pause in an unedifying exhibition of unrestrained gluttony, metaphorically representing the rapacity and the contradictions hiding behind the tourism produced by advanced capitalism: the setting is an idyllic unspoilt beach, but on it are displayed a range of objects typical of late 1960s fashion (inflatable rubber armchairs, spectacle frames). Bach writes “Costa Bach” in the sand in anticipation of his conquest, but the act is immediately undermined as his words are erased by the incoming waves. What attracts in this film is the strange mixture of characteristic features of Sardinian life and an almost surreal atmosphere. In stylistic terms it has clear references to the Western. Elements of the American genre were not new to Italian cinema, as witnessed by the syncretism attempted in films set in the Italian South in the 1940s and ‘50s.47 Their inclusion was explained by the identification of the South (and by extension Sardinia) with the Wild West, a land to be civilised, but in Syberberg’s film references to the American epic serve a different purpose. The photographer is played by Nicoletta Machiavelli, the young actress who starred in the spaghetti Western Giarrettiera colt – in Scarabea she gently sends herself up as a ‘pistolera’.48 At the beginning of the film she holds the gun Bach has with him – for safety, he says, since his travelling in bandit country – and towards the end she shoots at the picture of the homo universalis, who begins to bleed. This stands as a metaphor for the decadence implicit in modernity, a condition further evoked by an image of maggots busying themselves on the remains of the butchered animals.49 Western-type references are thus used as a way of negating, rather than contributing to, the icon of Sardinia as the Wild West. This is clear in the film’s closing scene, when the director, unhappy with the                                                             

47

See Olla 2008: 51-52, and chapter 3, section Exoticism and Wilderness. Olla 2008: 157. 49 Ibid. 48

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documentary he was shooting (the part we see is the dance in traditional costume, accompanied by his comment “What a spectacle, never seen anything like it! Sardinia dancing and laughing”), decides to make a film about bandits. But since he is unable to find any real Carabinieri or bandits prepared to take part in it, he asks the locals to dress up and act as extras. The consequence is a parody of a chase in which everything is bogus and absurd, such as the photographer, who has decided to dress up as a cowgirl complete with a mastruca (!), a military cap and a rifle. The background music is typical of a spaghetti Western soundtrack. The only comment the director makes on the whole wretched scene is “Sardinian bandits...”. The inclusion of Western features in this film is only one of a series of devices used by Syberberg to explode the myth of an island which is the antithesis of modernity. By the end the spectator has no choice but to conclude that every narrative on Sardinia is essentially a fiction; the primitive, wild, bandit-infested land does not exist, or as Gianni Olla put it “Perhaps the hidden message is that Orgosolo (the symbol of Sardinia as a whole), rather than being inaccessible and incomprehensible, is just a grand theatre of colour and folklore where there is nothing left to discover”.50 Syberberg made this brutally clear in his parody of the stock of images that had underpinned every Sardinian narrative for centuries. Il disertore (Giuliana Berlinguer, 1983) Based on Giuseppe Dessì’s novel of the same name, published in 1961, this film was produced as a television drama by RAI in 1983.51 It is set in the imaginary village of Cuadu (‘hidden’ in Sardinian, ‘secret’ in the context of the novel) in the years following the First World War. The story centres on Mariangela Ecca, a woman completely unable to come to terms with the loss of her two sons in the war. To her their death is senseless, unfair and irreparable, despite the best efforts of the priest Father Coi to bring her round to some form of acceptance. Some years after the war a memorial to the fallen is inaugurated in the village, and the names on it include those of Mariangela’s sons. She has donated all her meagre savings to help pay for the memorial. In actual fact one of those sons, Saverio, deserted                                                             

50 51

Ibid. On this film see Olla 2008: 358. Marci 2006: 256.

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after killing his captain in an instinctive reaction to being literally whipped into action during an attack. He managed to find his way back to Sardinia and hide out in a sheepfold in the hills; his mother and Father Coi kept the secret of his return, taking care of him until his death five days later. Although wartime deserters have since been rehabilitated, Mariangela and Father Coi decided not to remove Salverio’s body from the sheepfold in which they secretly buried it. Mariangela’s personal story is set against the background of growing political tension in Cuadu caused by friction between the traditional ruling class, known as the prinzipales, the new forces thrown up by the war – veterans’ organisations and the combat squads of the nascent Fascist movement – and the workers’ movement. Having initially espoused the separatist cause, Commendator Comina, the most authoritative figure among the local prinzipales, decided to support the idea of the war memorial put forward by impoverished aristocrat Roberto Manca, a decorated veteran, hero of the Free State of Fiume and leader of the veterans’ movement and the local Fascist unit. Comina’s decision was made in order to counter the threat represented by the political ascent of the workers’ movement. Il disertore has been subjected to a psychoanalytical study by Nereide Rudas, who defined it a “novel of secrets”.52 To put it briefly, she argues that it expresses the feeling of solitude and loss internalised by Sardinians as a response to the perpetual political subjection and unfreedom they have suffered throughout their long history.53 Rudas’ theory is that Sardinian writers have reproduced this collective psychological condition in their work, placing Sardinia at the centre of the narrative so that it is not just a background but the fulcrum of the story.54 Indeed, in the process of artistic creation it is the place par excellence, and as such is identified with the mother figure.55 Dessì’s novel fits this interpretation; provoked by his rejection of the war and symbolically of the value system identifiable with mother Italy, Saverio’s desertion enables him to return home, to his own land and his real mother (Sardinia), and is thus configured as a return to his roots.56 More recently literary critic Sandro Maxia has reviewed Rudas’ conclusions; in his introduction to the Ilisso edition of Il                                                              52

Rudas 2004: 251. Ibid., 261. 54 Ibid., 52; 256-257. 55 Ibid., 52-53; 256-257. 56 Ibid., 256-257. 53

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disertore he mentions Dessì’s interest in Freud’s work, specifically citing his essay Mourning and Melancholia (1917) and its analysis of reactions to bereavement, a central theme of the novel.57 Maxia also observes that the book accurately reflects its author’s conception of a Sardinia outside time and history, despite the fact that the village of Cuadu is caught up in the events overtaking Italy at the time.58 The elements in Il disertore thus identified by the critics are worth discussing in the analysis of the film version, which was dismissed as “smacking too much of television, of a neat and clean television drama”.59 Although the director stated she had been drawn to Dessì’s novel by its anti-militaristic message, the film is distinguished in its fidelity to the book above all by a portrayal of Sardinia in keeping with the repertoire of tropes discussed in chapters above. The cinematic Sardinia shown in Il disertore reveals the familiar features of a bare landscape, a primitive world corresponding to the geographical and anthropological topos of the South. Although the story is set in south-west Sardinia, where Dessì spent his childhood, the environment is reminiscent of the Barbagia described by Deledda – mountainous terrains typical of the interior, and not a trace of the sea or coastal areas – and adds up to a vision of the island’s geography consistent with the cinematic tradition. After a few introductory shots showing preparations under way for the inaugural ceremony for the war memorial and Mariangela going about her daily chores, the opening credits run against a background of the mountains, with their rocks and wild vegetation, exactly as cinema has depicted the island ever since Cenere (Mari 1916). The landscape is overexposed – it is strenuously exploited by the film narrative for its expressive beauty and thus performs a symbolic and evocative function.60 This is seen in the abundant shots of harsh and desolate terrain, rugged rocks, dusty tracks, dry-stone walls, trees growing bent by the force of the north wind, the prevalence of beige and brown alternating with the green and grey of the scrub: all these features strengthen the rural, mountainous, solitary and melancholy physiognomy of the island habitat.                                                              57

Maxia 2004: 23. Ibid. 59 Olla 2008: 358. 60 Ibid. 58

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As in the novel, the story is played out in two contrasting physical settings loaded with symbolic significance.61 One is the hills, where Saverio has his sheepfold and Mariangela goes to collect firewood, symbolising the traditional, archaic Sardinia. The other is the village of Cuadu, of which we are shown a few glimpses, the reading club frequented by the local gentry and above all the square – the physical and symbolic arena of social stride. The two are at once antithetical and complementary, in that they express the opposition between ancient and modern and evoke other contrasting pairs such as the rustic and urban worlds, as well as the dichotomy between nature and culture. The winds of change being felt in Cuadu may be seen as a break with the topos of Sardinian immobilism, as Dessì saw them, but their force is reduced, impeded by the overwhelming condition of isolation. This view is reproduced in the film: the events plunging Italy into turmoil in the aftermath of the Great War – the workers’ protest movement and the rise of Fascism – are set in a Sardinia still archaic, ruled by ancient customs and pervaded by a collective feeling of extraneousness to whatever happens beyond its shores. The film thus expresses the concept of timelessness that Dessì was wont to call “still time”.62 Aside from the events which brought Sardinia closer into the Italian orbit, Saverio’s story unmistakably symbolises the islanders’ anthropological and ideological separateness from mainland Italy. The instinctive act of rebellion which drives a soldier to shoot an officer and then desert reflects the principle of a spontaneous but deeply intimate revolt against power, against a state which orders its citizens to kill or be killed with no clear reason for doing so.63 Saverio did not choose to go to war - he never wanted to; upon him, a shepherd and a free man, the Italian state imposed something alien to his consciousness, something incomprehensible and unbearable, something which it was right to reject. The greatest wish of the shepherd-soldier is to return to the life he always had, to graze his sheep in the hills around Cuadu and go hunting in what spare time he has. But that’s not all. The identification of the condition of the deserter with that of the bandit, made explicit in the novel and in the film, take shape in Saverio in the form of feelings which cannot be                                                             

61

See Maxia 2004: 29. See chapter 2, note 138. 63 On this aspect see also the analysis made by Maxia 2004: 17-19. 62

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reduced simply to the act of desertion as a reaction to the inhumanity of commanding officers during the First World War.64 The identification of desertion with banditry, in other words, takes on a highly specific meaning in the cultural context to which Saverio belongs. Flight makes the shepherd-soldier a criminal in the eyes of the Italian army, but to Sardinians desertion and hiding is the legitimate and socially accepted response of he who is forced by an adverse destiny to become a fugitive and an outlaw in order to remain a free man. Beyond the novel’s (and the film’s) intrinsic pacifist message, desertion is not the result of weakness or cowardice, but it expresses a form of struggle in defence of a right denied; it symbolises the attempt of the Sardinian people to claim their freedom.65 In this light being a deserter means being a Sardinian resister, a bandit in the noblest sense of the word. This interpretation is borne out by a number of elements present in the novel and reproduced in the film, starting with the people’s reaction to the plan for the memorial – in Father Coi’s words, rather than commemorating the dead, it is a celebration of war.66 The depiction of the collection of funds for the monument confirms the dichotomy of an ‘us’ (traditional Sardinia) opposed to a ‘you’ (modern Sardinia). Schoolteachers and the daughters of respectable families have been recruited to go from house to house to collect money, but                                                              64

Ibid. Thinking of the circumstances in which Saverio has returned home, Mariangela realises that he is “a deserter […], a bandit, a man who will be shot at by the first Carabiniere to lay eyes on him” (Dessì 2004: 83). In the film Saverio himself, seeing his mother in the sheepfold, asks her not to light the fire because he is a deserter, a bandit. 65 The director has gone on record as saying that the film is essentially about opposition to violence and war without real temporal or geographical limits, so the timeless Sardinian setting was the ideal location for sending a universal message (Olla 2008: 358). But such a setting and the direction of the film confirm the importance of the landscape – rather than acting simply as a background, it entails a reinterpretation of the film in symbolic terms. 66 In a monologue featured in the film, Father Coi says: “Mariangela said to me, ‘It’s only right that all the dead should have their names written as a reminder’. Was it really right to let Saverio’s name be written? Rather than honouring the dead that memorial celebrated war, but Saverio had the courage to reject the war, making himself a deserter and a bandit.” (“Mariangela mi aveva detto: ‘È giusto tutti i morti devono avere il nome scritto per ricordo’. Era stato giusto davvero permettere che il nome di Saverio fosse esposto? Più che onorare i caduti quel monumento celebrava la guerra, ma Saverio aveva avuto il coraggio di rifiutare la guerra, facendosi disertore e bandito.”; my italics).

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they are not exactly welcomed with open arms – the housewives are busy with their domestic labours (sifting flour, making bread, weaving at the loom and so on) and are put out by the idea of such an expensive and pointless project. The village womenfolk are clearly divided by their physiognomy, their dress, their work and their language: the poorer ones are the symbol of the society described in a great many books as Biblical and Homeric, while the young ladies and schoolmistresses belong to Cuadu’s more evolved (Italianised) echelons, which have embraced new lifestyles and distanced themselves from traditional customs – the part of the village which feels closer to the mainland than to its agricultural and pastoral roots.67 The split between the ancient and the modern is therefore found not only in the physical and symbolic contrast between the mountains and the village, it is reflected in the fragmentation within the village. The same divergence of views is apparent at the inauguration of the war memorial. The villagers dance, sing and enjoy themselves, manifesting a collective need to forget the dead rather than remember them, to repress all the sadness associated with the war. Above all, they continue not to finance the project, which is rightly interpreted by its promoters as indifference to the values of nationalism (and to the interests of the ruling class). Their extraneousness to the workings of power and official institutions is visible even in the smallest things, as when Mariangela discovers that her sons’ names, like all the names inscribed on the memorial, have been ‘twisted’, with the surname before the Christian name, which to common people seems unnatural. The humanist and pacifist spirit that Il disertore has in common with novels such as Un anno sull’altopiano (Lussu) and Quelli dalle labbra bianche (Masala) finds its counterpoint in the bellicose rhetoric used to celebrate the mythical heroism of the Brigata Sassari, extolling the natural ferocity of the Sardinian people.68 Saverio is the archetype of the peasants and shepherds turned into footsoldiers and cannon fodder in the trenches but, like the soldiers in the stories written by Lussu and Masala, he is the exact opposite of those who glory in war. His decision to desert is not the act of a coward because he has already exposed himself to danger in action – it is the only possible response                                                             

67

See chapter 1, section Women. Each of the two novels has been made into a film: Uomini contro (Rosi 1970) and Sos laribiancos-I dimenticati (Livi 2001).

68

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to the incomprehensible devastation of the war.69 While post-war Italian culture put a positive spin on the island’s primitivism, portraying Sardinian infantrymen as fearsome fighting machines specialised in hand-to-hand combat, Il disertore reveals the deepseated humanity and civility of Saverio the shepherd-soldier, and by extension the Sardinian people, who sees hunting as a healthy practice in harmony with nature but rejects the idea of violence against other human beings. The situation is thereby overturned: even though be belongs to a race of primitives, Saverio is a champion of civility; branded as a deserter and a bandit by the Italian state, he is noble in spirit because he feels the inviolability of a man’s right to life and freedom. The problematic relationship between Sardinia and mainland Italy is symbolically reworked in the novel and in the film above all in the socio-cultural models embodied by the characters of Saverio, Mariangela and Father Coi, each of which is presented in contrast to an antagonist. Mention has already been made of Saverio’s identification with the figure of the ‘true’ Sardinian – a shepherd, well versed in the use of weapons, independent and free:70 he is clearly a worthier character than Roberto Manca, Marquis of Tharros, representative of a declining nobility trying to secure a position of social prestige by espousing the warmongering ideology of D’Annunzio and the Fascists.71 He is identified with the urban world, with the modernity of the regime’s bombastic rhetoric, an opportunist to whom the audience reacts with dislike, at the very least. Neither is the Church spared a controversial portrayal, divided as it is between its popular and charitable spiritual vocation, embodied by Father Coi, and its temporal dimension as embodied by Monsignor Tarcisio Pau, representing the ecclesiastical echelons in league with the regime.72 The main fulcrum of the narrative, however, is Mariangela, who embodies a model of motherhood which encompasses the distinctive cultural characteristics of Sardinian society. In the novel her appearance and demeanour recall the behavioural and social                                                             

69

See Maxia 2004: 17-19. In the novel Mariangela suddenly finds Saverio in front of her with “the strong wild smell of a man, of a shepherd, at the door of the hut in the old abandoned sheepfold” (Dessì 2004: 63). 71 Maxia 2004: 11; 13-14. 72 Maxia 2004: 13-14. In Maxia’s view the figure of Father Coi can be traced to the intellectual of peasant birth described by Gramsci (ibid., 14). 70

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conventions fixed in 19th- and 20th-century literary and pictorial portrayals. She is described as “wrapped in her shawl, hands clasped across her midriff and head reclining on her shoulder”;73 “she looked older than her years, so small and thin, her sparse greying hair parted in the middle, covered by a greenish headscarf that had once been black; and that smell of smoke, of a smoke-filled hut, and of old silence”.74 In the film the mother is played by Irene Papas, a Greek actress whose appearance recalled the model of Mediterranean beauty; she always wears black and her ever-present headscarf frames a face marked by suffering petrified in silence. More than anything else, her appearance recalls a major 20th-century Sardinian work of art: Madre dell’ucciso, a statue by Francesco Ciusa.75 The two women have in common the condition of motherhood shattered by bereavement and the wall of utter silence that seems to surround them; the remoteness and inaccessibility of the mother sculpted by Ciusa are equalled by the impenetrable mystery in which Mariangela is shrouded. Sandro Maxia describes the novel’s Mariangela as a “maternal simulacrum” subjected to a process of “stylisation, or at least desiccation”, a stark figure “carved in rustic wood, entirely devoid of consoling features”.76 Maxia’s choice of words to describe the character in the novel recalls expressions used by Rudas in her psychoanalytical study of Ciusa’s sculpture, and may also be applied to the film’s Mariangela. Irene Papas’ lined face, made up to accentuate the marks of age, appears dried up, ‘desiccated’ by grief and stubbornly closed in silence. The symbolism of the grief-stricken mother is also evoked in the film by certain shots which recall the icon of the Pietà, although the novel makes mention of Saverio’s habit of falling asleep with his head resting on his mother’s feet rather than in her lap.77 Another crucial aspect of the character of Mariangela confirms the symbolic nature of her role: her harmony with nature. In the novel she is repeatedly compared to animals in the expertise of her                                                              73

Dessì 2004: 48. Ibid., 65. In Dessì’s narrative certain elements are repeated in accordance with modes of expression typical of the oral tradition (Maxia 2004: 26), such as emphasis on the olfactory; on page 60 Mariangela is described as having “a smell of smoke, of a smoke-filled hut”. 75 See chapter 2, section Women: Physical Appearance and National Character and chapter 4, section The Sardinian Woman. 76 The quotes are in Maxia 2004: 24. 77 Dessì 2004: 89. 74

