Nuorese Cultural District

This is the church where Grazia Maria Cosima Damiana Deledda was baptized, on September 28, 1871, not long after she was born, as recorded in the certificate preserved in the archives of the Nuoro diocese: “A baby girl born yesterday at 8 pm to the husband and wife Giovanni Antonio Deledda Floris … and Francesca Cambosu Pereleddu was presented at the Cathedral.” She was born on the feast of Cosmos and Damian, and of the three names added to her first, the one in honor of the first of those two saints, Cosima, was always of special importance to her, as is clear from the title of the famous unfinished novel published posthumously a few months after her death (1936). Cosima was first published in a magazine between September and October of that year, and the volume came out the following year; the magazine was Nuova Antologia and the publisher was Treves – both of which were favorites of the writer. In this largely autobiographical book, Deledda tells of the life of an aspiring writer, spanning from childhood to her first literary success. In it, the reader can glimpse the Nuoro of the last decades of the nineteenth century, meet Grazia’s family and enter her childhood home. Her father, Giovanni Antonio, was a wealthy landowner, poetry lover – he enjoyed improvising in dialect – and law graduate, although he was not a practicing lawyer, instead running a successful cork, coal, and cheese business. Her mother, Francesca Cambosu, was about twenty years his junior. Grazia probably did not have the same loving relationship with her mother that she had with Giovanni Antonio; the daughter was afraid of the mother’s sternness and the mother could not comprehend her daughter’s desire to write. At the same time, Deledda was aware that her mother was unhappily married, bound, at a very young age, to a much older man, but also that she was devoted with an unshakable sense of duty to her growing family (Grazia had two brothers and four sisters; two of the latter died early, one at birth). This partly explains why Deledda’s heroines often find themselves forced to hide or purge their personal desires, sometimes within the context of an endless tragic striving. When her father died, the family businesses fell flat: the heirs appointed to take the reins, her brothers Santus and Andrea, were not up to the task, the former due to alcoholism and the latter due to his sometimes reckless and intemperate nature (features found in many of Deledda’s young male characters). It was Andrea, however, who, albeit with ups and downs, encouraged the literary ambitions of his sister, the future famous writer.

But let’s return to the cathedral of the diocese of Nuoro, dedicated to the city’s patron saint, the Madonna of the Snow. Built between 1836 and 1853 and consecrated in 1873, it was designed by the architect/priest Antonio Cano (who 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 a number of valuable works, including the Via Crucis by Giovanni Ciusa Romagna and Carmelo Floris, two paintings by Bernardino Palazzi (a Deposition and I Discepoli di Emmaus) and a wooden Art Nouveau compass made by the historic Sassari carpentry shop of the Fratelli Clemente. When she moved to Rome, Deledda commissioned the furniture for her home from the same celebrated shop.

The church and its clock are the focal point of a passage in the novel La giustizia, published in 1899:

The famous clock of Saint Mary’s, the pride and glory of Nuoro, struck two: the June sun, quite warm but not scorching, and tempered by a pleasant breeze, shone in the square and the deserted areas around the cathedral: the granite pavement and steps sparkled clean and bright; intensely green trees swayed gently in the breeze in the bishop’s garden, from which wafted the strong perfume of warm flowers. In the distance, against the bright horizon, a strip of green landscape completed the peaceful, sunny scene.

Next to the cathedral, there is an imposing, austere building, once used as a courthouse, then a museum, now temporarily closed to the public. This is the building that the main character of the novel, Stefano Arca, walks out of during the trial of the alleged murderers of his brother Carlo. In a fit of anger, feeling the eyes of everyone in the room upon him, Stefano leaves the building to get some air, finding himself in the Cathedral Square, which the narrator describes in the quiet warmth of an early summer afternoon:

Agitated, Stefano started walking around the square, squinting his eyes against the glare of the sun and glitter of granite. But little by little, as if dissipated by the fragrant breeze and the profound sense of peace given off by that fragment of small, deserted city and the bright background of the horizon, the poisonous rage that had been pressing on him quieted down. But he continued to pace back and forth, taking long strides and pulling his straw hat over his forehead. Then, suddenly, hearing some soft singing, he went down the steps to the left of the church and looked.

