Nuorese Cultural District

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.

Halfway along trail 101 (after about an hour of walking), you come to the Sa ‘e Milianu Spring, one of many on Mount Ortobene. The Ribu ‘e Seuna stream starts from the spring dedicated to Saint Emilianus. The structures you find there today date to the 1930s. But it would seem that this was the location of Nuoro’s first settlement. In about 1000 BCE, people came down towards the valley and built what became the Séuna quarter. The Istiritta spring mentioned by Satta in The Day of Judgment is right by this old district:

Could they not make do with those [marvelous] springs on the outskirts of town – Obisti, Istiritta – with their cool waters, which at twilight the serving-maids (sas teraccas) brought home in amphoras set lightly upon heads barely protected by a little pad? Even today, when there are so many aqueducts, the true Nuorese spurns the water that passes through pipes, and sends out for the time-honored water from the hillside.

In an interesting aside, the adjective ‘marvelous’ in the above passage, mirabili in the Italian, gave rise to a mistake that appeared in every edition of the novel (Cedam, Adelphi, Ilisso and etc.) and went uncorrected until a later philological project based primarily on the manuscript (L’autografo de Il giorno del giudizio, edited by Giuseppe Marci, and the edition of the novel edited by Aldo Maria Morace and published by Il Maestrale): due to a typo made when producing the first typewritten copy of the manuscript, mirabili became miserabili, meaning, in this case, ‘meagre’; and so the spring was described as ‘meagre’ in all the first editions, including in translation.

Although this spring no longer exists today, we can get an idea of it from the nearby Mariedda Spring, which also has a literary link, as it was mentioned in a poem written in Sardinian by Pascale Dessanay, a contemporary of Grazia Deledda:

Fit una die de iberru mala e fritta
fit bentu, fit froccande a frocca lada
e Mariedda, totu tostorada,
ghirabat chin sa brocca dae Istiritta.

Buffandesi sas ungras, poveritta!
Fachiat a cada passu s’arressada
e dae sa fardettedda istrazzulada
nch’essiat un’anchichedda biaitta.

Mentras andabat gai arressa arressa,
istabat annottandesi sa frocca
ch’imbiancabat una murichessa,

Cando trabuccat… e a terra sa brocca!
Mariedda pranghende tando pessat
chi li cazzan su frittu chin sa socca.

It was an unpleasant, cold winters day
It was windy, and snowing in large flakes
And Mariedda, frozen to the core,
was coming back from Istiritta with her jug.

Blowing on her fingertips, poor girl!
She paused at every step
And her tattered skirt
exposed her little legs, blue with cold.

While she walked, halting, lost in thought,
and lingering to gaze at the flakes
that were blanketing a mulberry with white.

Then she stumbled … and the jug broke to pieces!
Mariedda cried and imagined
They would drive the cold from her with the strap.

(Italian translation by Salvatore Mattana, in Gonario Pinna, Antologia dei poeti dialettali nuoresi)

In any case, the city fountains are fed by that marvelous water from the mountain. Here is Deledda, writing in Cosima about the path that leads from the village to the top of Ortobene:

A second stop was at a spring with water as pure and luminous as a diamond, gushing into a small stone hollow and spreading out modestly and almost furtively among the trampled, muddy grass into a circle of holm oak reaching up to the blue peaks. They heard the cry of the jays and the air seemed like a liquor perfumed with mint.

The girls knelt on the stone and leaned over to drink from the spring. And in the small onyx mirror of water in the shade Cosima’s eyes appeared to her from the miraculous light itself – a light that gushed from the depths of her land and had once actually reflected the souls of her shepherd and poet ancestors thirsty for divinity.