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movements as she makes her way among the hills along little-known tracks winding through the scrubland.78 In the film she is always on the move as well, performing her household chores, but particularly travelling the paths leading up into the hills, jumping from rock to rock to reach the sheepfold and tying bundles of firewood she intends to sell. In spite of fatigue, heat, age and grief, she doggedly continues to carry out her duty as a mother – to care and provide for the creatures she has brought into the world. The centrality of the mother figure in the novel reflects its importance in the Sardinian world, indeed it encapsulates the very essence of femininity in the island’s culture.79 In Rudas’ interpretation, the exclusive relationship between Saverio and Mariangela is the symbolic expression of the Sardinian people’s overwhelming desire to be reunited with Sardinia, the motherland they feel to be irremediably lost.80 The deserter’s only way to salvation is to remove himself physically from the theatre of conflict, to leave the continent behind him and to go back to the island and thus return home, regaining his roots and the world from which the call to arms had so tragically torn him. His rejection of the war and, by extension, of the culture which produced it, implies recognition of the moral superiority of the simple life, sober and solidly rooted in its principles, consecrated in the image of the pastoral Sardinia. The film, like the novel, though providing glimpses of modernisation, seems to confirm the persistence of an archaic model of life and its ethical superiority. In the face of the dangers of the present manifested in the social tensions pervading Cuadu – themselves a product of dramatic national events – the book and the film show the value of traditional culture. Mariangela keeps faith with her vocation as genitrix and guardian of life: she continues to go to the hut in the hills to light candles and keep alive the memory of her dead son. Saverio’s sheepfold, however, is not just the symbol of an intimate secret; it stands as a temple of the Sardinian world against the empty Fascist rhetoric celebrated by the war memorial.81 The ritual character of the mother’s silent, stubborn acts metaphorically expresses the eternity of a race which, despite the danger of being                                                              78

Ibid., 81. With regard to the portrayal of women as a symbol of the island in the 20th-century Sardinian novel, see Baumann 2007. 80 Rudas 2004: 256-257. 81 During Saverio’s burial the Sardinian version of the Ave Maria is heard. 79

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uprooted by the violence of history, looks to its roots to find the strength to renew itself. Pesi leggeri (Enrico Pau, 2001) This film tells the story of Claudio, a former boxer who earns his living as a boxing promotor and estate agent.82 His latest prospect is Nino, a talented young boxer dreaming of making a career in the ring. Nino’s girlfriend, Maddi, divides her time between her work as a hairdresser and her passion for singing, which she indulges in a local nightclub. Their relationship is not easy, particularly because Maddi finds it hard to accept the discipline and sacrifices required by boxing and wants to settle down as soon as possible. The situation is complicated by the arrival in Claudio’s gym of another boxer, Giuseppe. A solitary and aggressive individual, after causing a number of incidents with his behaviour, Giuseppe is thrown out of the gym. In the meantime he has begun to make advances to Maddi, who eventually gives in to them in order to get back at Nino after yet another argument with him. Claudio also has his problems: he has a crush on Sara, a teacher who has moved to Sardinia at a difficult time in her life, and has substantial debts, which are jeopardising the future of the gym. In an attempt to avoid bankruptcy he agrees to arrange a match between Nino and Giuseppe, even though the two boxers are in different categories. Giuseppe loses the match, but Claudio is moved by guilt to take him back under his wing and give him another chance. From the infancy of cinema to the present day, films set in Sardinia have confirmed the symbolic primacy of the mountainous interior (the topos of the Barbagia), and its corresponding agriculturalpastoral anthropological model, over all other aspects of the island, reproducing the image of the primitive exotic land, diametrically opposed to modernity, disseminated by literature. With Pesi leggeri, as in his previous work La volpe e l’ape, Enrico Pau distinguishes himself from that template, running counter to established practice in his choice of settings and characters.83 At the centre of his artistic world he places the island’s most modern face, setting his story in the capital Cagliari, traditionally seen as the anti-symbol of true Sardinian identity and as the negation of the real Sardinia celebrated for                                                             

82 83

On this film see Olla 2008: 188-189. See also Tanchis 2001. Ibid., 102-103.

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centuries by writers and travellers. His decision has two immediate consequences: Sardinian films are no longer monolithically identified with the topos of the Barbagia, and the discovery of the metropolitan dimension entails a semantic reformulation of the idea of insularity and, by extension, of the entire symbolic construct based on the opposition of the cultural concepts of ‘island’ and ‘mainland’. Following literature, cinema had hitherto built every discourse on the identity of the Sardinian people on their extraneousness from the parameters of the civilised world and their implacable resistance to any sort of cultural assimilation – a discourse which lay at the basis of Cainà. L’isola e il continente. Turning to the topos of the globalised post-modern world, Pau instead portrays an island which is in conformity with the rest of the planet and representative of the contradictions characterising contemporary life. The landscape remains one of the most effective tools for the symbolic creation of Sardinia in the post-modern age, but the traditional Sardinia here makes way for its least familiar facets. Pesi leggeri opens with a view of the sea as a young man, Nino, trains on a deserted asphalt road. One on side is the sea, on the other the tower blocks of a modern housing development on the edge of town. The images show the protagonist running through an urban environment just like any other. This feeling of anonymity continues in the scenes immediately following, in which two other characters are introduced. In the first, another young man, Giuseppe, walks across a huge swampy expanse that seems suspended between the earth and the sky. This location, a complete novelty in the repertoire of Sardinian geographical topoi, takes on a clearer shape when the camera picks out the chimney stacks of a large industrial complex on the outskirts of Cagliari – an icon of contemporary Sardinia far removed from the postcard pictures of a pastoral land and a tourist paradise. Like Giuseppe, Sara arrives in Cagliari, but from the mainland and by sea. But her journey is a flight from the pain of a recent amorous disappointment or, as she herself explains, an attempt to find isolation – which is why she has applied for a transfer to an island.84 Cagliari is                                                              84

Sara: “I had already been to Cagliari to sit on an examination board. I really liked it, so...” Claudio: “You moved here. But why come to an island?” Sara: “For isolation.” Claudio: “There are a million and a half people here though...” Sara: “I don’t know any of them.”

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thus a port, a destination, a place of isolation and the stage upon which the characters’ destinies intersect as each seeks a form of redemption. While metaphors in the literary tradition have always evoked an impenetrable boundary between the island world and the outside world, in Pau’s film the border is vague; rather, to the rest of the world, the island appears always to have been involved in the continual movement of human and material traffic. It is no accident that Nino’s entry into the gym is welcomed by a series of imprecations from his trainer Mr. Melis, who asks in his usual sardonic tones whether the boat from Naples was late – a subtle reminder that not only is he not a shepherd or a bandit, he is not even a Sardinian, given his Neapolitan origins. The importance of the urban environment in this film thus implies a revision of the ideas of border, insularity and ethnicity, while the characters’ mobility – always being on the move – is a narrative device widely used in European cinema as a metaphor for the condition of individuals in search of themselves.85 This is seen at its clearest in the sequence featuring Nino and Maddi riding around on a moped: their wanderings take them past drab suburban tower blocks, expressway junctions, traffic-choked streets and forgotten corners of ugly and degraded city outskirts. Cagliari shows its saddest face, scarred by the horrors of modern housing developments and the poverty hiding in the cracks of a disillusioned daily grind. Though the characters do not have much money they are certainly not desperately poor; every room in the flat where Nino lives with his family has a television, but the presence and abuse of such symbols of the consumer society serve to augment the feeling of solitude. Following the characters as they move from one part of town to another, the spectator is transported into a fragmented space, a place of transition for people exposed to a precarious existence, all metaphorical lightweights – pesi leggeri – forced to defend themselves against the below-the-belt punches dealt out by life as in the boxing ring. Cagliari has been described by writers as a white, vertical city, the Jerusalem of Sardinia, by virtue of its white walls and fierce heat; it is often called the ‘city of the sun’.86 These features were frequently accompanied by the image of a medieval fortress-city, a symbol of                                                                                                                                  Claudio: “I know every last one of them.” Sara’s words reflect the stereotype of Sardinia as an isolated, closed island. 85 Everett 2003: 27-45. See also Everett 2005a and Everett and Goobody 2005. 86 See chapter 2, section Tropes of Land: Town and Country.

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foreign domination and the Sardinians’ state of subjection. But in Pesi leggeri Cagliari’s vertical walled profile appears only for an instant, pictured under a glowering storm-filled sky. The colours in the air are mostly shades of grey, and many scenes are set in the darkness of night, when the city’s narrow streets are brightened only by shopsigns and street lighting. Rather than a solar city, then, it is lunar, populated by individuals in search of real emotions, trying to escape the (diurnal) boredom of everyday life and find their secret dreams. The film’s symbolic place is the gym, a closed space devoid of natural light, where sacrifice is required in pursuit of an aim without the certainty of achieving it. Compared with the disorder and the chaotic coming-and-going of the city streets, the square of the boxing ring is a secure geometrical space in which people can protect their illusions and defend themselves against the disappointments of existence. In anthropological terms, the urban setting of Pesi leggeri is accompanied by the discovery of a human type unknown to the stock of Sardinian images but entirely consistent with the trope of a modernity which preaches affluence but offers no guarantee of happiness. The film features failed boxers, aspiring boxers, old boxing heroes, men deep in debt who forget their failure to soften its pain or are tormented by its prospect, people full of hope and others who have abandoned it – a parade of specimens living on the edge, individuals who have nothing of the traditional ‘made in Sardinia’ trademark and who could be found anywhere else, given the normality and familiarity of their problems. From a social and cultural standpoint, then, Pesi leggeri is far removed from traditional Sardinian cinema, though it does present a detailed and authentic portrayal of some lesser-known aspects of Cagliari. There is one particular dimension to this film – made even more explicit in Pau’s following work Jimmy della Collina – that is worthy of special attention: the approach used with regard to multi-culturalism and the multi-ethnic society. Nino is Neapolitan, Sara is a mainlander and among those seen most often in Claudio’s gym is a non-European boy, not forgetting the Latin American dance school run by a homosexual teacher in one of the rooms in the gym. The latter element works successfully in terms of the dynamics of the screenplay,87 but when taken together these features actually conceal a deeper truth. Against proclamations of the ‘authentic’ Sardinia, populated by a race which has maintained its                                                              87

Olla 2008: 189.

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purity and is identified essentially with the island’s mountainous and pastoral interior, Pau’s films set the image of a cosmopolitan city populated by ‘foreigners’, the historical product of ethnic and cultural mixing. Though not universally well-received by the critics, Pesi leggeri and Pau’s work in general have the unquestionable merit of exploring Sardinia’s urban dimension, normalising it and modernising the popular image of a land which seems finally to have been reconciled, despite itself, with the rest of the planet. Even its peripheral position with respect to the centres of power is only apparent, since what happens there can also be experienced elsewhere. In this sense the Cagliari depicted by Pau has much in common with the city described from a post-colonial standpoint by Sergio Atzeni in his novels. L’ultima frontiera (Franco Bernini, 2006) Loosely based on Giulio Bechi’s book Caccia grossa, this television production reveals its perspective on Sardinia even before the opening credits appear.88 Its title – The Last Frontier – is the Italian rendering of the Wild West, the savage-infested land waiting to be civilised (meaning conquered) in the American epic story. It is a metaphor for what the mainlanders intend to do in Sardinia. The film has a number of features typical of the Western, a genre which inspired a number of ‘Southernist’ films, some of which were set on the island.89 The idea of Sardinia as the Wild West is based on the assumption that the island and the Italian mainland represent two antithetical and irreconcilable worlds, a conceptual contrast lying at the root of every portrayal of Sardinia since cinema began (Cenere, Cainà. L’isola e il continente). It matters not that the love story between Royal Army lieutenant Gabriele De Marchi and Francesca, the beautiful sister of arch-bandit Elias Satta Pintore, is in the end crowned by marriage, as if to propitiate peace between islanders and mainlanders.90 The whole work is built around the exhibition of primitivism, with an all-too-evident desire to display, in close-up, the habits, behaviour and even material objects that evoke the traditional island world.                                                              88

Bechi 1997. Olla 2008: 363. Olla 2008: 364. 90 Ibid. 89

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The film opens as per handbook, with all the visual elements used since the first days of cinema to characterise the story’s setting as Sardinian: the rocky peaks interspersed with thickly wooded mountain slopes recall the descriptions of the Nuoro area, and the Barbagia in particular, extolled in a long literary tradition with the epithets ‘true Sardinia’ and ‘heart’ of the island. The panorama presented to the spectator is worthy of the words of transport used by D.H. Lawrence in his description of the vastness of the Sardinian landscape, themselves a metaphor for freedom. The Barbagia is the realm of the shepherd-resisters and of the vendetta. And here it is the sublime backdrop for a classical scene: a man and a woman come across the body of a murdered relative. The characters wear traditional costume, and near the body is a sheep. As the woman embraces the corpse she is stained with its blood, and her fingers close around a crucifix as if in pronouncement of a solemn promise. Mountains, sheep, shepherds and vengeance – the RAI television audience is greeted by the Sardinia of popular imagination. The narrative viewpoint is the external one of a handsome young Piedmontese officer sent to Sardinia as punishment for his amorous escapades. The use of a well-mannered and educated foreign observer – found in many films – is an effective device for showing up the strangeness (barbarism) of a land portrayed as a place of atonement. Even before he gets to the island De Marchi is confronted with its otherness, starting with the conduct of relations with women. His attempts to seduce a girl on the boat to Sardinia are robustly foiled by her father, who deters him by extolling the sobriety of their local customs. The Lieutenant’s landfall is symbolic of arrival in a mysterious land, inhabited by people wearing curious costumes and accessories (carefully highlighted by camera close-ups), following bizarre customs, such as the men’s habit of carrying a rifle at all times (“It’s the done thing here”), and communicating in an outlandish and incomprehensible language. Hot water, coffee and the theatre are pleasures unknown on an island where; to use lines from the script, “people live by vendetta alone” and news “comes who knows when, if it comes.” Since Roman times being sent to Sardinia has been considered terribly bad luck; the officer being replaced by De Marchi is only too happy to be able to return to the mainland and expresses just one wish: that the newcomer won’t have to spend as long there as he has. A stay in Sardinia is thus depicted as exile in a benighted land

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or, for braver souls, an adventure comparable to the exploration of lands at the edge of the known world. Insularity is conceptually assumed to be a symbolic condition of inferiority to the mainland. The image of Sardinia coincides with the primitive, the archaic and the atavistic, while continental Italy embodies progress and civilisation. In exchanges between islanders and mainlanders frequent references are made to an ‘us’ as opposed to a ‘you’. Although Sardinia is an integral part of the Italian state, relations with the world beyond the Tyrrhenian Sea are governed by a system of power perceived to be extraneous and imposed, implying the islanders’ subordination. Thus recurs the trope of their political and cultural marginality, rendered explicit in a feeling of mistrust in their abilities and in derogatory remarks: “I wonder”, muses a government representative, “whether they cook their food or eat it raw like primitives”. What respect can you have for men who wear skirts (the white breeches typical of traditional costume)? All they can be compared to is savage races like the Scots. The symbolic reworking of the problematic relationship between the Sardinian people and the Italian state is expressed in the film by two contrasting positions, well established in literature and adopted into the cinematic tradition. On the one hand is the islanders’ historical resentment for those who come from outside, always and in all cases considered as oppressors. Theirs is an inferiority complex fuelled by the discrimination and mockery to which they are regularly subjected. On the other is the response of the mainlanders, who see themselves as benefactors who wish to help the Sardinians out of their backward condition provided that they accept their (the mainlanders’) rules of behaviour – those of the civilised world. They perceive the islanders’ hostility to the work of the Italian government as the result of victimism and an incorrigible propensity to crime. This dichotomy lies at the root of rapid exchange between Gasco, a Sardinian sergeant in the Carabinieri, and Lieutenant De Marchi, as they discuss the underlying reasons for the latest episodes of bloodshed. Gasco has sworn an oath of loyalty to the Italian Army but is able to perceive the errors of judgement typical of those who assess Sardinia from the outside, with no empathy for the island. De Marchi’s attitude is typical of the superciliousness adopted by the Italian state in its dealings with Sardinians. The confrontation between the two exemplifies the mindset of the socio-cultural category each of them represents. When

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De Marchi asks whether Gasco considers him to be responsible for the latest killing, the sergeant replies: Gasco: “Not you, no, but to tell you the truth it’s your attitude. The fact that you think you’re dealing with savages. That’s the reason we lost at Adua, did you know that?” [...] De Marchi: “You lot use the savage excuse to justify everything, and all we do is end up looking like colonialists or mugs. Here there are plenty of people ready to parade their pride when demanding a crust of bread, but when it comes to justice, a real sense of community, they’re a lot less proud, a lot less.” Gasco: “If we had the same opportunities you’d be right, sir, but Rome’s a long way from here and Turin used to be on the moon.” De Marchi: “It’s always someone else’s fault in the end.”91

The contrast between the two poles comes out clearly when “justice” is at issue. As in other films, the courtroom or anywhere with judges present make an ideal setting to enact the antagonism between the two.92 On the occasion of the official opening of the judicial year in L’ultima frontiera, the speeches concentrate on exploding the myth of romantic banditry and emphasise the effectiveness of the policy of the iron fist against crime on the island. As these words are being heard news arrives of yet another bandit ambush, which lays bare the fragility of the state. To use Pigliaru’s terms, the contrast between two systems of law is repeated throughout the film as a sign of the irreconcilability of opposing civilisations. When De Marchi and a government representative go to a meeting with the bandits to negotiate the release of two French hostages, the exchange between the parties is based on the usual stereotypes:                                                             

91

Gasco: “No, non Lei, il suo atteggiamento, se proprio devo essere franco. E l’idea che si è fatto di trattare con dei selvaggi. È lo stesso motivo per cui abbiamo perso ad Adua, lo sa?” [...] De Marchi: “Voi con la scusa dei selvaggi, giustificate tutto e a noi non resta che passare da colonialisti o da fessi. E qui c’è tanta gente che sventola l’orgoglio per un tozzo di pane, ma quando si tratta di giustizia, di un vero senso della comunità, si diventa molto meno orgogliosi, molto meno.” Gasco: “Certo, se noi avessimo le stesse opportunità avrebbe ragione Lei, Signor Tenente, ma Roma da qui è distante e Torino, a suo tempo, era sulla Luna.” De Marchi: “E la colpa è sempre degli altri alla fine.” This dialogue does not appear in Bechi’s book; see also note 93. 92 See chapter 5, section Italian and Sardinian on screen.

