Nuorese Cultural District

Let’s start off by taking a quick look at Salvatore Satta’s life. Born in Nuoro in 1902, he went to school in his hometown up until secondary school, for which he attended Azuni in Sassari. Studying law in Pavia and Pisa marked the start of an academic career that took him to Camerino, Macerata, Padua, Genoa and finally, as professor of Civil Procedural Law, the University of Trieste and La Sapienza. He settled permanently in Rome, succeeding his good friend Antonio Segni as chair when the latter was elected President of the Italian Republic. In 1926, he contracted tuberculosis, and spent two years in a sanatorium. This was the experience that inspired the novel La veranda, which was published posthumously (1981), like Day of Judgment, and following the latter’s success. In 1948, he published De profundis, a fundamental volume for understanding his melancholically pessimistic poetics. In 1936, in Padua, he met Laura Boschian, who taught Russian Literature at the university; they married in 1939. To find out more about their relationship, which lasted until Satta’s death (April 1975), you have two very good books to choose from: one by Boschian herself (La mia vita con Salvatore Satta) and the collection of letters her husband sent to her (Mia indissolubile compagna. Lettere a Laura Boschian 1938-1971).

The writer’s childhood home is at Via Angioy, 1, not far from Via Majore (precisely, the street that leads to Piazza Satta), on the block between Via Angioy and Via Sebastiano Satta. The building, which is now owned by the dioceses of Nuoro, is home to the Istituto ‘Filippo Satta Galfré’, named after Salvatore’s brother (Ludovico, in the novel), who gave it to the Episcopal Seminary of Nuoro in 1963, specifying in his will that he wished it to be used to help low-income women in the Province of Nuoro. The donor’s wish was fulfilled in 2009, when the house became host to a residential community for women with mental illnesses.

Opposite the entrance stands the house that, going by the novel, belonged to the engineer Mannu, the man who – again, according to the novel – designed the house built by the writer’s father, the notary Salvatore Satta Carroni (Sebastiano Sanna Carboni, in the novel):

But the fact is that a notary’s house simply can’t be like the house of a peasant in Sèuna, with its yard, its rustic patio, its log pile, its lòriche for the oxen, and the kitchen at the end, with the [fire] in the middle of the room. Such houses had grown by themselves for centuries, like bird’s nests. But Don Sebastiano needs an architectural engineer, and the engineer is right there in the house across the road, perhaps the oldest middle-class dwelling in all Nuoro, clapped tight like a fortress, full of women and maniacs, with its windows constantly shuttered and doors that only open at prearranged signals. Don [Pietrino] Mannu, like all the Mannu clan, was a rich man living in penury. But he had been to Rome, he had studied, and he had come back as an architectural engineer, to a town where no one had built a house for a century. … So he made design after design, calculation after calculation. All very well, but he had in mind the palaces of Rome and the staircases which (he had read) men of old climbed up on horseback. And thus, instead of a house he made a staircase, an enormous space from which at every landing little holes opened off (which were the rooms, one leading into the other); and he thereby committed the growing family to hardship and irritability. It is true that people peering in across the threshold were astounded at the immense, useless atrium, and began to imagine who knows what untold riches – even if the master builder did go around saying that without his providential intervention Don Sebastiano would have had to crawl into his palace on all fours, so low had the designer planned the architrave of the front door.

The first chapter of the novel is devoted to presenting the characters (starting with his notary father) and the house. Right at the beginning, we find Don Sebastiano in his office on the upper floor, ending his workday, like every evening, at nine o’clock sharp, and heading

down to the ground floor, to the modest room which served as dining room, sitting room, and study for his brood of sons, and was the only lively room in the large house, partly because it was the only one to be heated, by an old fireplace.

On the last page, after the whole family has gathered in the living room, Sanna Carboni’s day ends anything but idyllically, with a routine the final step of which reveals what is hiding, inside the building, behind the pleasing symmetry of the facade:

So that evening ended, one of many evenings of family life, in the family that Don Sebastiano and Donna Vincenza, over so many hard years of quarreling, had nonetheless created. The boys went up to their freezing bedrooms on the top floor, Ludovico helping his mother out of her chair and supporting her on her way up the stairs, which were becoming difficult for her. Sebastiano, named after his father, was responsible for securing the window giving onto the street. In thinking only of the facade, that beast of a Don Gabriele Mannu had set the window so high that they had to have two wooden steps made in order to look out. Sebastiano climbed up as best he could, and paused a moment before pulling the shutters to. Nuoro lay spread out in the deep night, racked by a bitter wind. Far off, a cart trundled over the cobblestones. Not a voice was heard. Two carabinieri on patrol, stiff and bored, came up the main street. It was almost frightening.

Another noteworthy feature of the architecture of the Satta home are the courtyards, described in the novel at the beginning of Chapter Three:

Even in the corte of Don Sebastiano’s house there was an oleander. Rather than being a single corte, it was a series of courtyards, obtained from a succession of little houses bought and demolished, at the end of which a narrow passage led on one side to the stable and on the other widened out into a space that was called the garden, and would indeed have been a garden if Don Sebastiano had cared for flowers …. The trouble was that the oleander is a poisonous plant, or at least so they thought in Nuoro, and so thought Donna Vincenza, who as the years went by began to hate that single tree which her husband had planted in his corte, evidently to spite her. Every day … she would take a pot of lye and pour it over the plant, in the vain hope of burning its roots and killing it. It was a senseless thing to do, purely symbolic; but what could this fifty-year-old woman do that was not a symbol? Before very long her legs would be completely crippled by arthritis, and she would be unable even to reach the vegetable garden; she would be confined to a chair in the first corte, with her hands clasped over her breast as if in prayer. But she did not pray.