At the top of Mount Ortobene, there is a bronze statue of the Redeemer that was made by Vincenzo Jerace in 1901 for the Jubilee. At the foot of the stairs that lead to the small belvedere where the statue stands, there is a plaque with an inscription (dated 1905) written by Grazia Deledda in memory of Luisa, the sculptor’s young wife, who died while it was being made (Vincenzo Jerace inscribed the palm of Christ’s hand with these words for his departed wife: To Luisa Jerace, who died while her Vincenzo was sculpting it):

Women of Nuoro / guileless old wandering shepherds / workers scattered in the fragrant valley / and all you who at the cerulean evenfall / turn your orant eyes to the vast altar of Ortobene and the bronze Redeemer rising amidst gossamer pink clouds offer your hearts / remember the sweet woman who there beyond the sea / inspired the artist for you / and now relieved of her mortal / veils great soul / beyond the bright skies / offers the flower of prayer to the Redeemer.

From the belvedere, you can enjoy a stunning view of Nuoro, the fraction of Lollove and a few other towns in the Nuoro Cultural District. A few, rightly famous, passages of Cosima are devoted to similarly magnificent panoramas:

Surely Cosima learned more that day than in ten lessons with the literature professor. She learned to distinguish [the magpie from the jay,] the notched oak leaf from the narrow tapered [one of the] holm oak, and the [veined] flower of the yew tree from [the feathery one] of the bearbind. And from a castle boulder that falcons wheeled above as though attracted to the sun like night moths to a lamp, she saw a large shining sword placed at the foot of a cliff like a sign that the island had been cut from the Continent and so it must remain forever. It was the sea, which Cosima saw for the first time.

(…)

She quickly left, [brushing the ferns of the clearing] with her wide open arms like a swallow flying low in an approaching storm, and then turned toward the top of precipice where the sea could be seen. The sea: the great mystery, [the land of blue ferns that the swallow flies across towards distant lands. She would have liked to transmigrate too, towards the marvellous places in Antonino’s stories, and remembering him she blushed again, thinking of the prince dressed in the colours of distant places that all young girls await. But the harsh cries of the young peasant boys, one of whom she was perhaps destined to marry, called her back to reality.] She also heard the whistles of the herdsmen gathering their flocks, and every voice, every sound vibrated in the great silence like a soft echo in a house of crystal. The sun fell on the other side, behind the mountains beyond the plain, and already the goats still climbing the peaks had red hawk-like eyes. It was time to go home; and remembering her still childish days, gladdened only by the stories she told herself, she felt, in the presence of the sea and above the great cliffs red with the sunset, like the kid on the crenelated peak of the rock who would like to imitate the flight of the hawk when instead it must return to the pen at the shepherd’s whistle.

In the Grazia Deledda house museum, there is a photograph of the writer on a trip to the mountain with Antonio Ballero and others from the ‘Sardinian Athens’. The photo was taken during one of the first summers that the writer spent on holiday in Sardinia after she got married and moved to Rome. After the death of her mother, the sale of the house and the move of her sisters Peppina and Nicolina to Rome, Deledda stopped spending her summer holidays in Sardinia, switching first to Viareggio and then Cervia.

The sanctuary, located at the top of Mount Ortobene, was founded in 1608 by the Pirella brothers. It was built to fulfil a promise: that year, a boat carrying pilgrims returning from the sanctuary of the Madonna di Montenero in Livorno was suddenly struck by a violent storm. The pilgrims, one of whom was Monsignor Pirella, pleaded for the Madonna’s help, promising, in exchange for her aid, to build a church dedicated to her on the first mountain top they saw. The founders of the sanctuary are commemorated on two plaques: one above the side door and the other, with the family coat of arms, on the main door.

The church is a classic example of country architecture, and at the back of the aisleless interior we find sas cumbessias, small spaces for pilgrims to use as lodging, including Cosima/Grazia, who stayed there during the novena, as we read in another passage from Cosima:

Above the little town, which was already six hundred meters above sea level, on the overhanging peak of the Monte, among the holm oak woods and granite rocks a short distance from the property of Cosima’s family and from where she had seen the distant sea for the first time, there rose a little church appropriately called Madonna del Monte [Madonna of the Mountain] in a clearing enclosed by rocks. Little rooms backed up the church, sharing the same roof, and a kind of arcade went from the door on the south to the door on the west, with stone seats placed around. The faithful lived into the little rooms during the time of the novena and the festival of the little Madonna.