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Giuseppe Cau: “Hospitality you said. As if we were happy to be hospitable folk. The truth is we’re not, we’re not happy about it at all, but after all the invasions we’ve had we’ve learned that being hospitable is the best way to control the invaders.” Government representative: “Sometimes invasions, as you call them, have enabled societies to progress.” Giuseppe Cau: “Or regress, depending on your point of view. We were building solid stone houses before you even knew what a wooden hut was.” De Marchi: “Receiving us in a cave doesn’t seem much of a step forward.”93

The reference to prehistoric times is only natural, considering that the scene is set in a cave staged to exhibit Sardinian primitivism, including roasting meat of the Homeric and Biblical variety mentioned by Bresciani and any number of 19th-century travellers. In a film built on the accumulation and dissemination of ‘signs’ drawn from the stock of Sardinian images, due place is given to a ready-made reflection on the nature of banditry. According to Elias Satta Pintore a life of crime is the result of poverty and injustices suffered. How else can he provide for his family when the local gentry stop at nothing in the pursuit of wealth and the state does nothing to change things? Such a romantic interpretation is made even more explicit when Elias harangues the crowd, asserting that he is not just a criminal, he is one of them. As proof of his struggle to defend the poor, he arranges the destruction of the land registers which legalise the expropriations carried out by the rich and proclaims a return to the time when the land belonged to the community.94 The crowd acclaim                                                              93

Giuseppe Cau: “Ospitalità avete detto. Come se a noi ci piacesse di passare per quelli ospitali. La verità è che non ci piace, non ci piace proprio, ma a furia di invasioni, abbiamo imparato che essere ospitali è la cosa migliore per controllare gli invasori.” Il rappresentante del governo: “A volte le invasioni, come le chiama Lei, hanno permesso alle civiltà di progredire.” Giuseppe Cau: “O di regredire, dai punti di vista dipende. Noi per esempio costruivamo abitazioni in muratura quando voi nemmeno le palafitte avevate inventato ancora.” De Marchi: “Eppure averci accolto in una caverna non mi sembra un gran passo avanti.” Both this dialogue and that of note 91 do not appear in Bechi’s book. 94 As observed by Olla 2008: 364, the destruction of the land registry recalls the popular revolt of su connottu (Nuoro 1868), in which the islanders protested against

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him as a hero, while in the eyes of Italian law he is nothing but a dangerous criminal. The differences between Sardinians and mainlanders are also expressed in the characters’ appearance. The use of traditional costume is obviously the most visible element in marking out a character, although in the Nuoro area in which the story is set some extras appear in normal clothes; according to literary sources, this was common among the better-off of the small town’s inhabitants at the turn of the century. The bandits are presented along the lines of the traditional shepherd model, with the addition of some curious details: Elias Satta Pintore sports a thick beard and long plaited hair in accordance with a custom recorded among the shepherds of the village of Bitti/Fonni,95 while Giuseppe Cau, known with good reason as Il signorino (the little master), wears a suit and a bowler hat, like the fashionable bandit interviewed by Sebastiano Satta and Gastone Chiesi.96 Most of the film was shot in the Barbagia in the places where the story is set, but the turn-of-the-century Nuoro seen in the film is actually Tempio, a town in northern Sardinia known for its historical buildings in stone.97 Important and of evident symbolic value among the interior spaces is the Satta Pintore home, an example of a country house with a closed walled courtyard; the camera work makes great display of its traditional kitchen, adorned with the classical implements of domestic life such as baskets, sacks and looms. Here and there are characteristic objects and products which, besides being unmistakable ‘signs’ of Sardinian identity, seem to be serving the subliminal function of advertising the island’s craft industry. Although the film is set over a century ago, its depiction of Sardinia signally failed to impress local audiences.98 Objecting to what they saw as a demeaning image of their island, Sardinians came out in open criticism of the film, taking a particularly dim view of local writer Marcello Fois’ collaboration in the screenplay, interpreted as nothing less than an act of treachery against his compatriots. There is no doubt that L’ultima frontiera is the result of an operation                                                                                                                                  the Savoy regime’s reforms, including the enclosure of land hitherto open to common use. 95 See Wagner 1908c: 268 and chapter 2, note 386. 96 See chapter 1, section People: Shepherds and Bandits. 97 Olla 2008. 98 See the review in Olla 2008: 363-364.

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designed to present all the ingredients considered likely to appeal to a television audience. But it is interesting precisely because it stands as yet another attempt to describe Sardinia by means of a fixed, stereotyped conceptual framework which essentially falsifies reality. And since such a fiction goes beyond the confines of fantasy, arousing the resentment of so many islanders at such a staging of their identity, it must be surprisingly credible. Post Scriptum: Bellas mariposas (Salvatore Mereu, 2012)99 In Bellas mariposas Salvatore Mereu tells of a Sardinia unlike the traditional one, relinquishing what for a century was considered to be the ideal framework for a story set on the island. The film is based on a story with the same title by Sergio Atzeni, posthumously published in 1996. It is the chronicle of an eventful day in the lives of two girls, Cate and Luna, who have grown up too quickly in a rough part of Cagliari but are determined not to abandon their youthful dreams.100 The analysis will focus here on how Sardinia is portrayed in the film, since it opens the way to a comparison of new trends in literature and cinema and bears witness to the cultural evolution taking place in Sardinian-set films already outlined in this research. Bellas mariposas breaks with the pastoral bandit film tradition to reveal a hitherto unfamiliar facet of Sardinian life, though it is a dimension already partially explored by Mereu in Ballo a tre passi (2003), the film that made his name known to European audiences.101 In his latest work the geo-symbol of Sardinia takes the form of the urban environment of Cagliari and its outskirts. In the popular imagination the island’s capital is considered the symbol of a lesser Sardinian identity, since it was the centre of power for the various foreign invaders who have ruled over Sardinia down the centuries. In cinematic terms this cultural subordination was expressed in the virtual absence of Cagliari from the screen, an absence made good only in recent years, when the city has at last acquired a cinematic identity through the work of directors such as Pau, Marcias and Mereu. Though his approach is far removed from that of his                                                             

99 This section was added after completion of this book, shortly after the premiere of Bellas Mariposas at the Venice Film Festival. My thanks go to director Salvatore Mereu for his permission to see the film before it went on general release. 100 For an analysis of Atzeni’s text, see chapter 2. 101 About this film see Urban 2011.

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counterparts, Mereu also explores the city through marginalised characters, yet the crudeness of the action narrated is contrasted in the film by the irony and lightness of tone – also characteristic of Atzeni’s original – with which the story is told; Mereu, as pointed out by Gianni Olla, has no pretensions to realism – he is much closer to the hyper-realism and surrealism of Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le métro (1960).102 Though realistically depicted, in Bellas mariposas Cagliari is never ‘over-exposed’. As the director himself stated, the story of Cate and Luna recalls other places, because the idea was to tell a universal story which would touch everybody.103 What is most memorable about the city is thus “la palazzina 47C di via Gorbaglius quartiere di Santa Lamenera periferia di Kasteddu” (“building 47C, via Gorbaglius, district of Santa Lamenera, outskirts of Kasteddu”),104 where the Frau family lives, while the city centre appears only in glimpses as the background to the metropolitan journey made by Cate and Luna on that fateful August 3rd, the day set for the murder of Gigi, Cate’s boyfriend, by her brother. Exploring private space, the camera lays bare the existential malaise pervading the tenement blocks, as in the flat where Cate lives with her large and turbulent family.105 The first shot of the girl is in the bathroom – she is drying her swimming costume with a zebrastriped hair dryer, while her younger sister Luisella is immersed in the bathtub wearing goggles. This curious little scene proves to perform an important function in the story because it is an anticipation of her sister’s swim at Poetto, the beach popular with the people of Cagliari. The figure of Luisella recalls Tommaso, son of Pietro Di Leo, the protagonist of Un’anima divisa in due (Soldini 1993): the boy plays at being an explorer and dreams of finding adventure in his father’s                                                              102

Gianni Olla, ‘Le Bellas Mariposas. Con Cate e Luna nei luoghi resi celebri da Atzeni’, in La Nuova Sardegna (31th August 2011) (accessed 1st December 2012). 103 The director’s comments on the film are published on the website www.festivalscope.com (accessed 21th November 2012). 104 Atzeni 1996: 66. 105 Cate makes no bones about her life and her family: “You’ve no idea what it means to live in my house.” Berated by her father for costing too much and still not having a job, she retorts: “Did I ask you to bring me into this house right below Mrs Sias in this fucking building in this fucking neighbourhood? Did I ask to be born?” (“Io ti ho chiesto di farmi nascere in questa casa proprio sotto signora Sias in questo cazzo di palazzo in questo cazzo di quartiere? Io ti ho chiesto di farmi nascere?”). These lines are taken directly from Atzeni’s story 1996: 64.

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clapped-out car – he can even ‘see’ the sea beyond the neighbourhood roofs. Like him, Luisella has invented a surrogate happy life in the cramped but liberating space of the bathtub, the only place in the flat where the noise, rows and problems are absorbed by the water and dissolve in a tranquillising silence. As Cate points out, the bathroom plays a crucial role in the equilibrium of the Frau family: “everybody wants to go to the bathroom in my house because it’s the only place where you can be on your own and find some peace”.106 Repeatedly appearing in the film, it is where the brothers and sisters in the Frau family try to carve out their own private space within the walls of a home too crowded to contain their dreams and disappointments. No less depressing is the kitchen – with no door, shabby doorless cupboards and packets of pasta, the sugar tin and other objects scattered about. One thing not lacking, however, is a flatscreen television, which Cate’s father sometimes takes into the bathroom to watch striptease shows broadcast by a local channel.107 The brothers and sisters take turns in the bunk beds in their bedroom, since they all come and go as they please. Goodnights are confused with good mornings: Cate’s sister Mandarina goes out in the evenings to work (in a brothel) and comes home at dawn, greeting their neighbour with a “goodnight”; in the meantime we see the beginning or end of the day for her brothers Massimo (a teenage heroin addict), Alex (a musician, religious believer and faithful fiancé) and Tonio (like his father, a bully and a layabout). For the most part the rooms are shot from the front: the viewpoint is that of someone standing in the doorway and seeing – we imagine with a mixture of surprise and revulsion – what is happening inside. It is a perspective which emphasises the distance between two contrasting realities, and Cate’s life as depicted on screen is certainly more reassuring to the spectator. Cate’s family is not an exception in their neighbourhood. The general malaise is reflected in the area’s public housing – modern but shabby and depressing, like the ugly grey facade of the block of flats opposite, seen at various times from the windows of Cate’s flat. Perhaps this is why the neighbourhood looks better at night, when everything is invisible and the graffiti’s walls and                                                             

106

“tutti vogliono andare in bagno a casa mia perché è l’unico posto dove si può stare tranquilli in santa pace”. 107 In the novel, set in the 1990s, Atzeni refers to a “small kitchen telly running on batteries” (la “tele quella piccola di cucina con le pile”): Atzeni 1996: 74.

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rubbish are swallowed up by the darkness. At night the headlights, the street lamps and the mopeds flashing by beneath the windows seem to promise a different reality: the chance to escape in search of a happiness, which seems impossible in the light of day. Even the relief given by the night is only momentary, however, since at three o’clock the whole block is woken by the eccentric morning ritual observed by Mrs. Sias, the woman living in the flat above the Fraus’. The choice of the Sant’Elia district as the film’s main location, instead of Is Mirrionis, which is the Santa Lamenera of Atzeni’s novel, is a successful one, since it bears all the distinctive marks of marginalisation. In the conglomeration of tenement blocks there are no real gardens or meeting places other than a basketball ground and in particular a large area of scrubland with an improvised football pitch and the remains of a bus, which stands witness to secret encounters between local males and “that cockroach Samantha Corduleris”. This wasteland stands close to the seafront, but from it the sea looks grey, almost colourless, so there is no trace of the picture-postcard Sardinia. The few recognisable glimpses of the centre of Cagliari shown by the camera do not include its best architectural and historical features; rather, the audience is shown anonymous squares, wide roads, places of transit and a shopping mall, emphasising that the city depicted in the film is well and truly in the category of post-modern non-places. The two girls cross the urban space from one edge to the other, and although Cate chronicles the precise times of their movements, that chronological exactitude punctuates a movement that continues with no apparent purpose,108 sometimes back and forth, always urgent and relentless, almost as if the girls were being blown about by the wind.109 Cate and Luna are thus seen on a bus, being given a lift in a car, moving on foot and breaking suddenly into a headlong run; their silence is broken by wild laughter, they are carried                                                              108

After yet another bus ride, Cate refers to the seemingly senseless prolongation of their journey in an utterance taken directly from the novel: “You could ask me why we didn’t walk a hundred metres downhill to avoid a bus ride and get there an hour earlier” (“Tu mi dirai non potevate fare centro metri in discesa per evitare un pullmann e arrivare un’ora prima?”): Atzeni 1996: 102. 109 At one point, after inflicting appropriate punishment on a boy who had followed them from the beach making indecent proposals, the girls start running towards one of the hills in the city. Cate comments on this movement of theirs as follows: “In a second the wind carried us to Monte Urpino”.

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into deserted places and then crowded places, where danger often lurks – usually in the form of a man, young or old, who tries to molest them and take advantage of their youth. The film’s depiction of urban space corresponds to the image of the ‘horizontal city’, with no real centre, that emerges from Atzeni’s novel.110 It is a recognisable and tangible place, but also reminiscent of any number of others. Only seemingly pointless and random, the girls’ wanderings are in fact a sign of restlessness, of a search, a desire to reach out and discover the world beyond the cramped space in which they are forced to live. Cate confesses that on that day for the first time in her life she is ashamed to say where she comes from, so she doesn’t give her real address to the woman who offers her a lift – this lie forms the starting point of her adventure.111 The mad car race along Viale Poetto is the beginning of a preposterous but intoxicating and exciting journey, one that the two girls face together, supporting each other and eating as many ice-creams as possible. Whereas the portrayal of the urban world as a place of decadence and lack of values is normally contrasted with the bucolic image of a pure and genuine rural world, Mereu follows Atzeni in identifying the liberating and soothing element as the sea. Cate purges her existential malaise by swimming, immersing herself in the water, being carried by the movement of the waves and entering into symbiosis with nature.112 Poetto beach, used by the locals en masse, is a social space marked by competition and hierarchy, reproducing the dichotomy between those who matter (and have a season ticket to a private section of the beach) and those on the margins, like Cate and Luna, who only have access to the remaining free areas. The girls’ emancipation coincides symbolically with their entry into the water. The extended underwater sequence shows their bodies, at last freed of all impediments, transformed by lightness and grace of movement. The two ‘butterflies’ (mariposa is the Sardinian word for butterfly) abandon themselves completely to the intoxicating pleasure of contact                                                             

110

See chapter 2, section Tropes of Land: Counter-images: Urban Modernity. In the film Cate says: “For the first time I didn’t want to show where I lived”, an utterance not found in the book, where she confines herself to remarking that the woman who gave them a lift “dropped us in Piazza Repubblica” (Atzeni 1996: 92), without stating a reason. 112 This underwater sequence features Cate speaking in voice-over, reproducing the substance of the words in Atzeni’s text, 1996: 88-89. A translation of this part of the story is provided in chapter 2, section Counter-images: The City and the Beach. 111

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with the water as it supports their weight and gives them fluidity and grace. In that suspended dimension noise magically disappears, and with it every trace of earthly ills. The all-embracing silence of the underwater world creates the conditions for the girls’ inner purification, for the free expression of themselves and their dreams. Absorbed in a different world, Cate and Luna at last find a chance of redemption. The counterpoint to their metropolitan misery is the sea, experienced as a resource, a potential, the life-blood sustaining imagination and giving fresh impetus to their hopes. In the first episode of Ballo a tre passi the young protagonists undertook a long and exhausting – almost epic – journey in search of the sea,113 and here the equally young protagonists of Bellas mariposas embark on their dangerous metropolitan adventure in a joyful, defiant spirit and then abandon themselves entirely to the seawater, regaling the audience with memorable and evocative images which are unusual for films set in Sardinia. On the basis of the geo-symbolic elements outlined above it becomes clear that Bellas mariposas represents a new development in Sardinian cinema. Not only is the symbolic centre of gravity of the island’s geography shifted from the mountainous pastoral areas to the metropolitan world (something already observed in Enrico Pau’s films), the film is the first to propose a serene interpretation of its insularity after centuries in which the islanders were portrayed as highly diffident towards the sea. As the city symbolising Sardinia, Cagliari is reconciled with itself, recovering its role as a permeable border between the familiar world and the unknown. The representation of the sea as an essential and benign component of the Sardinian world is captured in the expression of Cate’s wish: “dovevo nascere pesce” (“I should have been born a fish”). In addition to illuminating one of the most captivating scenes in the film, these words mark a point of no return in the Sardinian imagination. Cate enables Sardinians to rediscover an essential part of their history and identity that was for too long repressed in literary and cinematic discourse. A break with tradition may also be observed in the characters and the plot. At the centre of the story in Bellas mariposas are two high-spirited and quick-witted girls, able to tackle life’s difficulties and reinvent themselves. When it seems they are unable to escape                                                              113

See chapter 2, section Sea and Tourism: Coast as Interface and Urban 2011.

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their destiny, Cate and Luna prove the opposite, refusing to remain imprisoned in the alienating space of the outskirts. The myth of the bad sign under which the stock of Sardinian characters was born dissolves in the face of their gritty determination. It is their courage on which the story turns: with her prayers (and the help of Elena the witch) Cate saves the life of her boyfriend, who in the meantime has left her for another girl. This apparent defeat hides what is actually a victory; Luna consoles Cate by telling her that losing Gigi will be her salvation, because it is the only way she can escape the poverty to which her origins seem to have condemned her.114 Luna, who in the meantime has been revealed to be Cate’s sister, says to her, “You’re growing a pair of tits – really, they weren’t there this morning!” The emergence of those “tiny buds”115 is a sign of Cate’s development, a light and comely creature who emerges from her cocoon one August morning to find she is a butterfly. The two girls thus prove that they can lift their eyes and see afar, beyond the sad horizon of the neighbourhood in which they were born and risk imprisonment. In the final scene, lying next to each other on Cate’s bed, the two sister-friends exchange a smile and look straight into the camera to remind us that they are ready to take flight: Cate: “Our lips look like butterflies” Luna: “So do we” Cate: “Bellas mariposas”116 

  After a century of bandits and vendettas, Bellas mariposas presents the image of a land which has rid itself of the burden of being                                                              114

Luna: “Look, if you’d stayed with Gigi you wouldn’t have been a singer. You’d have ended up like all this lot, like that cockroach Samantha!” (“Guarda che se stavi con Gigi, non cantavi. Diventavi come questi, come quella blatta di Samantha!”). Since the beginning of the film Cate has been proclaiming her difference, her wish to be different from what is expected of her by all those around her, just as she rejects the ignorance of her father, who accuses her of doing nothing but cost the family money. Unafraid of her father, having vented her anger in his face she shouts, “What does he think? That I’m like Mandarina? I want to be a virgin and a singer!” (“Ma che cosa pensa? Che sono come Mandarina? Io voglio essere vergine e cantante!”). 115 The term is used in Atzeni’s story 1996: 88, and reproduced in the film. 116 Cate: “Sembrano farfalle le nostre labbra” Luna: “Anche noi” Cate: “Bellas mariposas”

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‘different’; with this universally recognisable story it lends itself to a post-colonial interpretation. However, there are certain differences between the film and the book which have a decisive impact on the interpretation of Mereu’s work. In the original, Cate addresses her monologue to a “San Michele villain”, the writer’s alter ego, chosen as the recipient of the story because he’s a good sort, has a good memory and is good at writing.117 Having to adapt a monologue text for the cinema, Mereu decided to have the protagonist speak directly to the camera. In essence, the story seen unfolding on the screen is thus Cate’s version of events, the story as managed by her. The separation of the two levels – the narrative and the monologue – is marked by the interventions of Cate’s younger sister Luisella, who remarks on her strange behaviour and repeatedly asks, “Who are you talking to?” Cate’s only response is to tell her to shut up and she continues to look straight into the camera. The director thus conducts a radical reworking of the relationship between the narration and the audience, but above all he introduces a character who, though invisible, represents a specific point of view. This may be deduced from comments Cate addresses to an interlocutor (a journalist), identifiable as the spectator. Her words configure an opposition, or at least an ideological distance, between                                                              117

In the film Cate addresses an undefined audience with a repeated ‘you’ plural (“voi”), while in the novel she starts with a repeated ‘you’ singular (“tu”) uses the plural once and towards the end reverts to a ‘tu’ which may be identified as the writer: “(and now you’re looking at me like that I know what you want and what you’re thinking but no chance I like you I’m telling this story to you because you’ve got a good memory and they say you’re good at speaking and writing even if you’re a San Michele villain but that’s all you’re getting from me and just give over looking at me like that right? Not me find yourself someone else first I’ll become a rockstar then I’ll find a husband I’m not interested in dirty games)”; “(e ora mi guardi a quello stesso modo lo so cosa vuoi e cosa pensi ma non io mi sei simpatico questa storia la racconto a te che hai buona memoria e dicono che sei buono a raccontare e scrivere mankai sias unu barabba de Santu Mikeli ma altro da me non prendi non guardarmi piu con quegli occhi hai capito? Non io cercati qualcun’altra io prima divento rockstar poi cerco marito non mi interessano i giochi porchi)”: Atzeni 1996: 117. Though there is no space here for a proper discussion of this dimension, it should be remembered that one of the most complex challenges faced by Mereu was the adaptation of Atzeni’s style, with its hybrid, poetic and highly musical language, to the spoken language requirements of the film. Besides making use of the canonical adaptation procedures (excision, abridging, shifting, etc.) the screenplay is the result of the addition of a series of utterances, not present in the book, which are of crucial importance for the interpretation of the film, as will shortly become clear.