You can get an idea of the space outside the house and its courtyards by looking through a fence in Via Sebastiano Satta, which must be the ‘great door’ described a bit further on in the book:

But if the ‘little door’, as they called the double door that gave almost onto the Corso, was never opened except in answer to the sound of one of the brass knockers (and whoever was knocking could only be one of Don Sebastiano’s clients), the ‘great door’ behind the house was always open to the vast breath of the countryside, because it gave onto the corte, and through it came the fruits of all that the notary had sown with such skill; and their variety announced the variation of the seasons. And so, the house had two faces, one sad and one joyful, and the inhabitants seemed to have two faces also, even Don Sebastiano.

Via Majore, now Corso Garibaldi, began at the ‘Ponte ’e ferru’ (Iron Bridge) and ended at what is now Piazza San Giovanni, where women from nearby villages sold produce, as we read in Grazia Deledda’s Cosima. If it were possible to define a dividing line between the peasants’ quarter of Séuna and the shepherds’ quarter of Santu Predu, Via Majore would be it. In the time of Umberto I, when the echoes of the new Kingdom of Italy were reaching as far as Nuoro, modernity made its appearance in the Barbagia region’s most important city, and right on this street. This is the sense we get from this short, snapshot-like description by the great scholar of the Sardinian language and culture, Max Leopold Wagner (1908):

Today, Nuoro has more than 7,000 inhabitants, a small military garrison, a gymnasium and a teacher training school and it is both a diocese and a vice-prefecture. The buildings have for the most part an urban appearance and the high street, covered in smooth paving, is in my view the most beautiful of its kind in Sardinia.

And this was confirmed, many years later, by another famous writer, whose novels brought Nuoro, past and present, into twenty-first-century literature. In his book In Sardegna non c’è il mare (2008), Marcello Fois wrote:

Continuing on, leaving Seuna behind, you enter Corso Garbaldi, which used to be called Via Majore, or main street. There, the new lords built their miniature versions of Umbertine houses like embankments along the grey granite river that covers that stretch of the road. The notary and the lawyer built in the continental style, stuccoed houses with showy balconies like front-row boxes at the theatre of looming modernity. It is the transplanted heart of this place, plagued by continuous rejections, but always beating. It is the street where people do business and meet. A bridge between the old-fashioned humbleness of Seuna and the raw, turbid heart of San Pietro (p. 25).

The notary Fois is talking about was of course Salvatore Satta’s father, and Fois’ description tallies with this passage in Day of Judgment:

The zii, or uncles, as these elderly rustics were called, came to Nuoro … clad in their brand-new costumes as if entering a drawing room, and went to testify, or talk to a lawyer or a notary (when they were not brought to town in handcuffs) once or twice a year, dragging their children behind them. These children, got up in modern dress, feeling stupid even in their own eyes and growing more and more ashamed of their fathers (in comparison with those gentlemen who were no less at a loose end but who sat at the caffè tables as if exercising a class prerogative), saw the huge shop windows spread with sweetmeats or toys or books, or with headless dummies dressed in ready-made clothes, very likely all moth-eaten and moldy, but nonetheless symbols of something never seen or even imagined: wealth in hard cash, so different from being rich in sheep or goats.

As a child, Grazia Deledda was drawn to the elegance of the palazzos and shop windows as she walked along Via Majore each day to go to school. And one of the spots the little girl and her classmates were most curious about was the renowned Caffè Tettamanzi, which is also the café referenced by Salvatore Satta in the above passage, the one he later describes as a place where ‘“the gentry” exercised their right to do sweet nothing’. You can still enjoy a coffee or glass of wine in this same café today, at number 71 Corso. It takes its name from its first owner, a carpenter from Piedmont named Antonio Tettamanzi, who had come to Nuoro to work on the construction of the cathedral. In 1892, Antonio Nani from Ferrara, visiting the city, described Tettamanzi as old and feeble of mind but still intent on moving ‘his lanky, good-natured self around the café’s three little rooms’. Caffè Tettamanzi, which makes a brief appearance in Deledda’s Cosima, is instead a key location in Day of Judgment:

The Corso sloped slightly downhill from the Piazza di San Giovanni, where the market was, to the Iron Bridge. Halfway down, just before a wide curve and after the little piazza of the barandilla, there was a flat stretch containing the houses of some consequence, the house of the ‘Registry’ (which Don Sebastiano had bought in order to rent it out), the house of Bertini, who was one of the Continentals who turned stones into gold and ended up being Sardinianized … and the house of Tettamanzi, another Continental, of whom there remains no memory except the name of the caffè on the ground floor.

It was an elegant caffè, with little rooms with red sofas around the walls – rather like the caffès in Venice, if I may be so bold as to say so. The owner of the caffè and of the whole building was now Giovanni Maria Musiu, who had perhaps inherited it through his mother, but there was nothing in the least Continental about him. He was short and fat, with dark eyes and a pointed head, and he had [only one single cursed reason for living]: to play cards in the little rooms of his caffè. The whole of Nuoro, of course, gathered in this flat stretch of the Corso. Here the lawyers met their clients; the small landowners in the dazzling costumes of the villages eyed the merchants, on the lookout for good deals for their produce, oil and almonds from Baronia, wine from Oliena, cheese from Mamojada and Fonni. And this was the route followed perforce, in the morning, by all those on their way to that earthly god – the law courts – or to that equivocal god that was the vast, badly proportioned church erected by some rich bishop who on the cornice of the facade had carved the words Deiparae virgini a nive sacrum, which not even the priests succeeded in translating.

Séuna is Nuoro’s historical peasants’ quarter. Once filled with a disorganized jumble of small, low houses with inner courtyards, this is where Ananias, the main character in Grazia Deledda's Ashes began his education, and it was also described by Fois:

Although Nuoro is now a city, something remains in Seuna of that silence, hard-working discretion, and distinctive world view. In the houses around the always spic and span courtyard, in the swaths of basil and parsley growing in the inner garden, in the dark shadow that breaks up the hard light. The light of Deledda’s Ashes, the majestic light that kisses the impoverished souls of this land. There are still a few Tatanas wandering around those streets, with the composure of an untouchable goddess.

