Nuorese Cultural DistrictSalvatore Satta (b. Nuoro, 9 August 1902–d. Rome, 19 April 1975), was one of Italy’s greatest jurists and also one of its greatest novelists, whose writing was discovered and published posthumously.
Salvatore Satta
Description
The seventh child of a famous Nuoro notary, Salvatore Satta went to secondary school in Sassari and graduated in law, with honours, from the university in the same city.
Completing his degree was the first stop along a long academic path focused on the branches of law, which led him to move from one university to the next, taking up teaching posts in Camerino, Macerata, Padua, Genoa and Rome. He was also pro-rector in Trieste.
Satta’s first novel, La veranda (1932), was a kind of first step in the direction of writing.
His posthumous work, Il giorno del giudizio (The Day of Judgment), published in 1977 by CEDAM and two years later by Adelphi, caused a sensation for its catastrophic, ruthless description of early twentieth-century Nuoro and its residents, who it submits to a final judgement.
This novel, which won the Comisso prize and has been translated into sixteen languages, threw direct, stark light on the symbolic places and quarters of the city, like the districts of Séuna and San Pietro, Corso Garibaldi and the celebrated Caffè Tettamanzi.
The people of Nuoro received Satta’s novel with little enthusiasm and a degree of resentment. However, the national critics compared it to Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo and George Steiner compared it to Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology.
This crucial text, now canonised, continues to be reissued and is able like few others to inflame the debate on culture and identity.