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the speaker and the listener-viewer. In one particularly important scene Cate speaks to a certain ‘you’: first she sends him away and slams the door in his face, but then calls him back and gives him permission to enter the bathroom.118 Her words are clear: “You can come in, but I decide what’s going to be said.” Deciding that she’s in charge, she lays down her conditions – it’s her story, her life, and she makes us listen, but will only tell us what she wants and we have to listen without breathing a word, with no right of reply. She will not be put off by anyone trying to shatter her dreams: “I wasn’t supposed to sing? I don’t want to end up like her [her sister Mandarina, a prostitute]. I want to be a singer – that’s right, a singer, you don’t believe me, do you? No-one does...” But while that ‘you’ observes her reflection in the bathroom mirror she continues to sing (“Mambo eh... Mambo italiano…”). So she knows she is going against the grain, not conforming to the expectations of those who observe her and think they have the right to judge her. The young heroine thus exacts her moral revenge. Recounting her life in her own way, she takes it back, she unanswerably asserts her right to exist – and that of many others like her – and to dream of a different future, in the face of our prejudices. Cate is therefore the first Sardinian film character who recounts herself – she demands to be the subject, the protagonist, not just the passive object of an external narrative. In comparison with the traditional female characters in Sardinian cinema, usually condemned to painful silence or marginalisation, or at any rate forced to relinquish part of themselves to conform to the rules of society, Bellas mariposas is the consecration of a female model which is aware and tenacious, able to stand up to social prejudice and male abuse. Cate asserts her independence and female dignity by refusing to become an object of male pleasure. And she knows what she wants: “I want a man I can chuck off the balcony if he gets on my nerves. I’m not going to answer to anyone”. The strength of this character derives from her unshakable belief in her dreams, which are fuelled by the recent musical success achieved by young Sardinians.119 Music is therefore her key to the                                                              118

Cate: “I said come in”. In the film Cate names a number of young Sardinian singers (including Valerio Scanu and Marco Carta) who have recently gained considerable popularity in Italy. This line is a modification of a passage in Atzeni’s story where Cate speaks of her brother Ricciotti, who plays as a midfielder for La Palma football team and dreams of 119

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future. It also enables other characters in Bellas mariposas to carve out a space for themselves and thereby avoid being sullied by the evils of the world. One is Mrs. Nioi, disenchanted with men but faithful to her daily appointment with her musical instrument; another is Cate’s brother Alex, who plays in a band and has earned the love of a girl who is pretty, kind and a virgin – a real rarity in their neighbourhood.120 To sing is also Cate’s objective, and she states her ambitious plan in concise terms: “I want to be a virgin and a singer”. As we see her resolutely singing in her bathroom and defending her maidenhood, it is to be hoped that she doesn’t stop.      

                                                                                                                                 having a trial with Cagliari. She foresees a future as a great footballer for her brother, who “being too shy and romantic will fall for some model when he’s famous like Virdis and Matteoli and Zola who are all Sardinians like him” (“troppo timido romantico si innamorerà di qualche modella quando sarà famoso come Virdis o Matteoli o Zola che sono tutti sardi come lui”): Atzeni 1996: 78. This adaptation is immediately comprehensible because the film is set in the present rather than the 1990s, the period of the original. In addition, talent shows are a big part of presentday popular culture. 120 Cate reminds us that Alex’s girlfriend “is the best apart from me and Luna”.

 

Conclusion

At the end of this journey through images of Sardinia, it remains to reflect on some of the salient points produced by the analysis and draw some conclusions. What is most striking is the remarkable continuity in the stock of representations of Sardinian identity in written and cinematic production alike. This derives from the predominance of a precise image of Sardinia: that of a land essentially archaic, primitive and exotic, re-hashed without ever really being questioned, from the heyday of travel literature up to present-day writings. The research presented here has followed the construction of a specific repertoire of images of the Sardinian world in films, starting from the forms of portrayal canonised in literary discourse and then identifying the standardised solutions adopted in cinematic narrative, in terms of the representation of characters, landscapes and locations. Travelling writers who visited the island in the 18th and 19th centuries, 19th- and 20th-century Sardinian writers and intellectuals who put the Sardinian world at the centre of their work, renowned essayists and scholars who studied various aspects of the island’s culture, cinema directors and films past and present – all have contributed to the creation and dissemination of the image of Sardinia, drawing on the same stock and presenting it continuously up to the present day. This conclusion does not rule out the existence of works which do not correspond to the above description, but it does entail the recognition, on the basis of the broad range of texts and films taken into consideration, of the prevalence of one version of the ‘imaginary Sardinia’ over all others. What is remarkable about portrayals of Sardinia in literature and film is that they express an idea of the island and its people based on a number of features held to be salient and distinctive, while other characteristics are ignored. Yet this representation tends to be identified with reality in its entirely – in other words it corresponds to a process of stereotyping. The strength of this tradition is demonstrated by the fact that it continued to thrive even when clear

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attempts were made in late 20th-century writings to effect some changes in the image of Sardinia – they resulted in new forms of portrayal that emerged alongside the traditional stock of images but did not completely displace it. A similar trend, probably more marked, may be observed in cinema, since production is still dominated by films focused on the ‘traditional’ Sardinia, that is to say consistent with the model of the primitive, pastoral and bandit-infested island. One reason for this continuity may be that the familiarity of places and characters and spectacularity are characteristics instrinsic to the audio-visual media. In addition, production strategies are inevitably influenced by the market, favouring the works most likely to succeed at the box-office, that is to say those which best meet the expectations (and preconceptions) of the public. Despite this, the research has also thrown up a number of counter-images which have broadened the stock of film images, without implying a definitive abandonment of the previous forms. An examplary case is the work by Enrico Pau and Salvatore Mereu, which bodes well for a development of the cinematic repertoire in a direction similar to that recently observed in literature. The main thread of the examination in this research, however, is made up of factors of continuity, and only to a lesser extent of signs of a breakaway from the traditional images of Sardinian identity. As an explanation of the basic consistency in the forms of portraying Sardinia and its inhabitants up to the present day, the analysis then focused on the fundamental factor of the viewpoint characterising all the works of literature and films under examination. The data analysed point to an essential difference between autoimages and hetero-images in the viewpoint from which a reality is described, not in the cultural identity of the author. The sources examined reveal that whoever observes Sardinia does so from an ethnocentric viewpoint, irrespective of his geographical origin. The image of Sardinia is thus the result of an ethnocentric discourse.1 There are two essential characteristics present in every narrative on the Sardinian nation: on the one hand it is considered interesting and fascinating because it is different from the observer, and on the other that condition of otherness entails the attribution to it of a culturally inferior status. All the sources analysed reflect the primitive                                                              1

Leerssen 2007c: 323-324.

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nature of Sardinian society; in a consideration of the signs of its otherness with a mixture of surprise and revulsion, the island is thus configured in the eyes of the observer as an exotic reality. Ethnocentrism, primitivism and exoticism therefore constitute the key factors in every narrative on Sardinia. Not only does this viewpoint characterise works of fiction, it stands as the distinguishing feature of every portrayal of the Sardinian world, regardless of literary or cinematic genre. The heterogeneous sources analysed here have provided ample confirmation of this, corroborating the hypothesis of the synergetic contribution of various literary genres in the formation of an image of the Sardinian people. Though ethnocentrism is an innate human tendency, the analysis has demonstrated that the symbolic construction of the Sardinian character was closely tied to the cultural history of modern Europe. The stock of images and portrayals of Sardinia matches the tradition of thought based on the paired concepts of North and South, which identified an indissoluble link between national character and climate. Starting from this conceptual basis, the literary and subsequently cinematic representation of Sardinia was configured according to the trope of the South. This configuration was entirely consistent with the cultural trends of a nationalistic and imperialistic Europe; the fascination of the exotic represented the ‘human’ face of the aggressive policies pursued by the great powers, and it was with that same imperialistic mentality that the dominant powers dealt with subordinate European cultures. As already pointed out by Giuseppe Dessì in his Scoperta della Sardegna, the island became an object of narration and thus of general interest because of the foreign writers who visited it. Having to explain Sardinia to European readers, they evoked colonial lands, islands lost in oceans and journeys of exploration, frequently likening Sardinia to peripheral and subordinate places such as Scotland and Ireland. The analysis reveals, however, that from the mid 19th century the Italian elite (including its Sardinian branch) also played a crucial role in the formation of the island’s image – it began to develop a repertoire of images in line with that established in travel literature. This development coincided with the construction of an Italian national image and the recovery of regional traditions following the unification of Italy. The latter operation directly involved Sardinian intellectuals and artists, anxious to ennoble their origins in order to ensure that Sardinia would secure a respectable status in the newly-

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constituted Italian state. The Sardinian image may therefore be considered an articulation of the trope of the primitive and exotic South produced by Southern elites.2 In addition, being the result of an ethnocentric viewpoint applied within a national state, it stands as an example of what has been described as “Orientalism in one country”.3 The position taken up by the local elite towards an external power centre is readily comprehensible in the light of Sardinia’s historically marginal role and how political and cultural relations between unequal forces are usually configured.4 An analysis of this question led to the identification of a direct correlation between the attributes ascribed to the Sardinian character and the island’s historically subordinate role. For centuries outside the mainstream of history, to further their own interests and counter the malevolent comments made by foreigners, the island’s ruling classes found themselves on the one hand assuming the standpoint of the educated modern Europe they wished to emulate, and on the other ennobling the immobilism and archaism generally ascribed to Sardinian culture so as to turn them into instruments for the assertion of their identity. The ennoblement of an archaic rustic society also chimed with the general European trend towards regionalism, an effort to promote local culture in the wake of the Romantic movement at a time when national identities were being constructed.5 At the root of this trend, of course, was a reaction to urbanisation and industrialisation which was expressed in the promotion of places of origin and a nostalgic yearning for an age of purity, simplicity and nobility, inevitably projected into the past and mythicised. This explains why the popular imaginations of nations in the 19th and 20th centuries often featured an idyllic auto-image of the countryside, seen as a bulwark protecting a community’s culture.6 These characteristics were also to be found in the Sardinian literary imagination. It entered into a crucial phase in the 19th century under the sway of the above-mentioned European trends and in coincidence with the assertion of an image of Italy centred on the North-South dichotomy, in which Sardinia was an integral part of the South. This was the tradition invoked by the new medium of cinema when it came into being at the dawn of the 20th century.                                                              2

Dickie 1999: 11. Schneider 1998. 4 Leerssen 2007d: 325; Idem 2007f: 340. 5 Leerssen 2007j: 412-413. 6 Ibid. 3

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An emblematic case of the process just described is constituted by the name which was most recurrent in this research: that of Nuoroborn author Grazia Deledda, repeatedly identified as the key Sardinian figure of the turn of the century. The analysis highlights the basic identity between her point of view and that of the Italian – rapidly followed by the international – reading public.7 From her poetic world emerges a primitive Sardinia exactly corresponding to the one recounted by European travellers in the 18th and 19th centuries, but what seemed to be a negative factor was transformed by her poetics into a positive resource. In Deledda’s writings, therefore, exoticism – the fascination of what is different – is configured as auto-exoticism. It should be borne in mind in this regard that although recent reassessments of Deledda’s work have identified a series of countervailing elements which may throw doubt on the accepted primitivist perspective,8 a comparison of her work with the selection and portrayal of its poetic world by cinema leads to different conclusions. The cinematic adaptation of her writings was in line with the primitivist viewpoint, stripping them of their most profound or contradictory reflections and selecting their most spectacular and exotic elements. It should also be added that subsequent Sardinian literature lived for a long time under the shadow of Deledda’s model, thus helping to perpetuate the image of a pastoral Sardinia. An examination of a series of literary texts from the second half of the 20th century has revealed some attempts to break this mould, or at least to seek alternatives, in some cases undermining the traditional Sardinian canon from within. Yet their film adaptations have frequently distorted their original content, indicating a desire to remain consistent with the island’s traditional image. The first of the emblematic cases in this respect is Gavino Ledda’s Padre padrone, which critics chose to analyse through the familar lens of the islandmainland dichotomy (standing for the ancient world against the modern world), an interpretation at odds with the author’s intentions but then amplified and given greater resonance by the international success of the film version made by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. It is an example of how cinema has preferred to betray the content of the original source in order to keep faith with a representational model of Sardinia which seems indispensable. The same may be said of other                                                              7 8

Paulis 2006. Marci 2006; Paulis 2008.

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texts which present an anthropological and landscape model different from that of the Barbagian shepherd, such as the novels Squarciò and Il figlio di Bakunìn, or works which reformulated the view of bandit culture from within (Gli arcipelaghi and Sonetàula): all stories published in the second half of the 20th century and made into films at different times, and with very different results. The power of the traditional repertoire of images reached well beyond literary fiction to influence various genres, each of which shared a seemingly indispensable viewpoint according to which Sardinia and its society were the antithesis of modernity and outside time. Particularly useful in this regard was an analysis of ethnographic and socio-cultural studies which were made into important films, such as Banditi a Orgoloso, Barbagia. La società del malessere and Disamistade. Such synergy between literary genres should come as no surprise since, as Susanna Paulis observed, quoting Clifford Geertz, the content of anthropological writing is developed in the same way as literature, essentially using style and rhetoric to convince the reader of the validity of a scientific investigation.9 It also emerged from the analysis that the attempt to change the image of Sardinia made by late 20th-century authors coincided with a fading of interest in European cultural interest in Sardinia. After the end of the heyday of travel literature – in the broadest sense of the term – the island basically stood as an anomaly in the variegated context of Italian culture, and the discourse on the subject was left to Sardinian artists and intellectuals operating on a national level. This development is even more marked in the cinema, since all the films of recent production have been made by Sardinians. This situation is very different from that regarding Sicily, for instance, whose standing in the literary and cinematic popular imagination has not only not declined in recent decades but may be said to have reached planetary proportions. Even clearer conclusions may be drawn from the discussion on cinema, starting from the premise that Sardinian films owe an enormous debt to literature, the primary source from which they draw the characters and plots to be re-created on the big screen. Cinema                                                             

9

Paulis 2006: 69. In this regard Paulis quotes Domenico Scafoglio, who speaks of the anthropologist as he who “passes from one room in his house to another” to explain the relationship between literature and anthropology (Paulis 2006: 70).

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may indeed be said to have gone further than literature, in that it has remained faithful to the traditional set of Sardinian images even in films not drawn from literary texts. More will be said below on the relationship between literary and cinematic narrative, but attention should be drawn at this point to a number of long-term trends revealed by this research. First, the Sardinian cinematic imagination has focused on and identified with the most frequent topoi in literature, the pastoral bandit setting, almost invariably neglecting the island’s more developed urban dimension. Cinema has thus embraced one of the cornerstones of the discourse on Sardinian identity, taking on board the preconception of an island split into two irreconcilable realities: on the one hand the archaic agricultural and pastoral interior, the ‘real’ Sardinia, and on the other the towns and coastal areas, understood as topoi of modernity and progress, places where original identity has been lost in the cultural mix produced by successive colonisations. Faced with this dichotomy, which was subsequently corroborated by renowned studies carried out in the 20th century, cinema decided to identify Sardinia with its archaic agricultural and pastoral dimension. This is borne out as much by productions written originally for cinema as by films based on literary texts (whether Deledda’s or not), from Briganti in Sardegna to Sonetàula, which means to say from the origins of ‘Sardinia on screen’ to the present day. The comparison between literary texts and their film versions is particularly revealing in this regard. Looking for ideas, film-makers generally confined their interest to stories centred on a shepherd or a bandit. When the literary text, despite its traditional setting, undermined or somehow departed from the traditional images, the film version usually differed, even radically, from the original in order to remove or dilute its detachment from the dominant model, thereby reinforcing its ethnocentric viewpoint. Predominance thus remained with the representation of Sardinia as a primitive and exotic land, as Grazia Deledda had prophetically envisaged in her Scenario sardo per il cinema as long ago as 1916.10 The main consequence of the process described above is the attribution in films of an absolute status to the literary imagination in terms of the portrayal of the Sardinian people and the representation of the landscape and settings. At the centre of the island universe                                                              10

Olla 2001.

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Sardinia on Screen

cinema puts the figure of the shepherd-bandit, in whom the characteristics considered typically Sardinian are identified and accumulated. This figure encapsulates a long tradition of thought which comprises the myths of the bucolic shepherd, the unbowed mountain rebel celebrated in classical sources but still alive in the thought of Braudel, the romantic bandit idolized by Byron, the Sardinian criminal characterised in the anthropological research of Niceforo and Orano, the barbaric soldier-hero of the Brigata Sassari, the living fossil of a primitive civilisation described by Cagnetta – all variations of an anthropological model, considered the historical product of the true Sardinia. In its exploration of this character’s potential cinema reacted above all to the stimuli produced by contemporary events and the cultural debate. At the dawn of the new art, as observed above, the first Sardinian films known to have survived were made in the wake of the military campaigns launched to stamp out banditry and the sensation they caused in national public opinion. From then on cinema kept a watchful eye on the ferments running through Italian society, as when it exploited the fame of the island’s fighting men in the First World War in order to present audiences with its exotic fascination. And in the 1960s and ‘70s, films revolving around banditry were produced to coincide with the recrudescence of kidnappings in a general atmosphere of tension characterised by studies, research, press investigations and parliamentary enquiries into the backward conditions in the Barbagia. Sardinia also asserted itself in the popular imagination as a holiday paradise, but still a land infested with bandits, which offered the opportunity to put a modern sheen on the myth of the exotic land. In other words, the perpetuation of the image of Sardinia depended on its repeated identification with historical events, but these were stripped of any real meaning because they were presented against a background of timelessness and immobilism. Where cinema relinquishes any engagement, confining itself to the creation of fantastic and exotic worlds of other times, exaggerating and distorting reality to the point of the grotesque, then recourse to the pastoral bandit-centred stereotype is its own justification: the cliché of the adventure centred on the figure of a(n anti-)hero is never questioned, it constitutes an ideal resource for the presentation of tried and tested narrative formulas. The films often feature the appearance of a stranger who performs the meta-narrative function of mediating between the story

Conclusion

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and the audience, as did the author in travel literature, accompanying the reader on each step in the lands he was exploring. Standing as one of the primary narrative devices used in literature to articulate the theme of otherness,11 the stranger plays a prominent role in Sardinianset films (from the out-and-out foreigner to the Italianised Sardinian who returns to the island and feels extraneous to his origins), where he functions as litmus paper in the ethnocentric discourse. Elias Desole’s astonishment (La grazia) at the desolation of the mountain landscape and the coldness of the local girls, the wonder shown by the sailors watching the Sardinian dance in Cainà, the modern, refined demeanour of the Italianised islanders Sebastiano (Marianna Sirca) and Saro (Faddjia. La legge della vendetta) compared to the coarseness of the Sardinians, the dismay expressed by Carabiniere Emilio at the archaic conditions he finds in the village of Coloras (La destinazione) – these are just a few examples of how the figure of the stranger gives voice to the trauma of the encounter with Sardinia. In this regard the misfortunes suffered by Emilio in La destinazione provide food for thought on how cinema renders the historical conflict between Sardinia and the outside world. In the eyes of the villagers of Coloras he is doubly foreign, since he is a mainlander and a Carabiniere to boot. The tragic story is mediated by the lost expression on the face of the young man who is unable to understand what is around him. Sardinian director Piero Sanna gives this character the task of expressing a critical judgement of the ills of his homeland. Emilio’s function as the director’s alter ego is reinforced by the introduction into the story – albeit in a marginal role – of local shepherd Costantino, who has utterly repudiated his roots by joining the Carabinieri; he thus represents the interiorisation of the outside viewpoint. In addition to characters, the portrayal of places has provided cinema with an essential instrument for communicating a precise image of Sardinian identity. The analysis of the films in the corpus allowed the identification of a series of visual solutions loaded with symbolic meaning. In the first place the exploration of the Sardinian world took the form of the visual and conceptual elaboration of a geographical space in which to project the Sardinian character type, as Smith pointed out in his research on national cultural myths (1999). Since the film’s protagonists were primitive and barbarous men,                                                              11

Albrecht 2007: 326.