The city is divided into three parts, ‘like all Gaul, and even more so’, as observed by Satta in Chapter Two of The Day of Judgment, with Séuna being one of them. In the middle of the quarter, you find the old church of Nostra Signora delle Grazie, a simple, rustic building not unlike the neighborhood’s humble little houses:

The Seunese are peasants to a man. They make a town within the town, and it is said that they are the original nucleus of the settlement. Nuoro, in a word, was born out of Sèuna; and I am inclined to believe it, because in Séuna we find the oldest church in Nuoro, Le Grazie, which is scarcely more than one of those same little houses, but with a gabled front and a bell in a kind of dovecote. The priest who officiates there is himself a peasant, and lives off the four or five turnips which he grows in the kitchen garden, and (believe it or not) off a little charity, since he does not have cure of the souls (S. Satta, The Day of Judgment).

The great jurist and writer devoted many other passages in the book to this part of the city; let’s read some of them here, to accompany our walk through the streets and lanes of Séuna, while others, written on the walls, we shall read while walking:

In this last stretch rises the first section of Nuoro. It is called Sèuna, and it ‘rises’ purely in a manner of speaking, being a huddle of low houses arranged without any order; or rather with that marvelous order that emerges from disorder. All are on one floor, with one or (the richest) two rooms, with a roof of rust-colored tiles sloping toward the cortita, a courtyard with a floor of earth just as God made it, surrounded by a dry-stone wall such as they build to enclose tanche, and an opening toward the road barred by a tree trunk. In front of this strange doorway is that masterpiece of abstract art, the Sardinian cart.

Sèuna is a painter’s palette transformed into a picture. With its windows picked out in white and the calm clear skies above it, it could well be a seaside village. All it needs is the sea.

It goes without saying that Séuna is the poor part of town. Compared to the aristocrats of Via Majore and the wealthy shepherds of San Pietro, and compared to the nascent middle class that was emerging in both, the peasants of Séuna were a world unto themselves. And yet, they had one privilege that the residents of San Pietro did not, even if of little consolation:

But the infinite poverty of Sèuna had one advantage over the potentates of San Pietro. When someone died, he had inevitably to pass along the flagstoned Corso, from end to end, because the cemetery, Sa ‘e Manca, was on the other side of town, beyond San Pietro, near the Chiesa della Solitudine. And when the dead man passed by, the gentlemen in the Caffè Tettamanzi rose to their feet and bared their heads.

The old monastery of the Friars Minor of the Observance in via Manzoni was built in the late sixteenth century that began to be used by the mid nineteenth century for a quickly changing motley range of purposes, including a courthouse, a theatre, a ballroom (as it was in the novella Ballo in costume), a gymnasium, the home of a musical band and, of course, a primary school. Many illustrious figures went to primary school there, including Sebastiano Satta, Mario Delitala, Francesco Ciusa, Grazia Deledda herself, Indro Montanelli (who lived in Nuoro when his father was principle at Liceo Asproni) and, of course, Salvatore Satta, who didn’t fail to describe the place where his long period as a student and scholar began in The Day of Judgment:

The school was, in fact, the Franciscan monastery that at some long-forgotten time had been suppressed and confiscated, along with all Church property, on account of some law or other imposed from abroad. The name had remained (like that of the huge tract of land adjoining it, which they still called the monks’ tanca); and to be at the Monastery, or to go to the Monastery, was the same as saying to be at school, to go to school. In fact, nothing had changed, either inside or out, because people were content with little; or rather, the very concept of ‘little’ did not exist. Even the bell was still there in its bell-cote perched on the top of the yellow-painted wall, as in all the little country churches in Sardinia, which have no bell towers, and Ziu Longu, the caretaker, used to pull the rope at nine o’clock on the dot, just as the sacristan did in the time of the monks. The selfsame sound announced the beginning of the sacred office and of the lay office, as if nothing had happened; and in point of fact nothing had happened. It was not like the other Church property, which had ended up for a song in the hands of the least scrupulous or least superstitious private citizens, who were nearly all from San Pietro. Of anything else to do with the monks there was not the least trace, except for a few mastic bushes pushing up here and there in the playground. Inside, there remained the huge entrance hall paved with slate crumbling from the damp, and leading off it were two large rooms with vaulted ceilings. The one on the left must have been the monastery chapel, because through the keyhole one could catch a glimpse of some empty niches, and in one of them there was even a saint with raised hand, who persisted in giving his blessing in the midst of filth. Mysteriously enough, the door was always locked, but it may have been that the roof was collapsing on that side. Just as it might have been a kind of sacristy or refectory or meeting place, while on the contrary the chapel had been the right-hand room, which was the schoolroom where Maestro Mossa taught, because to get to his desk, which was nothing but a simple table, you went up four steps, obviously the steps to an altar. (…) A short flight of steps led down from the entrance hall to what must have been the monastery proper. It was a sort of quadrangle, with a yard too small to be a cloister, and two long corridors on opposite sides leading to the classrooms, which in fact were nothing but the monks’ cells. And in those cells, lit more by loopholes than by windows, and so high up that the monks could see God but not the world, an incredible number of boys were jammed in, as if some fresh miracle had multiplied the space. The cells in the opposite corridor, on an upper floor, were used by the so-called normal school, alias the training college in which young men studied to become teachers in accordance with the new rules, which aimed at producing educated teachers, not pathetic wretches like Maestro Mossa.

The Monastery bell had nothing in common with the bells of Santa Maria. These, with their various accents, were a voice of command, whether they called the Nuorese – frankly, not great churchgoers – to their Sunday obligations, or packed off the dead to the cemetery, or announced that Christ had risen or that the bishop had crossed the threshold of the palace on his way to Pontifical Mass. The Monastery bell made no demands. It had a voice – ding, ding, ding – sent forth by Ziu Longu’s long tugs at the rope, as formerly by those of some sleepy monk or lay brother; if indeed, after so many years, it did not ring all by itself. But this voice climbed up the long road past the gardens, met with boys who were coming skipping down to the Monastery, made its way into the Corso and the hidden streets, and hovered in the limpid air of Nuoro. It was one of the two voices of Nuoro. The other was the drum roll of Ziu Dionisi, the town crier; and this was the evening voice, as the bell was the morning voice.