Inside the cathedral, even more monumental when seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy, Ananias, the main character of Ashes, receives the Sacrament of Confirmation:

At the same time, Ananias, who had turned eight, was confirmed; his religious padrino was signor Carboni. It was an important event for the boy and for the whole town, which met in the cathedral where Bishop Demartis, a handsome, imposing prelate, confirmed hundreds of children. With its animated light and its fragrant warmth, springtime pervaded the church through its wide-open doors, which seemed enormous to Ananias. The church was filled with women wearing their purple local costumes, with [ladies] and with happy children.

Gavina Sulis finished her studies in July 1890. Her father, who had worked as a contractor for the city roads, was an intelligent man and had had her repeat her fourth year at primary school, since there were no other schools for girls in their little town.

These are the opening lines of the novel Sino al confine (1910), and it is immediately clear that the character of Gavina is partly autobiographical. Grazia Deledda had also repeated her fourth year, since no fifth was offered. Her passion for reading had already been sparked, along with her unshakable ambition to become a writer, and so she continued her education with private tutors and on her own. However, Grazia never forgot the school she had attended in the old monastery of the Friars Minor of the Observance in via Manzoni, a sixteenth-century structure 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. The school was also attended by a number of other illustrious figures: Sebastiano Satta, Mario Delitala, Francesco Ciusa, Salvatore Satta and Indro Montanelli, the latter having lived in Nuoro when his father was headmaster at the Asproni secondary school. The building was on the opposite side of the city from Grazia’s home, and she walked there along the same route as Gavina:

Farewell! Years might pass before she sees the wild valley, lonely road and black and grey facade of the school again. Her house was on the other side of town, almost at the foot of the mountain, on the edge of another valley, this one partly cultivated and colored the green and grey of vineyards and olive groves. Gavina therefore needed to cut across the whole town, Corso and the little streets behind Corso, to get home.

This route is also described in the novella Primi passi, whereas in the famous novel Ashes (the 1914 film adaptation of which was the sole time the legendary theatre actress Eleonora Duse appeared on screen) we read that the “schools were at the other end of Nuoro, in a [monastery] surrounded by gloomy vegetable gardens.” There is a more detailed description of the school in Cosima:

The [monastery] has two entrances, one for the boys and one for the girls. From these one goes up a short flight of stairs to a long, bright and clean corridor that leads to the classrooms – small classrooms that still have a cloistral smell, with windows fortified by iron bars from which, however, one sees the green gardens and hears the rustling poplars and cane in the valley below.

Via Majore, now Corso Garibaldi, began at a point called ‘Ponte ’e ferru’ (Iron Bridge) and ended at what is now Piazza San Giovanni, where women from nearby villages came to sell produce. If you were to try to mark out a dividing line between the peasants’ quarter of Séuna and the shepherds’ quarter of Santu Predu, Via Majore would have been it. In the time of Umberto I, when the echoes of the new Kingdom of Italy reached as far as Nuoro, modernity made its appearance in the Barbagia region’s most important city, right on this street. This is the sense we get, in any case, from a short, snapshot-like description penned 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 it 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 high street. There, the new lords built their miniature versions of Umbertine houses like embankments along the grey granite river that covers that section 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 mentioned by Fois was none other than Salvatore Satta’s father. But if you would like to know more about the ‘Continental style’ of his house, you will need to read The Day of Judgment.

Via Majore was also the street that Grazia Deledda walked along every day to get to school: an obligatory route, but not without its appeal, as we can glean from the first-person narration in the novella Primi passi:

My classmates and I went to school very willingly: first and foremost, and I say this sincerely, for the school itself, but also because it was a diversion from our monotonous, almost cloistered life at home. To get to school, which was in an old monastery, we had to cut across the whole town, from our rocky little streets, which had a mountainy air, to the glorious entry to the piazza where women selling produce sat on the ground, offering their vegetables still shining with dew, and the servants for wealthy families crowded around the baskets of blue-grey mullet brought by a fishmonger from Baronia. Then, we would walk anxiously down Corso, stopping once again to admire the balconies of Don Antonio’s palazzo or in front of a few little shop windows or at the stationer’s shop to buy a nib and a notebook (five cents for the two). We would take a quick look at the people breakfasting at Caffè, soaking up every detail, and then, leaving the town center, entering the working class quarter before arriving at the school, we would buy chestnuts or cherries depending on the season, and, finally, we would pick a flower on the side of the monastery’s country road and look lovingly at the gently sloping valley, painted the green of vegetable gardens and vineyards, the grey-blue of olive groves and, especially, the hue of mystery. The mystery of life, which opened with the blooming of the almond blossoms and the bursting open of the winter sky above the mountains in the horizon.