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Sardinia could only be represented as a place with wild and magnificent landscapes, like frontier lands yet to be explored but hard to travel and fraught with danger – above all, a place unchanging and outside time. Another crucial element is the semantic reformulation of the concept of insularity, Sardinia’s most distinctive geographical feature. It was transformed from a simple physical fact into one of the most potent geo-symbols for expressing its otherness with respect to mainland Italy and the European continent. Physical separation became the symbol for the distance between the island civilisation and that of the world beyond the sea. That is why every story set on the island is essentially configured as a displacement12 into the unknown, an imaginary journey into an exotic and fascinating space, but above all a journey in time – the title chosen, not by chance, by Giuseppe Dessì for a documentary he made on Sardinia (Un itinerario nel tempo, 1963)13 – identifying the indissoluble link in the ‘journey in Sardinia’ between the experience of the encounter with a different world and the civilisational leap it entails for those who face it. Cinema repackaged this concept in symbolic form, as in the opening scene in Proibito, when the camera follows a coach entering an unknown landscape shrouded in an aura of apparent immobility. A similar device is used in Sequestro di persona, which shows the protagonists’ car driving off into the interior landscape until it disappears into the middle of the screen. The idea of combining the image of the journey into Sardinia with the annulment of time is a crucial one. It achieves one of its stylistic high points in La destinazione, in which the various means of transport used on the protagonist’s journey from the mainland to the island become progressively slower the nearer he gets to his destination; his movement in space takes place in a timeless dimension, as a metaphorical translation of the suspension of historical time in Sardinia. It emerged from the analysis of the films that in concentrating on the agricultural-pastoral setting, surprisingly and in some ways paradoxically, cinema identified Sardinia with the geo-symbol of its mountains. Writers had already pointed out the predominant role of the Gennargentu massif in the island’s geography, as had been the case                                                              12 13

Russo 2007. Olla 2008: 91.

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in various other contexts such as the Scottish Highlands, the counties of Connaught in the Irish tradition and Mount Etna in Sicily.14 The Gennargentu was unmistakably identified with Nuoro and the Barbagia, the area which for centuries had been considered the heart of Sardinia. Cinema reproduced the literary triad of SardegnaBarbagia-Gennargentu, making of the “mountains” (especially of the Supramonte di Orgosolo) the most significant image of the island’s landscape. Even in films where the sea has a presence, the plot always takes the audience back to the roots of Sardinia, to a re-exploration of the interior, reiterating the identification of the island with an essentially rural and mountainous space. That the portrayal of the Barbagia has a symbolic meaning and represents a centuries-old tradition is borne out by the fact that the geo-symbol of the mountains combines with a narrative that identifies the Barbagian people as the heirs of the rebels who stood up against the many attempts to colonise the island. In that sense the portrayal of the Barbagia on screen is an analogy of the effort of the local community to preserve its independence. The Barbagia is thus the physical locus of the nation’s fight against the invader, the space within whose perimeters the Sardinian people claim their right to exist as an independent race. Cinema thus provides an exemplary case of the symbolic representation of the mountain-freedom pairing, a conceptual entity running through 20th-century European thought.15 From that standpoint this research contribute to the study of geosymbols in the cinema, providing food for thought on how national tropes are articulated in spatial representations. In the context of the portrayal of Sardinia as a geo-symbol of the clash between subordinate and dominant forces, the analysis of the films depicting banditry, particularly in the 1960s and ‘70s, reveals a direct link with the thought of Antonio Gramsci, whose works at that time were at the centre of political and cultural debate. The vision of Italy presented in his writings was also characterised by a dichotomy: in the contrast between the Italian North and South Gramsci had identified a social and economic conflict left intact by the failure of the Risorgimento. This was a conflict in which the North took on the task of bringing (that is to say imposing) civilisation to the South,                                                             

14

Trevor-Roper 2012: 15-41. Paulis 2006: 174. Brilli 2006: 202. One instance is to be found in certain arguments set forth by Fernand Braudel in his La Mediterranée et le Monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. 15

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starting from the assumption that it was inferior, backward, equivalent (in his own words) to a “ball and chain” which hindered the proper development of the North.16 The Sardinian films dealing with banditry in the most heated years of the Marxist-influenced debate constituted a reworking of the writings and interpretations of authors such as Cagnetta, Fiori and Pigliaru, who in turn are known to have been strongly influenced by Gramsci.17 The portrayal of the Barbagia as the geo-symbol of a nation in revolt since ancient times was thus reinvented as the stage for the struggle of a subordinate Southern community against the new masters (the Italian state and its laws, produced by the political and economic hegemony of the North) and even taken up as a third-world banner, as exemplified in the film Sierra maestra (Giannarelli 1968). In this regard the films analysed here stand as illuminating examples of how the tropes of North-South and centre-periphery were expressed in the cinematic imagination of the late 20th century. The conclusions put forward thus far are also corroborated by films in which an urban setting replaces the traditional agriculturalpastoral representation. Where the Sardinian rebels are no longer invoked, the island’s geography is presented as a space which, though realistically explored by the camera, is fairly anonymous, comparable to any post-modern metropolis. A case in point is the work of Enrico Pau, whose urban setting – the city of Cagliari and its environs – is highly innovative, not to say revolutionary, in the context of Sardinian films. Yet the idea of modernity it evokes is not in itself identifiable with Sardinia, it is consistent with the universal metropolitan image. The setting of stories in places other than those familiar and typically Sardinian paves the way for an abandonment of the symbolic appeals inherent to the representation of the Barbagia. The same may be said of certain portrayals of beach scenes and the sea, since they imply a detachment from the irreconcilable dichotomy between the ideas of inland Sardinia and coastal Sardinia (that is to say between the “true” Sardinia and the world beyond the sea), giving way to a reinterpretation of the island space as a whole in post-colonial terms, as has been the case in a number of contemporary writings.18 Though it has certainly not relinquished the portrayal of the Sardinia of                                                             

16

See Urbinati 1998: 135-156. See Pigliaru 2008. 18 Marci 2006; Pala 2001. 17

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shepherds and bandits, when contemporary cinema does turn its gaze to the island’s other faces it seems able to generate some counterimages. A similar course of development may be observed in the case of the folklore which pervades every 19th- and 20th-century texts and has been considered indispensable for the depiction of Sardinian identity in films: specifically, festivities, dance and traditional costume. However, a comparison of how they are presented on the written page and on screen leads to a reflection regarding their function. Taking as an instance the emblematic case of Deledda’s writings, her exoticising descriptions of religious processions and village festivities are an effective narrative device for highlighting the spiritual essence of the Sardinian people through a self-celebrating national ritual. In travel literature such descriptions serve to express the symbolic meaning of certain forms of behaviour as well and they provide incontrovertible proof of the otherness of the Sardinian people. Writers thus succeeded in giving a direct impression of the world they observed, resorting to colourful similes and adjectives which bring to life the ‘spectacle’ of the Sardinian character. These tendencies were matched in cinema as well. Despite the demands of ‘realism’, folklore scenes were often restricted to outdoor shots, giving the impression that in a portrayal mediated by recognisable codified images it was sufficient to provide an appearance of authenticity rather than a faithful reproduction of reality. Take the peculiarities of traditional costume depicted in films: whatever its style or cut, it gives the wearer an unmistakable badge of identity and therefore acts as a marker of meaning immediately recognisable to anybody. In some cases the distance between the real world and the scene staged is so obvious and explicit – one instance is the Sardinian instruments playing a tarantella tune in Vendetta... sarda – that the festivity scene is reduced to spectacle for its own sake, has nothing to do with the plot, but is in any case culturally recognisable and consistent with the philosophy of ‘Sardinia ethnographic spectacle’. The film industry in its entirety is shot through with such practices, which confirms not only the importance of spectacularisation as an inherent component of audio-visual media, but also the essential role of national tropes as effective markers of meaning as well. The analysis revealed a direct correlation between the presence of folklore and the type of representation exhibited by a particular film. Folklore scenes tend to be absent in films whose

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evocation of Sardinian identity is not a primary objective and in stories with an urban setting, since the latter are considered a priori as not peculiar to the island. The analysis in this book also focused on the synergy established between literature and cinema in the 20th century, particularly in the selection of texts to be adapted to screen presentation. As already seen, the writings (fictional and otherwise) which have inspired the ‘Sardinian stories’ told on film are usually set in an agricultural-pastoral environment and feature a shepherd-bandit facing questions of honour. The selection of literary material by filmmakers thus took place in observance of the dominant cultural model. It is probably no coincidence that the first film based on a novel with a maritime setting, Squarciò, takes the audience to an indeterminate place, to a landscape devoid of any explicit reference to Sardinia, almost as if a story of men of the sea – even though they were bandits sui generis, as critics observed at the time – were by itself sufficient to free the film of any requirement to identify the setting as Sardinian. The same may be said of the intimist novel Il segreto dell’uomo solitario, an unusual work in the context of Deledda’s other writings, in which the Sardinian setting remains in shadow, a characteristic faithfully reproduced in the film version. The discussion of literary-based films produced since the 1980s, a decade which marked an important change in the Sardinian cultural debate, leads to a number of tentative conclusions. Novels such as Procedura and Il figlio di Bakunin sparked a number of films considered as the harbingers of a new Sardinian cinema. But it should be borne in mind that in the books from which films have recently been made – Gli arcipelaghi and Sonetàula – pastoral and bandit themes have prevailed once more, even though their presentation of the image of the shepherd is radically different. In other words, in its innate tendency to concoct fantastic stories and other worlds, cinema continues to prefer a demythicised bandit as a protagonist rather than portraying the life of an ordinary Sardinian. The same trend may be observed at an even more basic level in the choice of television productions such as L’ultima frontiera; starting from the model of a ‘suspect’ text like Caccia grossa, it brings to present-day homes the same myth of the primitive, exotic Sardinia which so excited the fantasies of the Italian public in the early 20th century. Turning to stories written specially for the cinema, it emerged from the analysis that until the 1980s most of them conformed to the

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trope of the traditional Sardinia. This tendency is still alive and well in the present day, as exemplified by La destinazione, a veritable compendium of traditional Sardinian images constructed around the insoluble dichotomy between the mainland (representing modern, civilised Italy and Europe) and the island (ancient, primitive, violent, etc.) exactly as depicted in the very early days by Cainà. L’isola e il continente. It is almost as if a hundred years of narratives and fantasies have been unable to undermine the accepted orthodoxy for the representation of Sardinian life in the cinema. By contrast, it also emerged that urban-set films, such as those made by directors Grimaldi, Pau, Mereu, and Marcias, have opened up alternative paths for the exploration of Sardinian society, this time in line with the trends of contemporary European cinema, characterised, as observed by Wendy Everett,19 by the theme of identity examined through the narrative device of the journey in space and time. A question also arises on the relationship between Sardinian film-makers and the image of Sardinia. While in the last century local directors formed a limited proportion of those making Sardinian films, in contemporary cinema they have come to make up the clear majority. This means that they have assumed the role of the main mediators of the island’s present-day cinematic image. But it does not mean that they express a single image of the island – far from it. The films of the new millennium – first of all Salvatore Mereu’s Ballo a tre passi and Sonetàula, Piero Sanna’s La destinazione, and Giovanni Columbu’s Arcipelaghi, and secondly the films made by Enrico Pau (La volpe e l’ape, Pesi leggeri and Jimmy della Collina), Antonello Grimaldi (Un delitto impossibile), Peter Marcias (Sono Alice), Enrico Pitzianti (Tutto torna) and, again, Mereu (Bellas mariposas) – represent contradictory tendencies. The first four films are marked by a prevalence of the ethnocentric viewpoint whereby Sardinia is still observed through the lens of its otherness. Yet in them an attempt is made, to different degrees and with varying results, to depart from the single gaze which always dominated Sardinian cinema to make way for other perspectives, asking questions about the world portrayed, diversifying the landscapes described and including characters and situations considered unusual in a Sardinian setting – such as the demystification of banditry and the law of the vendetta. They therefore                                                              19

Everett 2005a.

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seem engaged in practising the idea espoused by Deleuze,20 according to which the cinema, more than literature, has the power to integrate several visions and viewpoints in one image. At the same time, the other above-mentioned authors move in a different direction – especially Pau, who is probably the most important exponent of the counter-traditional tendency. Explicitly distancing himself from all ethno-cultural labels, he is building his work around the image of a post-modern metropolitan Sardinia in which the trope of the exotic island is replaced by the post-modern non-place. The ethnocentric viewpoint can thus be abandoned because the Sardinian setting, no matter how accurate and in some ways surprisingly convincing and original, does not generate a discussion on identity but paradoxically evokes an anonymous setting in which the typical markers of the island’s life (geo-symbols, Sardinian character, folklore, etc.) disappear from the screen. Contemporary cinema thus seems to be putting itself to the test, attempting a critical reworking of Sardinia’s culturally subordinate position, at times reinventing the potential of the ethnocentric discourse and remaining suspended between tradition and innovation, at others rejecting a priori any revisitation of traditional themes to favour a post-modern multi-cultural interpretation of identity, exactly as happens in other post-colonial contexts. This category may be said to contain not only the directors who reject any hagiographic depiction of Sardinia, but also recent films centred on pastoral bandit society. In this regard the work of Salvatore Mereu is probably the most representative of the development of contemporary Sardinian imagery in Italian cinema. Moving from deep-rooted cultural traditions, his films are successfully reshaping the image of Sardinia on screen.

                                                             20

Deleuze 1986.

Appendix

Brief Summary of Sardinian History Evidence of human habitation in Sardinia goes back to the early Stone Age. The island’s location in the middle of the sea that was the cradle of western civilisation brought a number of very different peoples to its shores throughout antiquity.1 The Bronze Age saw the birth of what was the most distinctive of the civilisations that developed on the island – nuragic civilisation, whose name comes from its most characteristic monument: the nuraghe.2 The development of nuragic society was accompanied by an increase in contact with a number of Mediterranean populations, some of which began to colonise the island. The arrival of the Phoenicians coincided with the formation of the first coastal urban settlements, of which remarkable archaeological remains are to be found to this day.3 In the 6th century BC the powerful Phoenician colony of Carthage annexed the rural areas in the south of the island to the territory under its control, and this hegemony lasted until 241 BC, when the Romans conquered Sardinia following the first Punic War.4 Though radically transformed, the island’s nuragic civilisation had continued to exist, but the Roman conquest brought about profound political and cultural changes. The Romanisation of the island was large in scale but uneven, achieving its greatest penetration in urban and agricultural areas. Roman domination continued until Sardinia was invaded by the Vandals in

1

Lilliu 1988. On the relationship between geography and history in Sardinia, see Le Lannou’s classic study, Pâtres et paysans de la Sardaigne (1941). 2 La civiltà nuragica (Milan: Electa 1990). 3 Bondì 1988c: 129-145 and in the same book: Idem 1988b: 147-171. 4 Bondì 1988a: 173-203; Meloni 1975.

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the 5th century AD, but subsequently the island was conquered by Justinian and entered the Byzantine orbit.5 The constant presence of foreign powers occupying the island has been adduced as the main cause of the failure to establish Sardinia as a nation-state.6 It was not until the early Middle Ages, from about 900 AD, that the Provincia Sardiniae, free of the Byzantine yoke, managed to organise itself into four independent kingdoms, known as Giudicati, bound by political and dynastic ties to the major powers of the time.7 Weighing heavily upon these kingdoms were the ambitions of the maritime republics of Pisa and Genoa, which eventually strangled all of them except the Giudicato d’Arborea – though under constant pressure from Genoa, it managed to survive as an independent sovereign state. This state of affairs was brought to an end in 1297 when Pope Boniface VIII handed the Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae – an entity existing on paper only – to King James II of Aragon as part of the settlement of the dispute between the House of Aragon and the Angevin Crown in Sicily. The Aragonese campaign to subdue the Regnum Sardiniae (1323) ushered in a period of almost uninterrupted war between the Aragonese armies and the Giudicato d’Arborea, which fought staunchly to defend its independent status.8 The Crown of Aragon gained the upper hand early in the 15th century, as a result of which it was able first to reduce the Giudicato d’Arborea to a vassal state and then annexe it to the Regnum Sardiniae in 1478. The territory of the Kingdom of Sardinia thus came to correspond with the coastline of the island itself, but by this time the Aragonese had come under the throne of Castile to form the Spanish Crown, held by the Most Catholic Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon.9 Sardinia thus remained for centuries under Spanish rule, which accentuated its detachment from Italian mainland states. Seriously impoverished and underpopulated after centuries spent under the Aragonese and Spanish crowns, the Kingdom of Sardinia was assigned to the Duchy of Savoy in 1720.10 The Spanish 5

Pani Ermini 1988: 297-327; Guillou 1988b: 329-371 and 1988a: 273-423. Brigaglia, Mastino and Ortu 2002. 6 Lilliu 2002; Cardia 1999. 7 Boscolo 1989 and Idem 1978; Artizzu 1985; Meloni 1988. 8 Casula 1997 and 1982. 9 Anatra 1984: 189-663; Anatra 2002. 10 On the history of this period see Anatra 1987; Berlinguer and Mattone 1998.