The cathedral of the diocese of Nuoro is dedicated to Santa Maria della Neve, the Madonna of the Snow, the city’s patron saint. Built between 1836 and 1853 and consecrated in 1873, it was designed by the architect/priest Antonio Cano (who unfortunately fell from the scaffolding and died during its construction). The church is Neoclassical in style and looks out over a large piazza. Inside, we find several valuable works, including the Via Crucis by Giovanni Ciusa Romagna and Carmelo Floris, two paintings by Bernardino Palazzi (a Deposition and The Disciples of Emmaus) and a wooden Art Nouveau compass made by the historic Sassari carpentry shop, Fratelli Clemente. Inside, there is a Neoclassical altar that was made by Salvatore Satta’s grandfather, the architect Giacomo Galfrè. In the novel, this continental grandfather (father of Donna Vincenza) is called Monsù Vugliè:

Donna Vincenza was not entirely Sardinian. Like Don Sebastiano, she had been born in the Kingdom of Sardinia, but [that kingdom was only Sardinian in jest, and in Turin there were no Sardinians whatsoever]. On the other hand, a few Piedmontese came to Sardinia, either to trade or to command, and among them, [from just this side of the French border] (two steps in that direction and destiny would have been completely different), there came a certain Monsù Vugliè, [about] whom absolutely nothing is known. Rumor has it … that he was an architect, but who knows what architect meant in those days, seeing that we are not even sure now. The old people still remember a tall man, evidently the commonplace notion of a Continental, who rather impressed them – and this was a commonplace too. It was also remembered that he had been carried off in his prime by a stroke. That is all that was known of a life which must have been … intense …, since in [just] a few years he acquired two houses and an orchard that was practically a garden, just outside Nuoro. Until yesterday it was still [referred to by his name]. Now they have built a local government office on the site.

The church is a focal point in the landscape of Grazia Deledda’s La giustizia (published 1899), another important place in which is a courthouse that overlooks it. And indeed, next to the actual cathedral, there is an imposing, austere building that was once used as a courthouse and later became a museum (now temporarily closed to the public) named after the Nuoro sculptor Francesco Ciusa. Satta mentions both buildings in the follow excerpt:

Santa Maria dell Neve and the law courts stood opposite each other, and to get there one had to go up a broad, well-paved thoroughfare and through the archway of the seminary, beyond which soared the great [crag] of one of the peaks of Mount Ortobene, like a petrified giant. On days of the Assizes [and] major religious festivals, there was a colorful procession, each person climbing up with his own secret load of sins.

Santa Maria was perhaps the original nucleus of the ‘historic center’, as they say nowadays, meaning the part where the gentry lived. The word ‘gentry’ does not mean ‘rich’; it is merely the opposite of rustic, and the difference – a great one – is embodied in the wearing of ordinary clothes, which have replaced local costume.

The sound of the cathedral bells – as well as those of the other churches – differ greatly depending on why they are being rung.

From the cathedral – the Church of Santa Maria high on the hill – there falls upon the 7,051 inhabitants registered at the last census the tolling of the bell that announces that one of their members has passed away: nine strokes for men, seven for women, tolled more slowly for prominent people. No one knows whether this last is at the discretion of the bell ringer or according to the clergy’s scale of charges, but a poor man who gets himself su toccu pasau, the slow tolling, is little less than a scandal. The next day, the whole town winds along behind the coffin, with one priest in front, then three priests, then the entire chapter (for Nuoro is the see of a bishop), the first one unpaid and in a hurry, the others making two, three, four stops along the way to the graveyard – however many are asked for – and truly the wing of death descends on the little low houses and on the occasional more recent [grand ones]. Then, when the last shovelful has brought the scene to an end, the dead man is [truly] dead …, and even his memory vanishes.

The bells are therefore a lens for talking about the city’s (seemingly) eternal, unchanging customs as well as sketching out the wonderful portrait of the bellringer Cischeddu, one of the countless characters in Satta’s tragic, ridiculous Nuoro:

The Church of Santa Maria, with its Latin inscription which not even the priests could understand, dominated it from the brow of the hill, a bell tower to the right and a bell tower to the left, like an immense snail. Nor were the bells just any two bells, because they had names (one was Lionzedda; the other Lollobedda) and they told different tales, according to the service, or even according to the mood of the bellringer, which, it was said, people claimed to recognize. Chischeddu (which was his name, meaning Franceschino) must have quarreled with the vicar, they thought at San Pietro and Séuna when the tolling for a funeral was too hurried or a note rang false. Chischeddu was one of those wrecks who for some unknown reason drift into churches, and are allowed by God or the vicar to take part in the life of the spirit as vergers or sacristans, or to take the collection, or – if they have a decent ear, as was the case with Chischeddu – as bell-ringers. … Chischeddu … regulated the life and death of the town [with the bells], from the silver ave of the morning to the resonant ave of the evening, which made the peasants doff their caps as they came home on their carts, and the middle-class children stopped their play in the piazzetta. Even Don Sebastiano rose from the bench of the Piga pharmacy (which had nothing to do with Don Pasqualino [Piga]) and went up the short, cobbled stretch that led him home, where the study, the newspaper, and the oil lamp awaited him. Life, at a certain point, must stop, at least for the middle classes. But the great outpouring of … bells, [when] Chischeddu sounded [nary a wrong note], even if the vicar had given him what-for a few minutes earlier, was not that of Holy Saturday, at exactly ten o’clock in the morning, when Jesus rose from the dead (and everyone stood and waited, gazing upward) but the peal that announced that the bishop had left his palace with his suite of canons in ermine, for the celebration of the Pontifical Mass. Santa Maria awaited him with its immense doors flung wide, and the dean on one side, ready to give the note to the [choir] of seminarists, was a splash of violet in the dark interior of the church. In his embroidered shoes, and with his long train held up by two young deacons, the bishop went up the gentle, oak-shaded slope that divided (or united) the cathedral and the palace, and upon that psalm-intoning cortege there fell the gigantic chimes of Chischeddu’s bells, which came no longer from the bell towers but from the blue sky, from all the blue skies of the island, [which] arched themselves above the fleeting scene.

