Category: sardinia

Sardinians

“We are Spaniards, Africans, Phoenicians, Carthaginians,

Romans, Arabs, Pisans, Byzantines, Piedmontese.

We are the golden yellow brooms that droop

on rocky paths, as large lighted lamps.

We are the wild solitude, the immense and profound silence,

the splendor of the sky, the white flower of cistus.

We are the uninterrupted reign of mastic,

of waves that flow on ancient granites,

of wild roses

of the wind, of the immensity of the sea.

We are an ancient land of long silences,

Of large and pure horizons, of gloomy trees,

Of mountains burned by sunshine and revenge.

We are Sardinians.

(Grazia Deledda)

My Depleted Island.

“This land resembles no other place. Sardinia is something else. Enchanting spaces and distances to travel-nothing finished, nothing definitive. It is like freedom itself. Sardinia is out of time and history.” (David Herbert Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 1921).

I was born in a place where solitude is a feeling that does not scare people. We are used to be alone in this big, wind-battered island. We are not talkative, and we are proud of our freedom. We speak an archaic Romance language that is closest to Latin that any other in Europe and talks of wars and battles for independence, of a land invaded and exploited but never conquered. They tried to tell us that our language was only a dialect and that it was the dialect of ignorant herdsmen and shepherds but we never believed them. We know we descend from proud warriors that have always been in charge of their destinies, even when they lost their battles. We are proud of the shepherds who descended from those warriors and we are proud to still carry on with those shepherding and farming traditions.  Our depleted island bears the remains of one the most ancient European civilisations and at those magnificent buildings made of Sardinian rocks we still look with pride.

My sense of nationhood grew in me together with the awareness of the importance of not letting anyone rob me of the possibility of speaking my own language. I love my family for letting me learn Italian at school and my own language at home, for giving me the gift of being perfectly bilingual, as any child who walks on this ancient soil should be. I read and re-read Lawrence’s account of his travelling in Sardinia and I made his words mine, because I truly believe Sardinia is still out of time and history. I am ridiculously proud of the way he never became a huge, sad modern touristic resort, even though the pureness of our sea is something that amazes inhabitants and visitors. It makes her more fascinating the way you still have to discover her hidden, wild places in the same way Lawrence had to.