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cultural influence was still strong at that time, language included – spoken language, at least. The islanders spoke Sardinian, Castilian was still widely used in official documents and the introduction of Italian met with initial resistance. Until 1827 the Kingdom remained under the indigenous medieval legal code known as the Carta de Logu.11 Aside from the island’s evident economic problems, this exemplified the Kingdom’s ancient cultural characteristics, which did not easily bend to changes attempted by the House of Savoy.12 The first half of the 19th century was marked by increasing government pressure for change, manifested by the introduction of measures radically different from Sardinian tradition, designed to stimulate socio-economic modernisation: one such reform was the privatisation of common land under the 1820 Editto delle Chiudende (Edict of Enclosure).13 The key factor in this reformist ambition on the part of the Sardinian ruling class was the spontaneous relinquishment of formal autonomy by the Regnum Sardiniae and its consequent annexation to Piedmont – an act known as the “perfect fusion”, accomplished in 1847.14 Despite hopes for rapid improvement in the island’s condition in the Italian political context, the fusion proved to be the harbinger of further difficulties, which were soon to be augmented by the problems created by the advent of the Kingdom of Italy.15 By the beginning of the 20th century Sardinian society was undergoing profound changes, and it found a motive for particular passion and collective pride in the island’s contribution to the Italian war effort in the First World War with the heroic exploits of the Brigata Sassari, which were immediately elevated to a myth.16 The aftermath of the war saw the foundation of Partito Sardo d’Azione, a movement aspiring to political autonomy and with it the implementation of much-needed modernisation plans. The political and ideological struggle for regional self-government and the debate on Sardinian identity and the defence of its roots dominated the rest of 11

Casula 1995. Marci 2006: 106-114. 13 Mattone 1998: 111. 14 Birocchi 1998: 133-138 and 143-145. 15 Ortu 1998: 201-288 and Di Felice 1998: 289-419. 16 Fois 2006. 12

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the century, though no real doubt was ever cast on the island’s membership of the Italian state. The profound transformations undergone by the island before the Second World War have been followed ever since by relentless socio-economic development. The Autonomous Region of Sardinia currently has a population of just over a million and a half, for whom unemployment has been and remains a serious problem, particularly among young people. Although living standards on the island are not as high as in northern Italy, it is fully integrated in the modern world and the globalisation currently characterising it. Yet it is known on the Italian mainland and abroad primarily as an exotic tourist destination – the beauty and variety of its landscapes and the rediscovery of its traditions under the impetus of mass tourism make it a focus of considerable fascination. A rapid perusal of any tourist brochure will suffice to ascertain that the tropes canonised in the European cultural tradition continue to bulk large in all the media of mass communication.

 

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Wagner, Max Leopold. 1907. ‘Sulcis und Iglesiente. Ein Reisebild aus Sardinien’ in Globus: Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde XCII (1): 4-11. ——. 1908a. ‘Das Gennargéntu-Gebiet. Ein Reisebild aus Sardinien’ in Globus: Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde XCIII (16): 105-108. ——. 1908b. ‘Das Nuorese. Ein Reisebild aus Sardinien’ in Globus: Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde XCIII (16): 245-249. ——. 1908c. ‘Das Nuorese. Ein Reisebild aus Sardinien’ in Globus: Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde XCIII (16): 266-269. ——. 1908d. ‘Reisebilder aus Sardinien. IV: Sárrabus und Ogliastra’ in Globus: Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde XCIV (3): 40-45. ——. 1908e. ‘Reisebilder aus Sardinien. V: Das Campidano’ in Globus: Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde XCIV (4): 57-61. ——. 1908f. ‘Reisebilder aus Sardinien. Temotal, Macomér und Tirsotal’ in Globus: Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde XCIV (5): 71-76. ——. 1913-1914. ‘Die Barbagia in Sardinien’ in Deutsche Rundschau für Geographie XXXVI: 1-13. ——. 1921. Das Ländliche Leben Sardiniens im Spiegel der Sprache. Kulturhistoriscsprachliche Untersuchungen. Heidelberg: Wörter und Sachen, Kulturhistorische Zeitschrift für Sprachund Sachforschung, Beiheft 4, Carl Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung. ——. 1996. La vita rustica della Sardegna riflessa nella lingua, edited by Giulio Paulis. Italian translation of the work Das Ländliche Leben Sardiniens im Spiegel der Sprache. Kulturhistorisc-sprachliche Untersuchungen [1921]. Nuoro: Ilisso. ——. 1997. La lingua sarda, edited by Giulio Paulis. New edition of the work La lingua sarda. Storia spirito e forma [1950]. Nuoro: Ilisso. ——. 2001. Immagini di viaggio dalla Sardegna, edited by Giulio Paulis. Nuoro: Ilisso. Wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ. 2000. Spostare il centro del mondo. La lotta per le libertà culturali. Rome: Meltemi. Original title: Moving the Centre. The struggle for cultural freedom [1993]. James Currey Ltd. Winter, Jay. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wintle, Michael (ed.). 2006. Image into Identity. Constructing and Assigning Identity in a Culture of Modernity. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Young, Arthur. 1792. Travels in France and Italy during the Years 1787-88-89. London and Toronto: J. Dent and Sons Ltd; New York E.P. Dutton & Co. Zagarrio, Vito. 2001. Cinema italiano anni novanta, 2nd edn. Venezia: Marsilio. Zucca, Raimondo. 1988. ‘Le Civitates Barbariae e l’occupazione militare della Sardegna: aspetti e confronti con l’Africa’ in L’Africa romana: atti del 5. Convegno di studio, 11-13 dicembre 1987, Sassari (Italia). Sassari, Università degli studi di Sassari, Dipartimento di Storia, [4] c. di tav.: ill. Sassari: Pubblicazioni del Dipartimento di Storia dell’Università di Sassari: 349-373. Online at: http://eprints.uniss.it/3684/ (consulted 12.09.2012).

Filmography

The films are ordered in two different lists. The first is alphabetical, the second chronological. TV productions are followed by “*”. If the film is based on a literary text, author’s name and title follow between square brackets. Alphabetical list A Alba serena in un tramonto di sangue (Mario Celada, 1920). Altura (Mario Sequi, 1949). Amore rosso (Aldo Vergano, 1952) [Grazia Deledda, Marianna Sirca, 1915]. Arcipelaghi (Giovanni Columbu, 2001) [Maria Giacobbe, Gli arcipelaghi, 1995]. B Ballo a tre passi (Salvatore Mereu, 2003). Banditi a Orgosolo (Vittorio De Seta, 1961) [Franco Cagnetta, Inchiesta su Orgosolo, 1954]. Barbagia. La società del malessere (Carlo Lizzani, 1969) [Giuseppe Fiori, La società del malessere, 1968]. Bellas mariposas (Salvatore Mereu, 2012) [Sergio Atzeni, Bellas mariposas, 1996]. Bill il Taciturno (Max Hunter [Massimo Pupillo], 1966). C Caccia grossa (Raffaello di Palma, 1981). Cainà. L’isola e il continente (Gennaro Righelli, 1922). Canne al vento* (Mario Landi, 1958) [Grazia Deledda, Canne al vento, 1913]. Cenere (Febo Mari 1916) [Grazia Deledda, Cenere, 1903]. …con amore, Fabia (In liebe, Fabia)* (Maria Teresa Camoglio, 1993, Germany) [Grazia Deledda, Cosima, 1937]. D Delitto per amore (L’edera) (Augusto Genina, 1950) [Grazia Deledda, L’edera, 1908]. Disamistade* (Gianfranco Cabiddu, 1988). Disegno di sangue* (Gianfranco Cabiddu, 2006). Dove volano i corvi d’argento (Piero Livi, 1976). E El Che Guevara (Paolo Heusch, 1969).

560

Sardinia on Screen

F Faddjia. La legge della vendetta (Roberto Bianchi Montero, 1949). Fusil chargé (Fucile carico) (Carlo Lombardini, 1971, France). I I briganti in Sardegna (Giovanni Vitrotti, 1905). Il disertore* (Giuliana Berlinguer, 1983) [Giuseppe Dessì, Il disertore, 1961]. Il figlio di Bakunìn (Gianfranco Cabiddu, 1997) [Sergio Atzeni, Il figlio di Bakunìn, 1988]. Il richiamo della terra (Giovannino Bissi, 1928). Il segreto dell’uomo solitario (Ernesto Guida, 1989) [Grazia Deledda, Il segreto dell’uomo solitario, 1921]. Il trionfo della vita (Antonio Gravina, 1922). In terra sarda (Romano Luigi Borgnetto, 1920). I protagonisti (Marcello Fondato, 1968). J Jimmy della Collina (Enrico Pau, 2006) [Massimo Carlotto, Jimmy della Collina, 2002]. L La calda vita (Florestano Vancini, 1963). La destinazione (Piero Sanna, 2003). La grande vallata (Angelo Dorigo, 1960). La grazia (Aldo De Benedetti, 1929) [Grazia Deledda, Di notte, in Racconti sardi, 1894]. La volpe e l’ape (Enrico Pau, 1996). Le due leggi (Eduardo Mulargia, 1963). Le vie del peccato (Giorgio Pastina, 1946) [Grazia Deledda, Dramma, in Il fanciullo nascosto, 1928]. L’ultima frontiera* (Franco Bernini, 2006) [Giulio Bechi, Caccia grossa, 1900]. M Marcella (Carmine Gallone, 1921). Marianna Sirca* (Guglielmo Morandi, 1965). Miguel (Salvatore Mereu, 1999). N Nel cerchio (Gianni Minello, 1977). O Oro nero (Enrico Guazzoni, 1942).1 P Padre padrone (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1977) [Gavino Ledda, Padre padrone, 1975]. 1

According to some sources the director is Camillo Mastrocinque (Olla 2008: 131).

Filmography

561

Panas (Marco Antonio Pani, 2006). Pelle di bandito (Piero Livi, 1969). Pesi leggeri (Enrico Pau, 2001). Prima della fucilazione (Salvatore Mereu, 1997). Proibito (Mario Monicelli, 1954) [different Grazia Deledda’s works such as Colombi e sparvieri, 1912 and La madre, 1920]. S Sa jana (Massimo Pupillo, 1980) [Giuseppe Fiori, Baroni in laguna, 1961]. Scarabea (Hans Jürgen Syberberg, 1969, German Federal Republic). Sequestro di persona (Gianfranco Mingozzi, 1968). Sierra maestra (Ansano Giannarelli, 1968). Sonetàula (Salvatore Mereu, 2008) [Giuseppe Fiori, Sonetàula, 1962, 2000]. Sono Alice (Peter Marcias, 2005). Sos laribiancos – I dimenticati (Piero Livi, 2001) [Francesco Masala, Quelli dalle labbra bianche, 1962]. T The Wide Blue Road [La grande strada azzurra] (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1957) [Franco Solinas, Squarciò, 1956]. Tontolini e l’asino (Baldassarre Negroni, 1911). Tutto torna (Enrico Pitzianti, 2008). U Una casa sotto il cielo (Roberto Locci, 1993). Una questione d’onore (Luigi Zampa, 1966). Un delitto impossibile (Antonello Grimaldi, 2001) [Salvatore Mannuzzu, Procedura, 1988]. Uomini contro (Francesco Rosi, 1970) [Emilio Lussu, Un anno sull’altipiano, 1938]. V Vendetta... sarda (Mario Mattòli, 1952). Y Ybris* (Gavino Ledda, 1984). Chronological list 1900 I briganti in Sardegna (Giovanni Vitrotti, 1905). Tontolini e l’asino (Baldassarre Negroni, 1911). Cenere (Febo Mari, 1916) [Grazia Deledda, Cenere, 1903]. Alba serena in un tramonto di sangue (Mario Celada, 1920). In terra sarda (Romano Luigi Borgnetto, 1920). Marcella (Carmine Gallone, 1921). Cainà. L’isola e il continente (Gennaro Righelli, 1922). Il trionfo della vita (Antonio Gravina, 1922).

562

Sardinia on Screen

1925 Il richiamo della terra (Giovannino Bissi, 1928). La grazia (Aldo De Benedetti, 1929) [Grazia Deledda, Di notte, in Racconti sardi, 1894]. Oro nero (Enrico Guazzoni, 1942).2 1945 Le vie del peccato (Giorgio Pastina, 1946) [Grazia Deledda, Dramma, in Il fanciullo nascosto, 1928]. Altura (Mario Sequi, 1949). Faddjia. La legge della vendetta (Roberto Bianchi Montero, 1949). Delitto per amore (L’edera) (Augusto Genina, 1950) [Grazia Deledda, L’edera, 1908]. Amore rosso (Aldo Vergano, 1952) [Grazia Deledda, Marianna Sirca, 1915]. Vendetta... sarda (Mario Mattòli, 1952). Proibito (Mario Monicelli, 1954) [different Grazia Deledda’s works such as Colombi e sparvieri, 1912 and La madre, 1920]. The Wide Blue Road [La grande strada azzurra] (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1957) [Franco Solinas, Squarciò, 1956]. Canne al vento* (Mario Landi, 1958) [Grazia Deledda, Canne al vento, 1913]. 1960 Banditi a Orgosolo (Vittorio De Seta, 1961); [Franco Cagnetta, Inchiesta su Orgosolo, 1954]. La calda vita (Florestano Vancini, 1963). Le due leggi (Eduardo Mulargia, 1963). Marianna Sirca* (Guglielmo Morandi, 1965). Una questione d’onore (Luigi Zampa, 1966). I protagonisti (Marcello Fondato, 1968). Sequestro di persona (Gianfranco Mingozzi, 1968). Sierra maestra (Ansano Giannarelli, 1968). Barbagia. La società del malessere (Carlo Lizzani, 1969) [Giuseppe Fiori, La società del malessere, 1968]. El Che Guevara (Paolo Heusch, 1969). Pelle di bandito (Piero Livi, 1969). Scarabea (Hans Jürgen Syberberg, 1969, German Federal Republic). 1970 Uomini contro (Francesco Rosi, 1970); [Emilio Lussu, Un anno sull’altipiano, 1938]. Fusil chargé (Fucile carico) (Carlo Lombardini, 1971, France). Dove volano i corvi d’argento (Piero Livi, 1976). Nel cerchio (Gianni Minello, 1977). Padre padrone (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1977) [Gavino Ledda, Padre padrone, 1975].

2

According to some sources the director is Camillo Mastrocinque (Olla 2008: 131).

Filmography

563

1980 Sa jana (Massimo Pupillo, 1980) [Giuseppe Fiori, Baroni in laguna, 1961]. Caccia grossa (Raffaello di Palma, 1981). Il disertore* (Giuliana Berlinguer, 1983) [Giuseppe Dessì, Il disertore, 1961]. Ybris* (Gavino Ledda, 1984). Disamistade* (Gianfranco Cabiddu, 1988). Il segreto dell’uomo solitario (Ernesto Guida, 1989) [Grazia Deledda, Il segreto dell’uomo solitario, 1921]. 1990 …con amore, Fabia (In liebe, Fabia)* (Maria Teresa Camoglio, 1993, Germany) [Grazia Deledda, Cosima, 1937]. Una casa sotto il cielo (Roberto Locci, 1993). La volpe e l’ape (Enrico Pau, 1996). Il figlio di Bakunìn (Gianfranco Cabiddu, 1997) [Sergio Atzeni, Il figlio di Bakunìn, 1991]. Prima della fucilazione (Salvatore Mereu, 1997). Miguel (Salvatore Mereu, 1999). 2000 Arcipelaghi (Giovanni Columbu, 2001) [Maria Giacobbe, Gli arcipelaghi, 1995]. Pesi leggeri (Enrico Pau, 2001). Sos laribiancos – I dimenticati (Piero Livi, 2001) [Francesco Masala, Quelli dalle labbra bianche, 1962]. Un delitto impossibile (Antonello Grimaldi, 2001) [Salvatore Mannuzzu, Procedura, 1988]. Ballo a tre passi (Salvatore Mereu, 2003). La destinazione (Piero Sanna, 2003). Sono Alice (Peter Marcias, 2005). Disegno di sangue* (Gianfranco Cabiddu, 2006). Jimmy della Collina (Enrico Pau, 2006) [Massimo Carlotto, Jimmy della Collina, 2002]. L’ultima frontiera* (Franco Bernini, 2006) [Giulio Bechi, Caccia grossa, 1900]. Panas (Marco Antonio Pani, 2006). Sonetàula (Salvatore Mereu, 2008) [Giuseppe Fiori, Sonetàula, 1962, 2000]. Tutto torna (Enrico Pitzianti, 2008). 2010 Bellas mariposas (Salvatore Mereu, 2012) [Sergio Atzeni, Bellas mariposas, 1996].

 

Index of Names

Accardo, Aldo 49n Agazzi, Elena 213n Akert, Robin M. 16n Alberti, Leandro 45 Aleo, Jorge 63n Alighieri, Dante (see Dante) Altea, Giuliana 160n-161n, 258n, 417n Anatra, Bruno 536n Anderson, Benedict 11 Angioni, Giulio 52n, 54n, 146n, 163n, 263n, 291n, 299, 299n, 451n Angius, Pietro Giovanni 95, 95n, 96 Angius, Vittorio 94, 115, 115n, 220, 268 Anonymous (author of Der Deutsche Sergeant unter den Sarden) 54n, 64n, 68n, 83n, 86n, 103n, 104, 104n, 106n, 117n Antonioni, Michelangelo 351 Antonutti, Omero 460n Aragó Cabañas, Antonio Maria 203n Araolla, Girolamo 294, 294n Aristotle 20 Arndt, Astrid 26n, 63n, 76n, 89n, 158n, 314n Aronson, Elliot 16n Arquer, Sigismondo 24, 25n, 45-46, 46n, 52, 62-63, 63n, 70n, 7980, 80n, 83, 83n, 105, 105n, 113n, 117, 117n, 118, 118n, 127n, 268, 270, 270n, 274, 293, 294n Artizzu, Francesco 536n Artizzu, Lucio 52n, 54n, 59n Asor Rosa, Alberto 141n Asproni, Giorgio 49, 49n Atienza, Miguel 394 Atzeni, Sergio 40, 144, 144n, 153n, 154n, 157, 157n, 177, 177n,

194n, 198, 198n, 199, 199n, 200n, 201, 201n, 202-203, 203n, 204, 204n, 205, 208, 208n, 209-210, 210n, 211, 244-245, 299, 299n, 301, 361, 371, 428, 428n, 429-430, 431n, 433, 503, 509, 509n, 510, 510n-511n, 512, 512n, 513, 513n, 515n-518n Augé, Marc 205n Aventi, Francesco 59, 60n Bachis, Francesco 146n, 163n, 291n, 451n Ballero, Antonio 160, 160n Balzac, Honoré de 55, 66, 127n Baresani, Franz 168, 168n Baresani, Sardus 168, 168n Bartolomeo, Beatrice 36n Baumann, Tania 165n, 181n-182n, 189n, 241n-242n, 251n-252n, 254n, 259, 259n, 261, 261n, 268n, 313n, 370n, 404n, 412n, 421n, 434n, 498n Beccini, Franco 364, 364n, 365 Bechi, Giulio 47n-48n, 61, 61n, 67n, 71n, 80, 80n, 82, 95n-96n, 100, 100n-103n, 127n, 131n, 133, 133n, 183, 183n, 211, 211n, 212, 262n, 331, 383, 397-398, 404, 451, 503, 503n, 506n-507n Beller, Manfred 11n-12n, 16n-17n, 20n, 25n-26n, 89n, 112n, 315n, 374n Bellieni, Camillo 218, 218n, 219, 263, 263n, 264, 264n, 265, 265n, 266 Bellocchio, Marco 378