After this passage, Satta delves into the role of the church and the clergy in Nuoro, formulating a theory that the church and the bishop’s residence must have once been a single building that was later divided into the two that they are now. In the course of this reflection, he again mentions Monsignor Roich, the bishop from centuries earlier who seems to have decided to move the seat of the diocese from Galtellì to Nuoro. This is discussed in Chapter Two, where we read that Galtellì was at one time much more important, but then it got hit by malaria and an intolerable climate, especially in summer. Here we need to clarify that in cases like these the narrative aim is not to provide the reader with a historically accurate reconstruction, but rather to slowly build an extraordinary literary construction, drawing in part on collective and individual memory, the main character of which being Nuoro. 

It is likely that at the time of Monsignor Roich the church and the forecourt and the bishop’s palace formed a single unit. There was no other reason for the granite walls surrounding the tree-lined slope outside the church in an embrace, and open only to the vast steps leading to the recently made cobbled roadway that borders the bishop’s palace. It is true that the tall, severe, disproportionate cathedral has nothing in common with the dwelling of the bishops, that earthly dwelling reminiscent on a larger scale of the peasant houses of Séuna. Rather than actually seeing it, one senses it through the palm trees rising above the red-tinted wall. [Indeed, it could have been] the summer residence of a minor provincial landowner, with its shady patio, [or even] a place of pleasure, had it not been for [tall, black-clad] priests who came and went [during the hours of the Divine Office] The bishops would arrive, would take up their abode, and then be carried off by death like the popes in Rome; and each of them was like a little pope in that town of 7,051 inhabitants, which had at least forty canons and priests, two convents of nuns (the rich nuns and the poor nuns, as they were called), and a seminary that was the first glimmer of hope for peasants from the villages, who even then were longing to move to the towns. And all this in the midst of a population that was pagan by instinct, as in fact the canons and priests were half-pagan, not acknowledging each other and acknowledging the bishop only because he was an outsider.

Before leaving the area of the cathedral, be sure to take in the stunning view from the lookout at the end of the street that separates Santa Maria della Neve from the former courthouse. From here, you can see, beyond the slope where a new part of the city was built in the shade of the church’s apse and amidst the mountains in the distance, the closest town to Nuoro, Oliena. The fact that each town could be seen from the other is central to the following passage in Satta’s novel about the installation of electric lighting in Nuoro’s streets:

[E]lectric lighting was, as they say nowadays, an irreversible fact, meaning that [they would never go back to] the old lamps. Then something occurred that I think has never been recorded in any newspaper in the world. Nuoro, in its nimbus of light, looked like a great ship in the darkness of the ocean. The nearby villages continued in their black of night. The nearest of all, just on the other side of the valley, was Oliena, as the maps say, though its real and more poetic name is Ulìana, with the accent on the i. … Now from the piazza of Oliena, Nuoro looks like an immense fortress, with the apse of the church perched high above the valley, the red mill, and the tall houses of San Pietro. Only a corner of Nuoro, because (as I think I have said) most of it slopes down on the other side. But that October evening all the Olienese, men, women, and children, had gathered together, looking upward, because word had got around. And the luminous magic suddenly appeared in the immense void, and Oliena also gave forth a shout of joy. What concern it was of theirs, except as a miracle, which is a miracle for everyone, is not clear. But it did concern them – very much so. No one knows exactly who first had the idea, but the fact is that the dead street lamps of Nuoro took the road to Oliena. They were sold along with the lamplighter’s ladder to Nuoro’s poor neighbors, and the mayor in a brand-new costume and the town secretary came from Oliena to draw up the deed. The Nuorese secretly rubbed their hands with glee, and in the evening went up to Sant’Onofrio to see Oliena light up, one lamp after another, so that one could count them. And who knows whether the children ran after the lamplighter as well, picking up the spent matchsticks.

The boundaries of San Pietro were a little vague, unlike those of Sèuna, which were marked by the Iron Bridge. … San Pietro ends where the long, newly paved Corso begins. The Corso is the symbol of the third part of Nuoro, the Nuoro of the law courts, the town hall, the schools, the bishop’s palace; the Nuoro of Don Sebastiano, of Don Gabriele, of Don Pasqualino – in a word, of the ‘gentry’, whether rich or poor. [Although] the boundaries of San Pietro were not geographically certain, the people of San Pietro knew them to perfection, and no one from up there would ever have dared to cross the threshold of the Corso (formerly Via Majore).

Santu Predu (San Pietro) is one of the city’s two old quarters, the one traditionally home to shepherds. In contrast to the other one, Séuna, the buildings here are taller and have two entrances: one that opens onto the street and another that opens onto the vegetable garden behind the house. A classic example of this type of home is Grazia Deledda’s house, as described in Cosima and, indirectly, Sino al confine. The quarter is also described by Maria Giacobbe, whose family lived there, in Diario di una maestrina and Le radici. And Marcello Fois observed, in his book In Sardegna non c’è il mare:

The quarter of San Pietro … begins right where the high street ends. And it feels like being at the top of the world. Here, the silence is filled with a strange, unexplainable restlessness, probably that of the shepherd fathers. The houses are built tall and narrow, silvery grey. The beating heart of San Pietro is the church of the Rosario, home to sharp-witted, highly educated parish priests. Home to art and sheep farming. It is the epic of a Barbagia too often victim of its own epic. The crow’s nest extolled by Salvatore Satta in The Day of Judgment. The fortress of the magnificent Corrales family of brigands. A treasure chest filled with all the strengths and all the weakness of the Nuoro spirit …

It’s the ancient church of San Carlo, the Deledda family home, the enveloping softness of the bare stone.