The narrating voice highlights a kind of wonder that can renew itself daily, the sort typical of childhood and early youth. One of the spots the little girl and her classmates were most curious about was a café in Corso, along with its customers. This was the renowned Caffè Tettamanzi, a place where, to cite Salvatore Satta, ‘“the gentry” exercised their right to do sweet nothing’. You can still sip a coffee or glass of wine in this same café today, which you will find at number 71 Corso. It takes its name from its first owner, a carpenter from Piedmont called 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’. Before becoming a key location in The Day of Judgment, Caffè Tettamanzi was described by Deledda in Cosima:

The wide regional road that crosses the town passing through the piazza is called Via Maggiore. There is long impressive palazzo whose loggias and cornices inspired Cosima’s wonder. There is, further down, a café with glass doors, and with mirrors and divans inside, another marvel to Cosima.

This 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. The Deledda family home, which we shall visit shortly, was built just the same. In the novel Sino al confine, which we already know to have a strong autobiographical vein, the main character, Gavina, is in many ways like Grazia. She continues her studies through the fourth year, repeating it twice as a way of furthering her education, and she lives in a house very similar to that of the writer, of the kind typical of this neighborhood. The bedroom has two windows: one looking out onto the village; one opening onto the garden, towards the countryside. From the former, Gavina observes the lives of men, to whom she is drawn by morbid curiosity. She turns to other window to punish that instinct, taking refuge in religious life and the family routine. This passage from the end of the first chapter is representative: irritated by the shouting coming in from the street,

Gavina closes the window towards the street and goes to the one towards the garden. At least there everything was wonderful and pure.

Besides its turn as a literary landscape in Grazia Deledda’s Cosima and Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgment, the neighborhood is also described by Maria Giacobbe, whose family lived there, in a few passages in Diario di una maestrina and Le radici. And then here is Marcello Fois, in his book In Sardegna non c’è il mare (2008):

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.

Curiously, Nuoro’s two great narrators viewed it in quite different ways. Satta, who was born in via Majore, saw it like this:

San Pietro has no color. The houses here are tall, giving onto narrow streets, not alleyways, and to see the sky you have to look up.

Deledda flipped 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.

In the heart of the San Pietro quarter, and built on the site of an earlier church (which was dedicated to the saint after which the neighborhood is named, Peter), the church of the Rosario 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.
We are introduced to it right away in Salvatore Satta’s novel, where it is mentioned in the beautiful, somber opening sequence, when the narrator describes the city’s funeral processions, which started here and continued along the “fatal 500 meters” that separate the church from the cemetery.

On a more cheerful note, the church of the Rosario was also where Grazia Deledda and Palmiro Madesani were married on January 11, 1900 (having met about one year earlier in Cagliari), in the presence of their families and a small number of other guests. For the occasion, Grazia had a dress made that she described to her future spouse in a letter (the dress was reconstructed by the ISRE and is now displayed on the top floor of her family home):

So, I ordered an elegant travelling dress, which I’ll wear for the wedding, since that’s the fashion now, and a dress-length piece of dark silk. I’m also having the black-silk dress remodeled, and I bought a sumptuous dress in silver and lilac brocade that was for a bride who didn’t get married. That dress is out of fashion, but I’ll send it to the seamstress in Cagliari so she can make me two pretty dresses out of it (Letter to Palmiro Madesani dated December 13, 1899, cited in Rossana Dedola, Grazia Deledda. I luoghi gli amori le opere, 2016).

Right after her wedding, Grazia Deledda left Nuoro to fulfil her long-cherished dream of moving to Rome, the ideal place for concentrating even more on her writing and achieving her dream of emancipation. Grazia had been in love various times prior to getting married, in some measure experiencing the romantic fire she was able to so deftly describe: but never happily, and always within the constraints of an epistolary relationship (a well-read friend of Santus, Antonino, featured in many pages of Cosima; the writer and journalist Stanis Manca; a secret boyfriend, opposed by her family, Andrea Pirodda; the great man of letters Angelo De Gubernatis). As with all born writers, over the years she developed an extraordinary talent for observation and psychological penetration, together with impeccable skill in organizing her work. In her maturity, the sources for her books – and the love stories told in them – can be found more in great tragic and melodramatic literature than in the reality of quiet, affectionate married life: to which we must, of course, add the increasingly fervid imagination that the writer rationally translated into extremely grounded stories.