566 Benedetti, Achille 233 Bennet, James Henry 58, 58n Benson, R.N. 52n Berlinguer, Giuliana 41n, 142, 229, 422, 460, 490 Berlinguer, Luigi 144n, 540n Bernabé, Jean 300n Bernini, Franco 330, 339, 348, 376, 397, 503 Bhabha, Homi 15n, 288n Bianchi Montero, Roberto 316, 401, 406, Biasi, Giuseppe 160, 258, 264, 278, 416-417, 470, 473 Birocchi, Italo 537 Bissi, Giovannino 312n Bizet, Georges 108n Bjoernstaehl, Jacob Jorna 114n Bodenhoff Salmon, Annette 139n Bondì, Sandro Filippo 539n Bonsaver, Guido 36n Bonu, Peppe, 95, 134 Bordwell, David 33n, 306n Borgnetto, Romano Luigi 382 Boscolo, Alberto, 47n, 52n-58n, 60n, 66n, 68n, 127n, 536n Bossaglia, Rossana 161n Botter, Francesco Luigi 59 Boullier, Auguste 55n, 57, 57n, 70n, 77, 77n, 127n, 285n Bowlby, John 260n Braudel, Fernand 40, 191, 191n, 192, 238n, 526, 529n Brázda, Oki 140n Bresciani, Antonio 40, 48, 56, 56n, 66, 67n, 70n, 71, 71n, 78n, 85, 85n, 86n, 88, 88n, 92, 92n, 95n, 104n, 108, 108n, 116, 116n, 119n, 128, 128n, 129n, 247, 249, 249n, 259, 269, 281n, 283n, 284, 284n, 419, 507 Brigaglia, Aldo 139n Brigaglia, Manlio 46n, 53n, 54n, 61n, 62n, 140n, 146n, 206n, 207, 211n, 231n-233n, 243n, 288n, 351, 351n, 374, 425, 425n, 536 Brilli, Attilio 25n, 529n

Sardinia on Screen Brunetta, Gian Piero, 36n, 37n Bullegas, Sergio 265n-267n Burdett, George 55, 55n, 119n-120n, 123n, 131n Burton, Richard 352 Bussi, G. Elisa 12n, 28n, 30, 30n, 31, 31n-32n, 308n Buxton, Edward North 59, 59n, 107, 107n, 131n Byron, George Gordon 94, 530 Cabiddu, Gianfranco 244n, 336, 360362, 387, 391, 395, 401, 428, 428n, 429, 431 Cabiddu, Myriam 21n-22n, 52n, 54n56n, 58n-59n, 64n, 68n, 84n, 86n, 87n, 107n Caboni, Giuseppe 235n Caddeo, Rinaldo 189n Cagnetta, Franco 36, 36n, 40, 146, 146n, 172, 192, 192n, 193, 193n, 212n, 223-224, 224n225n, 226, 226n, 227, 227n, 228-229, 249n, 256, 256n, 258, 258n, 342, 342n, 249, 342, 342n, 349, 374, 387, 387n, 388, 388n, 389, 393n394n, 403, 526, 530 Caltagirone, Benedetto 56n, 146n, 163n, 291n, 451n Camboni Alba, Pietro 263n Cambosu, Salvatore 140-141, 141n, 150, 150n, 232n Camoglio, Maria Teresa 41n, 312, 356-357, 414 Capolicchio, Lino 461n Capuana, Luigi 73n Cara, Antonio 411n Cardea, Ugo 378n Cardia, Mariarosa 288n Cardia, Umberto 48n, 293n, 536n Carlotto, Massimo 366, 366n, 367, 367n Carr, John 52, 52n Carta, Luciano 49n, Carta, Marco 420n Carta, Maria, 378, 419, 423 Casadio, Gianfranco 325n

Index of Names   Castel, Lou 378 Casula, Francesco Cesare 536n Cattabiani, Alfredo 251n Cattaneo, Carlo 115 Celada, Mario 312n Cerina, Giovanna 51n Cetti, Francesco 114, 114n Chamoiseau, Patrick 203, 300n Charles Emmanuel III 114 Chiesi, Gastone 95-96, 96n, 510 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 68, 110, 309, 373n, 395n Cirese, Alberto Mario 15n Ciusa, Francesco 160, 248, 260, 260n, 423, 497 Ciusa, Maria Elvira 160n, 416n-417n Cocco, Marcello M. 45n Columbu, Giovanni, 143, 229, 241n, 339, 396, 401, 533 Conde y Delgado de Molina, Rafael 203n Confiant, Raphaël 300n Coppola, Francis Ford 35n Corbeddu, Giovanni 95 Corbetta, Carlo 60, 60n, 72n, 77n, 83n-85n, 87, 105, 105n, 107, 107n, 127n, 129n, 131n, 132n, 285n Corraine, Battista 220n, 276 Cortellazzo, Sara 36n Cossu, Antonio 241n Cossu, Gavino 271n Cossu, Marcello 271n Cossu, Tatiana 146n, 163n, 291n, 451n Costa, Enrico 39, 50, 50n, 94, 94n, 97, 97n, 98, 98n, 104n, 108, 108n, 127n, 130, 130n, 238n, 244n, 268n, 272n, 274, 274n, 275, 275n Crawford Flitch J.E., 119n, 139, 139n, 148, 148n, 150n-151n, 156, 156n, 169, 169n-170n, 176, 176n, 177, 177n, 186n, 187n, 188, 188n, 194, 194n, 219, 219n, 220n, 221, 221n, 246n, 247, 247n, 248, 250, 262n, 269, 269n, 270n, 272n,

567 277n, 278, 278n-280n, 286n287n, 417 Creuzé de Lesser Auguste, 25 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 496 Dante 105, 105n, 175 Da Passano, Mario 212 Da Re, Maria Gabriella 263n Davey, Mary 56 De Benedetti, Aldo 324, 329, 401, 469 De Centellas, Gaspar 45n De Cordova, Richard 305n-306n Deffenu, Attilio 234, 234n, 380, 381n De Giovanni, Neria 140n Degler, Frank 12n, 14n, 28n-29n, 35n, 38n, 303n De Gubernatis, Angelo 50, 50n, 91n, 110, 112, 149n, 155n, 186n, 214n, 216, 216n, 295n Deledda, Andrea 218 Deledda, Grazia 19, 28, 38-39, 41-42, 50, 50n, 51-52, 61n, 73, 73n, 75, 91n, 102, 102n, 109-110, 110n, 111-112, 112n-113n, 115, 115n, 116, 116n, 125, 128, 139, 139n, 140, 140n, 141, 145, 148, 148n, 149, 150n-151n, 155, 155n, 160, 160n, 162, 164n, 166n, 167, 167n, 168, 168n, 171, 174, 174n, 176, 184, 184n, 186187, 187n-188n, 194, 195n, 197n-198n, 206n, 213-214, 214n, 215, 215n-216n, 217218, 218n, 245, 245n, 248, 248n, 250, 250n, 252-253, 253n-254n, 258, 258n, 259, 259n, 262, 262n, 269, 269n, 271n, 272, 272n, 273, 273n, 278, 278n, 280, 280n, 295, 295n, 296, 296n, 297, 300301, 310, 311n, 313n, 319, 323-324, 324n, 325, 325n, 327-329, 332, 334, 344, 347, 353, 356, 356n, 358, 358n, 370, 383-384, 384n, 385, 387,

568 403, 409, 411-418, 438, 438n, 442, 444, 444n, 445, 445n, 470, 470n, 472-473, 473n, 474, 474n, 475, 475n, 488, 492, 523, 525, 531-532 Deledda, Nicolina 168, 168n Delessert, Édouard 56, 56n, 119n, 127n, 282n Deleuze, Gilles 35, 534, 534n Delitala, Enrica 50n Della Marmora, Alberto Ferrero 39, 41, 48, 53, 53n, 54-55, 65, 65n, 71n, 72, 72n, 73-74, 74n, 78, 78n, 79, 84, 84n, 87, 87n, 92n, 95n, 101n, 103, 103n104n, 105, 105n, 107, 107n108n, 114, 114n-115n, 119n123n, 126n-127n, 128, 128n, 130n-132n, 134n, 183, 187, 187n, 249, 251n, 282n, 283, 283n, 284, 284n-285n Delogu, Luigi 95, 95n, 96 De Rooy, Ronald 323n, 383n Derosas, Francesco 95, 95n, 96-98, 383, 395 De Seta, Vittorio 36, 146, 228, 317, 330, 378-379, 382, 387-388, 442, 457, 488 Dessì, Giuseppe 39, 82, 140-142, 142n, 156, 156n, 159n, 165, 165n, 167n, 169n-170n, 171, 171n, 172, 172n-173n, 176, 179, 180n, 184, 184n-185n, 194n, 198, 198n, 229, 251n, 253, 253n, 254, 254n, 255, 261-262, 265, 265n-267n, 324n, 362n, 370n, 415, 422, 422n-423n, 460, 490-493, 494n, 496n-497n, 521, 528 Dettori, Antonietta 294n Deupmann, Christoph 373n Dickie, John 26n, 27, 27n, 39n, 48n, 315n, 383n, 522n Di Felice, Maria Luisa 537n Dissanayake, Wimal 12n, 308n Domenech, Emmanuel 57, 57n, 65, 65n, 85n-86n, 91n, 95n, 119n121n, 127n-128n Don Backy 459n

Sardinia on Screen Dongu, Maria Grazia 21n, 22, 22n Dore, Franciscu 263n Doria, Brancaleone 113n, 267 Duse, Eleonora 452 Dusi, Nicola 36n Dyserinck, Hugo 12, 12n Eberhardt, Isabelle 140n, 197n, 258n Edwardes, Charles 47n, 59, 59n, 68n, 71n, 73, 73n-74n, 77, 77n78n, 81, 81n, 92n, 95n, 99n, 103n, 105, 105n, 115, 115n, 118n, 121, 121n, 122, 122n, 123, 123n, 127n, 129n, 132n, 285n-286n, 309n-310n, 328, 364n, 373n Einstein, Albert 370 Eleonora d’Arborea 94, 94n, 110, 113, 113n, 114, 114n, 115116, 218, 253, 261-262, 262n, 264-267 Errera, Eglal 140n Everett, Wendy 501n, 533, 533n F.O. 58n Falchetto, Francesco 378 Fanciulli, Giuseppe 263n Fara, Giovanni Francesco 45, 46n, 113n, 130, 275, 285n, 293 Farris, Giuseppe 212, 212n, 213, 213n Fellini, Federico 431n Ferrero, Guglielmo 93n, 134n Ferri, Enrico 60, 60n, 444 Ferroni, Giulio 140n Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 21 Figari, Filippo 160, 272n, 442, 442n Fiori, Giuseppe, 36, 141, 141n, 143, 143n, 147, 147n, 154n, 166n, 168n, 172, 173n, 180, 180n, 194n, 224, 226n, 229, 229n, 235, 235n, 236-237, 237n, 239, 239n, 240, 244, 244n, 318n, 341n, 342, 349, 355, 355n, 380n, 389, 398-399, 403, 415, 426, 465, 482, 482n, 530

Index of Names   Floris, Antioco 361n-362n, 428n, 429n-431n Foa, Vittorio 459 Fois, Giuseppina 231n, 232, 232n234n, 380n-381n, 537 Fois, Marcello 189, 397, 397n, 508 Fois, Vanni 378 Follemberg, Carl (see Neigebaur, Johann Daniel Ferdinand) Fondato, Marcello 229n, 354, 378, 394 Forester, Thomas 47n, 55, 55n, 65, 65n-66n, 68n, 73, 73n, 86n, 91n, 99n, 118n, 131n, 282n, 284, 284n, 373n Freud, Sigmund 492 Fues (Fuos), Joseph 41, 51-52, 52n, 54, 63, 63n, 64, 67, 70n, 79, 83n-84n, 86n, 89, 117n, 119n, 121n, 282n, 401, 401n Gallone, Carmine 310 Galt, John 52, 52n, 85 Gamel Holten, Marie 139, 139n, 211n, 219, 220n-222n, 234n, 238n, 245n, 247n, 262, 262n, 272n, 277n-278n, 286n, 296n Gariazzo, Mario 347n Gastaldi Millelire, Pasquale 52, 52n Geertz, Clifford 524 Gellner, Ernest 11n Genina, Augusto 320, 326, 329, 346347 Gessner, Salomon 93, 93n Giacobbe, Maria 139n, 142, 142n143n, 152, 152n, 163n, 172173, 173n, 180, 225n, 228n, 229, 241, 241n, 251, 251n252n, 255, 255n, 256, 256n, 339, 396, 396n, 404, 419n, 420, 421n, 462 Gialeto 186n Giannarelli, Ansano 350n, 393, 530 Giannone, Antonella 29 Gian Rocco, 347n Gibbs, John 33n, 306n Gibson, Mary 60n Gibson, Mel 31

569 Ginsborg, Paul 335n, 408n Goobody, Alex 501n Gorky, Maxim 253 Goüin, Leon 58, 58n Gramsci, Antonio 15n, 56, 56n, 61, 61n, 94, 94n, 147n, 156n, 234, 234n, 238, 238n, 239, 342, 349, 349n, 353n, 383, 383n, 498n, 529-530 Gramsci, Carlo 238 Gramsci, Teresina 383 Grandfils, Charles Joseph 58, 58n Gravina, Antonio 312n, 360 Grimaldi, Antonello 144, 244n, 362, 533 Guazzoni, Enrico 360, 424 Guillou, André 536n Guiso, Angela 206n, 217n, 245n, 253n, 262n, 311n Gunning, Tom 304n Hanska, Evelina 55 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 21 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 20 Hermet, Guy, 11n Heusch, Paolo 350n Hill, Terence 378, 459, 459n Hobart, Robert 54 Hobsbawm, Eric 11n Hoenselaars, Ton 20 Homer 86n, 122, 122n, 173, 219, 224 Hörstel, Wilhelm 217 Hunter, Max (pseudonym of Massimo Pupillo) 347n Hutcheon, Linda 36n, 308n Iotti, Nilde 263n Isnenghi, Mario 30n, 233n Jaccarino, Antonella 311n, 319n320n, 382n, 438n-439n, 441n Jacobs, Lea 305n-306n Jacopone da Todi 255 James II of Aragon 540 Jourdan, M. Gustave 47n, 56, 65, 65n, 67, 67n, 76, 76n, 80n, 86,

570 86n, 100n, 107n, 118n Joyce, James 181n Jünger, Ernst 39, 140, 140n, 151n, 159, 159n, 163, 163n, 169n, 170-171, 172n, 174, 175n, 176, 176n, 182, 182n, 219, 220n, 222, 222n, 287n, 288, 288n, 291, 428n Juta, Juan 417, 417n, 451n Keating, Patrick 33n King, Geoff 33n-34n, 304n-305n Lamartine, Alphonse de 54 Landi, Mario 38 Laneri, Maria Teresa 45n-46n, 79n La Polla, Franco 31n Lavik, Erlend 33n-34n, 304n-305n Lavinio, Cristina 299n Lawrence, David Herbert 39, 139, 139n, 151n, 158, 158n, 159, 159n, 164n, 182n, 186n, 190, 190n, 196, 196n, 201, 219n, 222n, 246, 246n, 251n, 253, 270, 270n, 271n, 275n, 276, 276n, 277n, 278, 278n-279n, 296n, 313, 313n, 316n, 379, 379n, 417n, 445n, 452n, 504 Ledda, Gavino 36, 39, 143, 143n, 152, 153n, 154, 154n, 165n166n, 189n, 229, 229n, 230231, 239, 239n, 320, 320n, 335, 371, 523 Leech, Patrick 12n, 28n, 30, 30n, 31, 31n-32n, 36n, 308n Leerssen, Joep 11n-15n, 18n, 20n21n, 24n, 26n-28n, 47n-48n, 63n, 76n, 84n, 89n, 94n, 101n, 160n, 193n, 292n, 307n, 313n, 345n, 374n-375n, 403n, 405n, 472n, 520n, 522n Léger, Fernand 304n Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 370 Lei Spano Giovanni Maria, 288n, 315n Le Lannou, Maurice 40, 145, 146n, 157, 157n, 163, 184n, 191,

Sardinia on Screen 192n, 287n, 312n, 318, 318n, 335, 409, 409n, 536n Levi, Carlo 39, 140, 140n, 159n160n, 171n, 175, 175n-176n, 177, 177n-178n, 186n, 190n, 196n, 219, 219n-221n, 250, 250n-251n, 275n, 276, 276n, 314n, 346 Lévy-Strauss, Claude 227 Lewis, Simon John 33n, 304n, 306n Lilliu, Giovanni 31n, 40, 49, 146, 146n, 161, 161n, 162, 162n, 163, 164n, 167-168, 168n, 170n, 171, 171n, 192, 192n, 237n, 282n, 286n, 288, 288n, 289, 289n, 290, 290n, 291, 291n, 292, 293n, 299, 379, 379n, 389, 389n, 428n, 457, 535n, 536n Lisca, Paolo 60n Livi, Piero 143, 229n, 343, 378, 387, 389, 394-396, 401, 495n Lizzani, Carlo 229, 332, 333n, 375n, 378-389, 390n, 393n, 394 Lobina, Benvenuto 298, 298n Locci, Roberto 343 Loi, Pierangelo 95n-96n, 212n, 220n, 223n, 227n, 239n, 353n, 394n, 395n Lombroso, Cesare 60, 60n Longhi, Maria Grazia 53n-54n, 78n79n Losey, Joseph 351 Losurdo, Domenico 30n Lo Vicu (Lovicu), Giuseppe 95, 101, 211n, 216 Lussu, Emilio 140-141, 141n, 143, 147n, 179, 179n, 231n, 232, 232n, 233, 235, 235n, 236, 236n, 237, 237n, 288, 290n, 379, 431, 495 Machiavelli, Nicoletta 489 Madao, Matteo 114, 114n, 282n, 294, 294n Magnani, Marco 160n-161n, 258n, 417n Maingard, Jacqueline 34n, 306n

Index of Names   Maistre, Joseph-Marie de 46, 374 Malle, Louis 510 Maltese, Corrado 162, 162n Maltzan, Heinrich von 57, 57n, 65, 65n, 68, 68n, 71, 76, 76n, 77n-78n, 82n, 86, 86n, 91n, 107n, 118n-119n, 127n, 129, 129n, 133n, 135n, 282n-283n, 285, 285n Manconi, Antonio 213 Manconi, Francesco 60n, 63n Manno, Giuseppe 49, 49n, 59, 282283, 283n Mannuzzu, Salvatore 40, 144, 144n, 182, 182n, 183, 198, 204-205, 208, 244-245, 301, 362, 371 Mantegazza, Paolo 48, 60, 60n, 65, 65n, 67n-68n, 70n-71n, 77n, 84n, 87n, 90n-91n, 93, 93n, 99, 99n, 103n-104n, 106, 106n, 107, 107n, 115n, 127n, 128, 128n-129n, 132n, 133, 133n, 136, 136n Manzoni, Alessandro 131 Marci, Giuseppe 15n, 46n, 49n-50n, 115n, 131n, 140n-141n, 144n, 146n, 149n-150n, 154n, 171n172n, 177n, 180n-184n, 186n, 198n, 200n, 203n, 205n-206n, 208n-209n, 223n, 229n-230n, 234n, 236n, 238n-241n, 243, 243n, 259, 260n, 267n-268n, 292n, 294n, 297n-300n, 301, 313n, 321n, 336n, 358n-359n, 361n-362n, 425n, 428n, 431n, 433n, 490, 523n, 530n, 537n Marcias, Peter 358, 367-368, 509, 533 Mari, Febo 323, 328, 375n, 492 Mariano d’Arborea 266 Maricosu, G.M. 263 Marras, Margherita 397 Marrocu, Luciano 49n Martini, Pietro 49, 49n, 114, 115n Masala, Francesco 143, 143n, 235n236n, 298, 299n, 495 Mascagni, Pietro 108n Masini, Roberta 216n Masoni, Tullio 31n