Deledda and Satta saw the quarter in entirely different ways. The latter, who was born in Via Majore, saw the streets and houses of the neighborhood as follows:

The shepherds all gather [in] … the other town within a town, which is called San Pietro, although the place has no church of this name. San Pietro, Santu Predu, is the black heart of Nuoro. … San Pietro is colorless: it has tall houses that open onto narrow roads that are no longer lanes, and if you want to see the sky, you have to look up.

Deledda, however, flips the point of view, making the ‘tall houses’ small by comparing them to the quarter’s main church, as we read in this excerpt from Cosima:

The most important house, however, is the priest’s … a real fortress with courtyards and gardens inside. One [of which, the hanging one, is] full of roses, pomegranates, and a tall mulberry tree full of small violet fruit. From there extends a panorama of houses and shacks that form the most characteristic and popular quarter of the little town, and the white bell tower of Rosario church emerges above the low dark roofs like a lighthouse among reefs.

Satta’s description of Santu Predu turns on comparison with the very different Séuna. And at base, the difference between the way the houses were built in the two quarters reflects the differences between the life of a shepherd and that of a farmer:

San Pietro is an urban extension of the sheepfold, and the smell of sheep and goats is in the air. … The houses are large, because masters and servants all live together, eat at the same table, and warm themselves at the same fire; and this makes the servants more servants and the masters more masters. … The sound of knocking at night bodes no good [and] anyone who wants the door opened has no need to knock. If in his remote hut the shepherd has a thousand eyes fixed on the unsuspecting wayfarer, in town there are a thousand eyes fixed on him, whether he be servant or master, for all are subject to the same destiny.

Grazia Deledda, drawing on her personal memories for her final masterpiece, also wrote of night-time knocks on the door. There is a passage in Cosima where the writer’s family finds himself receiving the ‘ambassador’ of a pair of infamous bandits, who were ‘requesting’ the concession of some pastureland that Giovanni Antonio Deledda had already rented to someone else. Finding oneself faced with negotiations of that kind could make a person fear for his life. However, the wise Deledda, who his writer daughter describes as a prudent, just man, managed to make the shadowy messenger see reason, and the latter even ended up becoming the former’s friend and loyal swineherd. The notary Sebastiano Sanna Carboni also saw himself as a prudent man, bound by an unshakable sense of justice: but times had changed in the generation that passed between Deledda and Satta, and in a dark novel like The Day of Judgment it is impossible to find solutions for disputes and quarrels. In short, it is impossible to find the ultimate meaning of justice, as expressed in a passage like the following:

Divided from Nuoro by insurmountable barriers, maybe San Pietro had another life. With its patriarchal crimes San Pietro was building a bridge toward the future, while Sèuna was nothing but a cart and a yoke of oxen, and [oblivious to and uncaring about its existence].

Or the presentation of the infamous, feared dynasty of Santu Predu:

San Pietro is the base – and no other base is possible – for the Corrales dynasty. … They used to ride into their houses, just as they would into the sheepfold. The houses are high, with three or even four floors, even though life was still essentially nomadic, and took place entirely on the ground floor. As it did in Don Sebastiano’s house, though the company was different. … The Corrales … had gazed on that boundless landscape with the eyes of pirates gazing at the sea. And their gaze had turned into action, the mysterious act of theft that is at the root of all property. Theft, what we call theft on the artificial assumption that there is such a thing as ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ … in Sardinia, or rather in Nuoro, or better still in San Pietro, consists of stealing a flock of a thousand sheep and making it disappear into thin air.… Obviously the Corrales do not have a magic wand, and a thousand sheep … cannot be stolen unless they are stolen by Sardinia as a whole. But this is the magic of the Corrales: they have made thieves of all Sardinians, or at least all of the Barbaricini. Other Sardinians don’t count anyway.

The Gallisai Mill is near Grazia Deledda’s house and is described in The Day of Judgment as a big mill built at the edge of the town by Don Pasqualino Piga (in real life, Francesco Guiso Gallisai): 

Handsome, tall, and possessed of immense riches …, Don Pasqualino Piga had a vocation for industry, almost alone among the Nuorese, who did not even know what industry was.

The author locates the mill at the edge of Séuna, but he clearly switched the farmers’ quarter with that of the shepherds:

On the outskirts of Sèuna he had set up a steam mill, with a baker’s shop attached to it, and it filled the whole neighborhood with pulsations, like the beating of an enormous heart. The millstones worked day and night, and in a fine mist of flour groped the shadows of Don Pasqualino’s sons, who toiled away like workmen, or even harder than workmen, with that frenzied dedication that always comes over the gentry when they discover work.

In the heart of the San Pietro quarter and built on the site of an earlier church (which was dedicated to Peter, the saint after which the neighborhood is named), the church of the Rosario, or the Rosary, was first built in the seventeenth century but radically renovated between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The church, which became a parish church in 1943, is central to the celebration in honor of St Francis of Lula: indeed, it is where the second pilgrimage to the Sanctuary starts each year on May 1st. 

And this was where Grazia Deledda and Palmiro Madesani, who had met about one year earlier in Cagliari, were married on January 11, 1900, in the presence of their families and small number of other guests. But it is also a key location in Salvatore Satta’s novel, in which it appears right at the beginning, in the beautiful, somber opening sequence, where the narrator describes the city’s funeral processions, which started here and then continued the short distance separating the church from the cemetery.