Rome was the perfect place for pursuing the success as a writer she had tenaciously, rigorously, and earnestly aspired to for so long. After they moved, Madesani quit his job as a civil servant to devote himself fully to being his wife’s literary agent, her star, especially after Elias Portolu (1900), in rapid ascent. This decision was surprisingly modern for the time: a man quitting his job – a serious job, fully integrated into middle class society – in order to devote himself to his artist wife. It was difficult to understand, and indeed Luigi Pirandello, who often visited Deledda’s home in Rome in the early years of the century, took inspiration from the relationship between Deledda and Madesani for his novel Suo marito (1911), which tells the story of an unhappy marriage between a young writer and her husband, a nondescript, uncultured clerical worker who quits his job to devote himself, with enormous profit, to his wife’s career, including relations with publishers, the public and the press.

The house where Grazia Deledda lived from birth to marriage was declared an Italian national monument in 1937. The City of Nuoro bought it in 1968 and then sold it, in 1979, to the Istituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico (ISRE) for the symbolic price of 1,000 lire. The Instituto then set to work to make the house into a museum. Receiving a generous donation of materials from the Madesani-Deledda family, the ISRE created the museum collection, which includes a large number of manuscripts, photographs, documents and personal items.

Grazia Deledda lived in this three-floor house, with an inner courtyard on the ground floor, until she left for Rome after marrying Palmiro Madesani. The house remained in the family until it was sold in 1913. This sale – which was linked to the death of her mother – marked a clear break for Deledda. From this point forward, Sardinia became increasingly remote, as we glean from the following excerpt from a letter sent to the writer Georges Hérelle, who had translated many of Deledda’s works into French:

The old Sardinia is going, with the emigrants. Just on the trip here from Rome, I travelled with a trainload of Sardinians who were headed to Genoa en route to America: they had left their traditions behind and, what’s worse, they were leaving without regret and without nostalgia. This pained me as if the Sardinia I had known was dying at my feet. The past remains, it’s true. And this is exactly what I want to recall now, in my next book, with everything beautiful and poetic that vibrates in my memory. I think I’ll write the story of my childhood, of the things I lost and that I’ll never find again outside myself, but that remain inside me, in my interior world.

The house was the epicenter of what her native Sardinia became in her later writing, which is to say after she left the island for Rome. She described Sardinia from different angles: we find the Verist eye of someone who knows how to handle social art and also the ethnographic one, ranging from the objectivity of describing customs and traditions to more expressive tones, more in harmony with ‘barbaric’ traits like mystery, archaism and endless silence. Hovering above it all however, you sense an elegiac tone, nostalgia for an island that was profoundly hers but increasingly distant. Cosima is, for this and other reasons, the great writer’s definitive masterpiece. In it, in the very first pages, we find the famous description of the house where she was born:

The house was simple, but comfortable: two large rooms on each of the three stories with wooden floors, low wooden ceilings and whitewashed walls. The entryway was divided in half by a wall: a stairway to the right, the first flight of stairs granite, the rest slate. The solid door, latched by an iron hook, had a door knocker that pounded like a hammer, and a bolt, and a lock with a key as big as a castle’s. The room to the left of the entrance was multipurpose, with a high, hard bed, a desk, a large walnut wardrobe, rustic straw-bottomed chairs painted a cheerful blue. To the right was the dining room with a chestnut table and chairs like those in the other room, a stone fireplace and hearth. Nothing more. A door led to the kitchen, also solid and closed with hooks and bolts. As in all the simple houses of the time, the kitchen was the most lived in room, warmest with life and intimacy. There was a fireplace, but also in the center of the room was a focolare enclosed in four stones. And above it, at a man’s height, attached by four leather thongs to the large ceiling beams, was a smoke-blackened cane trellis about a meter square. Small round pecorino cheeses were almost always curing in the smoke and spreading their odor everywhere. And attached to a corner of the trellis was a primitive lantern of black iron with four beaks – a kind of small square pan in which the wick, sticking out of one of the beaks, floated freely in the oil. Everything was simple and old in the rather large, high kitchen, well lit by the window looking out upon the garden and by a Dutch door opening into the courtyyard. In the corner near the window stood an enormous oven with a brick flue and cooking surfaces. In its firebox ash-covered coals burned day and night, and under the stone sink by the window there was always coal in a small cork pot. But the food was usually cooked over the fire in the fireplace or over the center focolare on large iron tripods which could also be used as seats. Everything in the kitchen was large and solid: the carefully lined copper pans, the low chairs around the fireplace, the benches, the shelves for the kitchenware, the marble mortar and pestle for grinding salt, the table and shelf where, along with the pots and pans, there was always a wooden container of grated cheese and an asphodel basket filled with barley bread and food for the servants.