571 Mastino, Attilio 540n Matteoli, Gianfranco 520n Mattòli, Mario 328, 337, 377, 401 Mattone, Antonello 46n, 49n, 144n, 283n, 285n, 288n-289n, 536n537n Maulu, Mauro 59n Maxia, Sandro 157n, 461n, 491, 491n, 492, 492n-493n, 496n, 497, 497n McLaughlin, Martin 36n Meloni, Giuseppe 540n Meloni, Piero 539n Menneas, Pietrina 241n, 378, 423 Mereu, Salvatore 36, 143, 229, 241, 312, 342, 344, 358, 363, 368369, 378, 382, 387, 398-399, 401, 415, 424, 449, 463, 465n, 509, 509n, 510, 513, 516, 516n, 520, 533-534 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 370 Mesina, Graziano 228, 239, 343, 353, 353n, 378, 389, 394-395, 447, 459n Metz, Christian 29n Miccichè, Lino 387 Mills, Stephen F. 346n Mimaut, Jean-François 46n, 53, 64, 64n, 65n, 67n Mingozzi, Gianfranco 229n, 343, 354, 376, 476, 485 Miraglia, Marina 56n, 323n Moe, Nelson 25n, 315n Molina, Angela 461n Mommsen, Theodor 49 Monicelli, Mario 214n, 329, 343, 347, 386, 401 Montand, Yves 426 Montesquieu 20, 46, 46n, 63, 89 Morandi, Guglielmo 38 Morandini, Laura 363n Morandini, Luisa 363n Morandini, Morando 363n Moravia, Alberto 193, 193n, 227, 227n Morittu, Salvatore 366n Moro, Aldo 362 Mosso, Sebastiano 49 Münster, Sebastian 24, 45, 45n

572 Münster, Thomas 39, 140, 140n, 150, 150n-151n, 152, 152n, 170, 170n, 173, 173n, 174, 174n, 176, 176n, 188, 188n, 211n, 219-220, 220n-221n, 222, 222n-223n, 237n-238n, 246n, 262, 262n, 274, 274n-275n, 277n, 286n-287n Mulargia, Eduardo 317, 342, 387388, 401 Mulas, bandit of Oliena 95 Mundula, Mercedes 263n Muratori, Lodovico Antonio 186n Murray, John, 54 Murtas, Gianni 160n Mussolini, Benito 361, 424 Naitza, Salvatore 160n Naitza, Sergio 361n, 428n Nazzari, Amedeo 376 Negroni, Baldassarre 71, 374n Neigebaur, Johann Daniel Ferdinand 55, 55n Nelson, Horatio 53-54, 54n, 66n Nero, Franco 376-377 Niceforo, Alfredo 28, 40, 61, 61n, 68, 68n, 69, 69n, 73n, 74, 74n, 75, 75n, 76, 89, 89n, 90, 90n, 92, 92n-94n, 97n, 103, 107n, 109, 124, 124n, 126n, 134n, 315, 353, 370, 379, 379n, 444, 530 Nietzsche, Friedrich 90 Nippel, Wilfried 20n Noli Coi, Giuseppe 214 Nora, Pierre 30n, 292n Norris, William Edward 21, 21n-22n, 23-24, 106n, 108n, 127n Nurra, Pietro 82n Olives, Gerolamo 113n Olla, Gianni 15n, 34, 35n, 37n-38n, 141n, 142n-143n, 146n, 228n, 312n, 316n-320n, 322n-327n, 329, 332n, 334n, 336n, 339n, 343n, 346n-347n, 350n-356n, 358n, 360n, 362n-364n, 366n-

Sardinia on Screen 368n, 375n, 377n-378n, 380n, 382n, 384n, 387n, 389n, 391n, 393n-394n, 396n-397n, 398, 398n, 400n, 404n, 406n, 408n-409n, 412n-414n, 422n, 424n-426n, 428n, 430n, 432n, 438n, 440n, 443n, 446n, 448n, 450n, 453n, 456n, 459n-460n, 462n-463n, 465n, 470n, 472n, 475n-476n, 478n, 485n-489n, 490, 490n, 492n, 494n, 499n, 502n-503n, 507n508n, 510, 510n, 525n, 528n Orano, Paolo 40, 60, 61n, 67, 67n, 72, 72n, 74, 74n, 78n, 83n, 88, 88n, 90n, 92, 92n, 97n, 109, 109n, 111, 123, 123n, 124, 124n-127n, 134n, 160, 274, 439, 439n, 441, 526 Orrù, Tito 49n Ortu, Gian Giacomo 536n, 537n Ortu, Leopoldo 315n Pais, Ettore 285n, 373n Pais Serra, Francesco 48, 60, 60n, 91n-94n, 99, 99n Pala, Mauro 15n, 139n-140n, 159n, 203n, 206n, 288n, 300n, 430n, 530n Pallavicino di San Rémy, Guglielmo 46 Pancrazi, Pietro 275n Pani, Marco Antonio 414 Pani Ermini, Letizia 536n Papas, Irene 422-423, 461, 497 Pasquin, Antoine Claude (see Valery) Pastina, Giorgio, 324 Pau, Enrico 312, 340, 364, 366, 368, 378, 432-433, 499-503, 509, 514, 520, 530, 533-534 Pau, Giuseppe 95 Paulis, Giulio 145n, 189, 189n, 295n296n, 297, 297n-298n, 334n Paulis, Susanna 19n, 22n, 40n, 46n, 49n-51n, 73n, 94n, 102n, 109n, 115n, 120n, 125n, 128n-130n, 248n, 252n, 268n269n, 271n-273n, 275n-276n,

Index of Names   278n, 280n-281n, 293n-296n, 301, 311n, 318n, 359n, 375n, 437n, 442n, 465n, 523n, 524, 524n Pellegrini, Franca 36n Petronio, Giuseppe 141n Petrusewicz, Marta 25n Pigliaru, Antonio 40, 146, 146n, 147, 167, 167n, 168, 193, 193n, 223, 223n, 229, 232n, 288289, 338, 342, 342n, 349, 374, 387, 387n, 388-389, 389n, 391, 392n, 402-403, 447n, 482, 482n, 485n, 506, 530, 530n Pili, Roberto 113n, 114, 114n, 262n, 263n Pinna, Giuseppe 217, 217n Pinna, Gonario 229 Pisano, Laura 184n, 359n Pitzianti, Enrico 368, 533 Pitzorno, Bianca 263n Poe, Edgar Allan 248 Poggi, Valentina 47n, 53n, 373n Polato, Sarah 36n Polybius 65 Pompejano 253n Pontecorvo, Gillo 142, 207, 243n, 350-351, 425-426 Posse Brázdová, Amelie 139, 139n, 140n, 217, 217n Prunas Tola, Giuseppe, 57, 57n Pupillo, Massimo, 229n, 355, 426, 427-428 Pyle, Christian 304n Ranger, Terence 11n Renan, Ernest 21 Riesz, János 26n Righelli, Gennaro 311, 318, 318n, 323, 329, 412 Rigney, Ann 13n, 20n, 291n, 292n Risi, Dino 478 Roissard de Bellet, François Alphonse Camille Eugène 58, 58n, 84n, 89n, 95n, 103n, 119n-120n, 127n, 131n, 135n, 285n

573 Romagnino, Antonio 59n Rombi, Paride 141n Rosi, Francesco 141n, 495n Rosselli, Carlo and Nello 141n Rossellini, Roberto, 31 Rother, Rainer 29 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 101 Rudas, Nereide 49n, 259-260, 260n, 262, 262n, 267n-268n, 415n, 418n, 422n-423n, 491, 491n, 497, 498, 498n Ruju, Sandro 532n Russo, Paolo 532n Sacchetti, Lina 438n Salis, Stefano 143n, 230n, 231n Sanciu Obino, Irma 263n Sanna, Piero 320, 344, 396, 531, 537 Sanna, Susanna 140n, 288n Sardus 263 Satta, Salvatore 43, 143, 143n, 149n, 152n, 172n, 181, 181n, 182, 182n, 260, 260n, 261, 416 Satta, Sebastiano 94, 94n, 95-96, 96n, 211n, 217, 508 Savona, Leopoldo 347n Sbragia, Matteo 460n Scafoglio, Domenico 524n Scaliger, Julius Caesar 20 Scano, Maria Grazia 160n Scanu, Valerio 517n Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 21 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich 94 Schlöezer, Leopold 159n, 170, 170n, 172n, 285n Schneider, Jane 27n, 81n, 315n, 522n Schucht, Julca 156n Scorretti, Mauro 71n Scott, Walter 50, 100 Sechi, Salvatore 233n Sella, Quintino 59, 60n Sequi, Mario, 453n Sergi, Giuseppe 60, 60n, 89, 444 Serra, Fiorenzo 355 Serra Sanna, Elias 95, 404, 404n Serra Sanna, Giacomo 95

574 Serra Sanna, Mariantonia 404 Sesti, Mario 431n, 458n Silius Italicus, Tiberius Catius Asconius 373n Sinis, Salvatore 263n Smith, Anthony D. 30, 30n, 31-32, 32n, 217n, 305n, 332n, 362n, 527 Smyth, William Henry 54, 54n, 55, 59, 68n, 71n, 76n, 77n, 79, 79n, 81, 84, 85n, 87, 87n, 89, 89n, 91n, 94n-95n, 99n, 103n104n, 106n-108n, 114, 114n, 117n-118n, 121n-122n, 127n, 131n, 134n-135n, 281n, 308n, 328, 328n Soddu, Francesco 288n Soldini, Silvio 510 Sole, Carlino 49n Solinas, Franco 142, 206, 207n, 243, 243n, 244, 350, 425-426 Solinas, Paolo 213 Sorgia, Giancarlo 60n Soriga, Flavio 189-190, 313n Sorlin, Pierre 37n Soro, Antonio 213 Soro, Vincenzo 96n Sotgiu, Girolamo 235n, 380n Sotgiu, Pietro 213 Spano, Giovanni 115n, 285, 285n, 294, Spinazzola, Vittorio 214n-215n, 385n, 411n Spinoza, Baruch 370 Stanzel, Franz K. 16n Støyva, Line Hauge 71n Strömberg Kranz, Eva 140n Sulis, Gigliola 144n, 428n Sulis, Vincenzo 206n Syberberg, Hans Jürgen 352-353, 486-487, 489-490 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius 20n Taine, Hippolyte 21 Tallarigo 233 Tanchis, Aldo 499n Tanda, Nicola 142n, 301 Tandeddu, Pasquale 225n-226n

Sardinia on Screen Tandeddu, Pietro 226n Taverner 52 Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio 36, 143, 229-230, 320, 335, 523 Taylor, Elisabeth 351-352 Tennant, Robert 47n, 54n, 58, 58n, 65, 65n, 67, 67n, 68, 68n, 71n, 80, 80n, 83n-85n, 87n, 89n-91n, 95n, 101n, 104, 104n, 105, 117n, 119n-120n, 122n, 127n, 131n, 373n Theocritus 93, 155 Thiesse, Anne-Marie 11n Thompson, Kristina 33n, 306n Tinazzi, Giorgio, 36n Titian, 127 Tobing Rony, Fatimah 34n, 439, 440, 440n Tolstoy, Lev Nikolàevič 486 Tognazzi, Ugo 377n, 459 Tola, Pasquale 49, 49n, 94 Tolu, Giovanni 97-98, 98n, 108, 134, 383, 388 Tomasi, Dario 36n Trevor-Roper, Hugh 529n Turchi, Dolores 116n, 253n Turtas, Raimondo 45n, 46n Tuveri, Giovanni Battista 49, 49n Tyndale, John Warre 46n-47n, 54n, 55, 55n, 59, 65, 65n, 66, 66n, 68n, 71n-72n, 78n, 83n-84n, 86n, 87, 87n-88n, 91n-92n, 95n, 99n-101n, 104n, 105, 105n, 115, 115n, 117n-120n, 121, 121n-122n, 127n, 131n, 281n-282n, 283, 283n, 284, 315n Unali, Lina 296n Urban, Maria Bonaria 198n, 203n, 323n, 344n, 358n, 363n, 368n, 383n, 464n, 509n, 514n Urbinati, Nadia 530n Valery 46n, 54, 54n, 64, 64n, 65, 65n, 66n, 71n, 73n, 79, 81, 81n, 84n, 86n, 98, 98n, 99n, 104n,

Index of Names 105, 105n, 114, 114n, 115, 117n, 119, 119n, 120, 120n, 157, 282n-283n, 312n Valli, Alida 426 Vancini, Florestano 351, 360 Van Dijck, Anthony 100 Varese, Carlo 22n, 130n Velasquez, Diego 271 Verga, Giovanni 108n, 323, 383 Vergano, Aldo 320, 329, 342 Vidor, King 346n Viganò, Aldo 34n Virdis, Pierpaolo, 520n Virdis, Tommaso 95 Visconti, Luchino 351, 378, 426, 457n Vitrotti, Giovanni 382 Vittorini, Elio 39, 140, 140n, 160n, 164, 165n, 170n-171n, 176n, 196, 197n, 201, 211n, 218n, 219, 220n, 286n Vuillier, Gaston Charles 59, 59n, 71n, 73-74, 74n, 77n, 80, 80n-81n, 82, 82n-84n, 92n, 98n-101n, 103n-104n, 106, 106n, 115, 115n, 119n, 121, 121n, 127n, 132n, 373n, 450n, 452n

575 Wagner, Max Leopold 72n, 111, 145, 145n, 182n, 186, 186n, 187, 187n-188n, 189, 190n, 195, 196n, 212n, 219, 219n, 220, 220n-221n, 222, 222n, 245n, 246, 246n, 270n-272n, 275n, 279, 279n, 281, 286n, 295, 295n, 296-297, 329, 329n, 331, 331n, 332, 332n, 334, 334n, 344n, 345, 345n, 376n, 379, 379n, 380, 380n, 386, 386n, 397, 401, 401n, 406, 406n, 451n, 508n Wa Thiong‘o, Ngũgĩ 300n Wertmuller, Lina 488n Wilde, Oscar 23 Wilson, Timothy D. 16n Winter, Jay 30n Wintle, Michael 12n Young, Arthur 52, 52n, 64, 68 Zagarrio, Vito 431n, 458n Zahn, Johannes 24 Zampa, Luigi 337, 347, 348n, 401 Zola, Gianfranco 518n Zucca, Raimondo 332n Zurita, Gerolamo 113

Index of Films

Alba serena in un tramonto di sangue 312n Altura 453n Amore rosso 320, 329, 342, 346, 384385, 401, 403, 406, 452, 458 Arcipelaghi 143, 229, 241, 339, 396, 401, 404, 414, 416-418, 420421, 431, 447n, 462, 464n, 482n, 533 Ballo a tre passi 312, 344, 358-359, 363, 368, 370, 378, 414n, 448, 449, 463, 465n, 509, 514, 533 Banditi a Orgosolo 36, 146, 146n, 228, 317, 330, 342, 375, 378379, 382, 387-388, 401, 425426, 442, 442n, 457, 458, 483 Barbagia. La società del malessere 332, 333n, 343, 349, 375, 375n, 389-390, 390n, 392, 393, 393n, 394, 402-403, 410, 416, 418, 458-459, 524 Bellas mariposas 509, 509n, 510, 510n, 514, 515, 517-518, 533 Bill il Taciturno 347n Boom! 351 Braveheart 31 Caccia grossa, 458, 461 Cainà. L’isola e il continente 311312, 318, 318n, 319, 323, 329, 350, 358, 377, 382, 388, 412, 437-440, 440n, 441-443, 451, 453, 457, 470, 500, 503, 527, 533 Canne al vento 38, 411, 452n Cenere 323, 328, 375, 375n, 388,

437, 452, 457, 470, 492, 503 …con amore, Fabia (In liebe, Fabia) 312, 356, 414 Delitto per amore (L’edera) 320, 326, 329, 346-347, 411, 413, 444, 452, 458 Deserto rosso 351 Dio perdoni la mia pistola 347n Disamistade 336, 387, 391, 391n, 395-396, 401, 410, 416, 418419, 448n, 451, 458, 524 Dove volano i corvi d’argento 343, 349, 395, 401-402, 410, 417 El Che Guevara 350n Faddjia. La legge della vendetta 316, 334-335, 401, 406, 409, 414, 445, 453-454, 527 Giarrettiera colt 347n, 489 I briganti in Sardegna 353n, 382, 450 Il disertore 142, 229, 261, 261n, 416, 416n, 417, 422, 458, 460, 490, 492 Il figlio di Bakunìn 244, 244n, 360361, 414, 428, 431, 458, 461, 524, 532 Il richiamo della terra 312n Il segreto dell’uomo solitario 532 Il sorpasso 478 Il trionfo della vita 312n, 360 In terra sarda 382, 451

578

Sardinia on Screen

I protagonisti 229, 349, 354, 378, 394, 410, 447n, 458 I pugni in tasca 378

Proibito 214n, 329, 343, 347, 376377, 386, 401, 406, 414, 437, 445, 454, 478n, 528

Jimmy della Collina 366-367, 415, 432-433, 461, 502, 533

Sa jana 229n, 355, 426, 428, 455-456, 458, 461 Scarabea 352, 352n, 354, 486, 488n, 489 Sequestro di persona 229n, 343n, 349, 354, 354n, 378n, 458, 476, 528 Sierra maestra 350n, 393, 530 Sonetàula 36, 143, 143n, 147, 181, 229, 240-241, 342, 378, 382, 387, 398-399, 414-415, 424, 431, 465, 526, 532-533 Sono Alice 367, 415, 461, 533 Sos laribiancos – I dimenticati 458, 495n

La calda vita 351, 360 La destinazione 320, 322, 339, 343344, 396, 414, 416, 421, 431, 437, 448, 448n, 462, 464n, 527-528, 533 La grazia 324 329, 382, 401, 403, 411-413, 443, 444n, 451, 457, 469-470, 527 La terra trema 351, 355, 378, 425, 457n La volpe e l’ape 364-365, 432, 461, 499, 533 Le due leggi 317, 342, 387-388, 401403, 410, 417 Le vie del peccato 324, 383, 406, 414, 452 L’ultima frontiera 330, 330n, 331, 339-340, 343, 348, 348n, 376, 397-398, 404, 411, 451, 461, 503, 506, 508, 532 L’ultimo pugno di terra (documentary) 355 Marcella 310 Oro nero 360, 424 Padre padrone 36, 230, 320, 335336, 369, 371, 375, 426, 428 Paisà 31 Panas 414 Pelle di bandito 229, 343, 349, 378, 378n, 387, 389, 389n, 394, 401, 410, 416, 447, 458 Pesi leggeri 312, 340, 365-366, 415, 432-433, 461, 499-500, 502503, 533

448, 488, 343, 376, 180, 375, 401, 524143,

The Godfather 35, 35n The Godfather II 35n The Rose of Rhodesia 34n The Wide Blue Road [La grande strada azzurra], 142, 207, 350, 410, 425-427 Tontolini e l’asino 71, 71n, 374n Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare di agosto 488n Tutto torna 368, 533 Una casa sotto il cielo 343, 458 Un’anima divisa in due 510 Una questione d’onore 337-338, 347, 348n, 377, 401, 411, 418, 437, 446, 447n, 453-454, 458459, 488n Un delitto impossibile 144, 244n, 362-363, 461n, 533 Uomini contro 141n, 495n Vendetta... sarda 328, 337, 347, 377, 401, 411, 446, 453, 459, 531

Index of Films Ybris 320

579 Zazie dans le métro 510