But our visit to the church shall be accompanied by a different passage from The Day of Judgment. As is well known, the novel was inspired by actual events and is in a certain sense even autobiographical. Some, like Vanna Gazzola, Satta’s main biographer, even think that the model for Day might have been Cosima, a book that Satta cherished. The passage is written in first-person, in a novel in which the narrator is often hidden, and yet present on every page, subtly connected to the author:

And here I am, already in the square in front of the Rosario, the church on the edge of town where the dead used to pause as if to draw breath, before the fatal five hundred meters, between meadows and low walls, that led them to be [really, truly] dead. The surroundings of the Rosario were part of San Pietro, no doubt about it, but the church’s particular mission gave it a metaphysical stamp, which San Pietro was careful not to acquire. Strictly speaking, the officiant was Father Delussu, the blacksmith’s brother, who limped along with his heavy body full of blood and wine: but in fact it was the whole quarter that received the dead man. At the hour fixed for the burial, the bells of Santa Maria sent forth those great, rocking notes that made people stop in the street and ask ‘Who’s dead?’ Unless it was a well-known person, of course. These continued for a quarter of an hour, and then that austere bell suddenly broke into a kind of a gallop, pouring down the steep slope. This was the moment at which the priest in his black cowl, a sacristan before him with the [processional cross], emerged from the cathedral (for everything started from there) to fetch the dead man. There might be three priests, also in black cowls, if the family wanted them and paid them, and this was always a hurried scene that put heaven and earth into a sulk. But there might even be the entire chapter, with the canons in a double line and the ermine and the red-braided birettas. Then everything proceeded with gainful slowness, amid hymns of death and glory for which the detested dean signaled the start and beat out the time. A burst of color, a spectacle which the family offered (and was bound to offer if it was rich) to the common people, who emerged from house to house as the coffin passed, and followed along behind it. The procession of canons wended its way along the Corso and between the rows of little low houses, and in the solemnity of the singing one could tell that they were listening to their own voices, and not one, for sure, thought of putting himself in the place of the poor fellow in the coffin. But these are things of small importance. The fact is that as soon as the bell started galloping, the women poured out of the houses near the church, roused Father Delussu, [got] the keys, threw open the russet-colored door, and dragged an old table out of the sacristy, setting it up in the middle of the rough-cast nave. One of them gave a quick sweeping around, raising a cloud of dust; another cleaned the saints frozen in their niches, or straightened the garland of stars around the blue-and-white Madonna, or laid out the utensils for the benediction or the lighting of the candles. Then they all crowded to the doorway in eager expectation, for they were hostesses to the newcomer, and kept a close lookout for his arrival. When they saw him coming, borne on the devout shoulders of the confraternity, they called Father Delussu and ushered the dead man to him; and he received him, had the coffin put on the table, and there recited the prayers in a low voice, as if he were having a chat with the corpse. Now they have restored the facade of the Rosario with little cement blocks, and it is clear that they no longer take the dead there, either because they have no need for rest or because no one dies any more, which seems more likely.

Located at the edge of the Santu Predu neighborhood, not far from the church of the Madonna della Solitudine, the Nuoro cemetery is arguably the most important place in The Day of Judgment. It has been the burial ground for the people of Nuoro since 1868, a few years after the town bought the parcel of land, which was already known as Sa ‘e Manca.

Then, when the last shovelful has brought the scene to an end, the dead man is [truly] dead, and even his memory vanishes. The cross remains on the grave, but that’s up to it. And in fact in the graveyard, or rather in the cemetery, dominated by a crag that looks like one of the Fates, there is neither chapel nor monument. (This is not the case today: ever since death ceased to exist, the place has been crammed with family tombs. Sa 'e Manca, Manca’s plot, as it used to be called, I imagine after the name of the long-expropriated owner, [has become,] over and beyond its costly walls and absurd colonnades, … a continuation of the now middle-class city.)

Satta hand-wrote his novel, with few changes, in two identical diaries, one from 1970, the other from 1971. It was then typed up, in view of publication, but the book was not published until 1977, two years after the author’s death. The publishing house, Cedam, is specialized in legal texts and was one with the great law scholar was already familiar. It was two years after that, and so in 1979, that Day was republished by Adelphi and became a publishing sensation, on its way to becoming a twentieth-century classic in Italy and Europe.

Walking amidst the tombs and family chapels, readers hoping to find the names of characters from the novel will be disappointed. The writer’s family changed the names and surnames found in the manuscript, perhaps for ethical reasons or perhaps for privacy. All the characters’ names in the manuscript are those of people who really lived in Nuoro in the early twentieth century, the years straddling the Great War, when the novel is set. And so, the Sanna Carboni family made famous by the Adelphi and subsequent editions was actually Satta Carroni, the author’s family. And to give just one more example, the Bellisai family in the novel was the Gallisai family in real life – and they would likely not have appreciated Satta’s narrative take on the activities of Don Ricciotti. If you would like to find out more about the differences between the manuscript and the published editions of the novel, you could start by looking for the volumes edited by Giuseppe Marci (L’autografo del Il giorno del giudizio, published by Cuec) and Aldo Maria Morace (Il giorno del giudizio, published by Il Maestrale). The latter also includes some of the original names from the manuscript. Or, you could go straight to the source, reading the high-quality scan of the manuscript available on the University of Sassari’s website, in the section dedicated to the FASS (the Fondo autografi scrittori sardi), a collection of manuscripts by Sardinian writers.

We shall conclude our walk through Nuoro guided by The Day of Judgment with a few more passages about the Sa ‘e Manca cemetery:

I have been, in secret, to visit the Nuoro cemetery. I arrived early in the morning, wishing to see no one and not … be seen. I got out at Montelongu, the point where Nuoro in my day began and ended, on the edge of San Pietro, and I started off along the little streets of my long-lost childhood. In spite of the efforts of recent administrations, the traces of them still remain in the low houses, with a few dusty relics of pergolas, a few neglected courtyards. They have given names to the streets. These are written in blue on white ceramic plaques with a thin blue line around the edge, and are the names of forgotten splendors – Canon Fele must have had a hand in this business. I am sure that Don Priamo would have disapproved of them. ‘What do you need plaques for’, he would have told the council in memorable words, ‘when everyone knows where they have to go?’

