INSPIRATION

Minus three. On a journey in reverse Quartucciu would have been the third municipality and I, full of enthusiasm, would have penetrated the narrow streets of the historic center surrounded by old Campidanese houses around the church of San Giorgio, looking at everything with eyes hungry for beauty.

I would have visited DoMusArt, a cultural center in the former Casa Angioni. I would have gone as far as the border with the Molentargius Park to enjoy a corner of nature in a densely populated area.

Instead, thanks to the rain, I see everything grey, including the peaks of Sette Fratelli, in the background, blurry.

SOUND FRAGMENTS

SARDINIAN SHORT STORIES

Pedalling along a route in the center of Quartucciu, not far from the church of San Biagio, I come across a beautiful noble building. Today an accommodation facility, it seems that Maria Cristina of Savoy, daughter of King Vittorio Emanuele I of Savoy and his wife, the Archduchess Maria Teresa of Austria-Este, stayed here for a few years.

The history of the Savoys in Sardinia is long, and controversial, with those who today would like to erase that past which would seem to have brought the Sardinians to an unprecedented condition of subjection, an omen of the current situation towards the Italian State.

There are some municipalities that have already changed the names of streets and squares by adopting names more suited to the history of the Sardinians, and yet the “Corsi\o Vittorio Emanuele” remain more or less everywhere in Sardinia, despite the result of the famous Edict of the Chiudende, which allowed for the first time the division of land into private ownership and the end of the period of collective ownership that had always been going on in Sardinia. Nobody can take it from my mind that the kilometers of famous dry stone walls of Sardinia are to some extent also made up of stones from the dismantling of Nuragic villages.

Returning to Maria Cristina, she seems to have enjoyed great popularity for her virtues as a Catholic woman. She died after giving birth to Prince Francis, the last king of the Two Sicilies, and in 2014 she was beatified by Pope Francis.