The house where she stopped was also unusual. It stood at a fork in the road that climbed up the slope of the mountain on one side, and on the other led down to the valley on the left. It was a small church, with a facade that in fact looked down into the valley, and was surrounded on the front and one side by a clearing marked by a little hedge enclosing a garden with fruit trees, a little wooden gate … and a path leading to the eastern side of the church, which was used as a dwelling.

Only two little windows fortified with iron grilles opened from the wall of the old building, where the road turned under the clearing. One roof of black tile, encrusted with moss and … parasitic plants, covered both the church and the house. Two markers, two symbols, looked down from one corner to the other, over the two valleys of the promontory; they looked down like brothers who, though far away and separated by a whole world, remember each other tenderly, being sons of the same mother. Rising above the facade, on top of a small arch from which hung a bell, was a cross; on the side of the garden and almost over the door to the house, was a chimney out of which came a banner of smoke that gladdened Concezione’s heart.

(Grazia Deledda, The Church of Solitude).

The current church of the Madonna della Solitudine was designed by Giovanni Ciusa Romagna and built between 1950 and 1957 on the site of the seventeenth-century country church described by Grazia Deledda in the novel The Church of Solitude, the last book she completed (Cosima was published posthumously and unfinished). The church is intimately tied to the writer: indeed, the restoration (actually, reconstruction) was commissioned in connection with a plan to bring her body back to her hometown, for burial in the old country church. A competition was launched, and the design presented by Giovanni Ciusa Romagna won. The project for the square in front of the church was awarded to Antoni Simon Mossa, although the space was changed again sometime later.

The new church maintains the simplicity of the original plan (‘Nothing adorned it. The roof was of planks, just like a [hut]. A stone bench along the wall served as a seat’), as well as a few elements described by Grazia Deledda in the novel, like the link to the custodian’s residence:

She went into the church, passing through the small sacristy that opened onto the kitchen. The little room had a small, high window that opened towards the north. It framed the mountain like a melancholy painting without a background of sky, and the crude light of the bare rocks gave it a profound sense of glacial solitude. The church, entered through a short hall from the little sacristy, also seemed to be carved out of the earth, it was so cold and humid. The gleam of the small lamps next to the altar, and of the dusty lunette over the door increased its sadness. But with the window open, in the blue light from the horizon clearing over the distant valley, the poor sanctuary seemed less icy and desolate.

The sobriety of the architecture is counterbalanced by the richness of the religious furnishings and decorations made in the second half of the 1950s by Eugenio Tavolara (the entrance door, the fourteen Stations of the Cross, the door for the tabernacle, Crucifix, and bell) and Gavino Tilocca (the marble apse relief of the Madonna and Child).

On June 20, 1959, the writer’s body was translated to the church. After her death (August 15, 1936, from the same disease that afflicted the main character in The Church of Solitude), Grazia Deledda had been buried in Rome in the cemetery of Verano, in a tomb that she had wanted to look like a Sardinian nuraghe. According to her grandson Alessandro Madesani, she had never expressed a wish to be buried in Sardinia. The plan to bring her body back to her hometown was devised by the Autonomous Region of Sardinia and a committee of Sardinian intellectuals and was, as just noted, the reason for the reconstruction of the seventeenth-century country church on Ciusa Romagna’s simple design. Grazia Deledda seems to have gotten some small revenge for this forced transfer in the end: the city authorities who had, with great pomp, organized the new burial discovered at the very last minute that the coffin that had come from Rome was too big to enter to specially made tomb.

To avoid disappointing the crowd gathered for the occasion, they organized a fake burial, and the regrettable situation was resolved at a later time with a ruse: a tunnel was dug out leading from outside the church to under the tomb: and it was there, outside the church, that the writer’s coffin was placed.

It was only relatively recently that her remains could be laid to rest as they had original planned: in 2007, the body was exhumed once again and, after the completion of some restoration work on the church, finally placed inside the church, in the tomb designed by Giovanni Ciusa Romagna.

There is an installation by Maria Lai, Andando Via. Omaggio a Grazia Deledda (2013), outside the church, not far from the little square. This piece, left unfinished when the artist died, was her last work of public art.