As in a photographic print as it develops, remote faces reappear in those around me: people vanished from the earth and from memory, people dissolved into nothingness, but who on the contrary are repeated without knowing it down the generations, in an eternity of the species; of which we are uncertain whether it be the triumph of life or the triumph of death. I feel I am already inside the cemetery I am heading for; a cemetery of living beings, of course. But is it not the living I have come to seek in Sa 'e Manca, in the graveyard dominated by the crag that looks like one of the Fates?

I leave the piazza and the new streets that I do not recognize, I leave the last houses facing with indifference onto the cemetery (for the very first time I think I understand the hidden meaning of the pomerium), and I have arrived at the place which is the object of my journey, or the reason for it.

Maiden, round the white wall of your graveyard

The farmer strains over the shaft, and plows.

With his clear voice, the lark Accompanies him from skies of hyacinth.

Why do these old lines come welling up in my memory? It is as if the first dawn of the world were rising again before my eyes. These costly walls, that have replaced and swallowed up the old cemetery and made it too large for the living and the dead alike, now vanish (and whatever would Don Priamo say, if he were to wake in there?): the plowman has grasped his plow again, and the labor of life that furrows the soil is matched inside the enclosure by the labors of Milieddu, the sexton of all the Nuorese; which is also a labor of life. And the skylark soars for all of us into the skies, and sings. It is a moment of poetry, such as occurs from time to time, and my secret anxiety gives way to a mood of inward joy. I approach the gate, which they have substituted for the rust-eaten door, and I get ready to search for Milieddu, without thinking that he would be at least a hundred years old by now.

… He was a kindhearted man, and seemed to ask forgiveness of each dead man for having to bury him, [but bury them he did], and without caring whether they were rich or poor, if they were Fileddu or Don Sebastiano. This earned him neither love nor hatred, but made him in a sense the master of them all. It was as if everyone had a second self, himself and Milieddu: and in conversation, when someone was asked if he was really sure of what he was saying, the answer was: ‘A man’s sure of only Milieddu’s shovel’. In Nuoro death had a name. I cross the threshold. Inside are two strapping young fellows in black uniforms, seated idly, like bodyguards. (Who knows how Milieddu managed to bury himself?) They eye me with complete indifference. The cemetery has spread to the very foot of the Mountain, reminding me of those displays of plaster or terra-cotta statuettes one comes across on the outskirts of towns. I make my way along prim avenues full of names that mean nothing to me. I am about to succumb to the terrible anguish of nothingness, as when crossing a square or wandering through a deserted house, [when] at last, at the end of an avenue of dusty cypresses, I see a cement church resembling the Rosario. I realize at once that they have built it on the site of the crumbling little chapel in which the bishops of Nuoro lay quietly in a row, waiting for the inevitable resurrection. This is the place. There are the two marble angels, one bent [sorrowfully] over the other, eternally [mourning] the proud dead of the Mannu family. Here is the tombstone of Boelle Zicheri, the pharmacist, who left everything to the hospital out of hatred for his relatives, and that of Don Gaetano Pilleri, who [persisted, with no cross, in] his loathing for the priests; here are the first graves of the families of shepherds, with their nicknames that became surnames and the haughty portraits in costume, framed in little enameled ovals; here is the broken pillar commemorating a young man, with the inscription – ‘You weep, and I sleep far off in the graveyard’ – that used to trouble my nights; here is the modest iron railing that encloses Maestro Manca, preventing him from turning back into Pedduzza (the Pebble) and going back to the [tavern] where he slid under the table, [killed by the last glass of wine he was imbibing] … Within a radius of a hundred meters from here I could trace the limits of the old, damp walls. I would only have to follow everything that is black with age, chipped, forgotten – everything that has died for the second time. And beyond these poor tombs there is still a short stretch of ground, short and infinite, with the remains of a few slanting crosses, and others overturned, as if they had exhausted their function. I wonder whether there is more hope in all those tombs where the dead lie alone, or in this bit of earth beneath which the bones of infinite generations are heaped up and mingled together, being themselves turned to earth. In this infinitely remote corner of the world, unthought of by anyone but me, I feel that the peace of the dead does not exist, that the dead are released from every problem except for one only, that of having been alive at all. In Etruscan tombs the oxen now chew the cud, and the largest have been turned into sheepfolds. On the stone beds lie pans and wicker baskets, the humble implements of the shepherd’s life. No one remembers that they are tombs, not even the indolent tourist who climbs the path cut into the rock, and ventures into the dark depths where his voice resounds. Yet they are still here, after two thousand, three thousand years; for life cannot conquer death, nor can death conquer life. The resurrection of the flesh begins the very day one dies. It is not a hope, it is not a promise, it is not a condemnation. Pietro Catte, who in the tanca of Biscollài hanged himself from a tree on Christmas night, believed he could die. And now he too is here (because the priests made him out to be a madman and buried him in consecrated ground), along with Don Pasqualino and Fileddu, Don Sebastiano and Ziu Poddanzu, Canon Fele and Maestro Ferdinando, the peasants of Séuna and the shepherds of San Pietro, the priests, the thieves, the saints, the idlers from the Corso … All in an inextricable tangle beneath my feet. As in one of those absurd processions in Dante’s Paradiso, but without either choruses or candelabra, the men of my people file by in an endless parade. They all appeal to me, they all want to place the burden of their lives in my hands, the story, which is no story, of their having been. Words of supplication or anger whisper with the wind through the thyme bushes. An iron wreath dangles from a broken cross. And maybe while I think of their lives, because I am writing their lives, they think of me as some ridiculous god, who has summoned them together for the day of judgement, to free them forever from their memory.