Nuorese Cultural District

And the sun gives life to the young oaks and holm oaks scattered among the rock and whitens the water of the babbling torrent that carries the simple song of the workers and washerwomen far far away.

Lollove, encircled by a few holm oak hedges, a handful of wilting almond trees and lots of agaves and pale wild olive trees, is situated deep in the valley, and looks abandoned, like a dead person in a coffin. When I went there, pedibusse cum chambisse, as Tartarius said, it was Epiphany.

There was nary a trace in that village of the Three Kings, the fine elders with the golden scepters. It was permeated with the silence of the summer siesta, and the smell of cooking sauce coming from a cottage where they were hosting a long-haired and hirsute guest from Orgosolo for the holiday.

Thanks to this description, which is excerpted from an article by Sebastiano Satta published in La Nuova Sardegna in January 1896, we can imagine what looked Lollove looked like during Grazia Deledda’s time. Not that it is so hard to imagine today: in Lollove, like a few other Sardinian villages (examples include Rebeccu and Gairo Vecchio), time has in a certain way stood still. Now, the inhabitants of this little village, a fraction of Nuoro about fifteen kilometers from the capital, number less than fifteen. And so, while the quiet swarm of those few hundred souls is now missing, the number of houses is practically the same.

The picture sketched out by Satta can also be found in one of Deledda’s most famous and successful novels, The Mother, published in 1920. The success of this book is partly due to a film by Mario Monicelli, Proibito (1954), starring Mel Ferrer, Amedeo Nazzari, and Lea Massari. But the film is no more than a free adaptation of The Mother, the intense but spare plot of which it expands to include a story about bandits to create the ‘Western-style’ atmosphere desired by the producer and the director. The film was moreover shot in a few towns in the northern part of the island (mainly Tissi, Codrongianos, and Thiesi), far from the Lollove that the writer imaginatively gave the name Aar. With that name, which has a slightly exotic, vaguely Biblical ring, Lollove became part of Sardinia’s vast literary geography, later joined by Giuseppe Dessì’s Villacidro, which is known as ‘Norbio’ in many novels, the most famous being Paese d’ombre.

Our visit to Lollove will be a ‘free’ literary ramble, without specific stops. However, it can only start from what is to all intents and purposes the central point of the village, even though it is higher up than almost all the other buildings: the church of Santa Maria Maddalena. Built in the sixteenth century, possibly in place of a pre-existing religious structure, the church is late-Gothic/Aragonese in style. Its interior divided into a nave and two aisles, with a cusped bell tower at the back, the only vertical element in a village where almost all the buildings have just one floor. On the north side, to the right of the facade, there is a portico with ogival arches; this is the only stuccoed part of the building. The facade is made of exposed granite blocks and looks out onto the village from a terrace: this gives the view of the church from below at certain small majesty (perfectly in line with the size of the village).

There is an inscription inside the church, still perfectly legible, that was commissioned by a parish priest who had come to replace the previous one, after his murder. The new arrival understandably wished to ingratiate himself with his future community, and so he had this message inscribed on the wall:

P.P. GASOLE / NATIONE BITTI MANO / NULLUM PETIT NULLUM VOLET / QUAM VIVAT SINE DANO

(P.P. Gasole, born in the big town of Bitti, neither asks nor wishes for anything more than to live unharmed)

The male protagonist of Grazia Deledda’s The Mother is also a priest, named Paul, and he, too, came to the little village from elsewhere, replacing a priest who was, to put it mildly, the subject of much gossip. Over time, he gained the trust of the people of Aar, but at the start of the novel, he finds himself needing to deal with, among other things, his fear of the community’s judgement, a nagging thought that pits his moral sense and the decorum of his position against the magnetic pull of desire. In fact, he is embroiled in a secret affair with one of his female parishioners, Agnese, a member of the village’s noble family. Still quite young, and at the height of her beauty, she lives alone in her large house. Many of Deledda’s novels are built around the contrast of desire and its repression, for the most varied reasons. Paul’s anguish in this situation is matched by that of his mother, Maria Maddalena, who lives with her son in the parsonage (like the main characters in the Church of Solitude) of the church that has her same name, at least in the real world of the village that inspired Deledda. The woman lives in fear in this church and annexed house, feeling that it is sacrilege, and her feeling of guilt is manifested in terrifying visions, like when, in her delirium, she imagines she is visited by the spirit of the former parish priest:

It was a bad thing for you, coming here, you had better have brought him up to follow his father's trade. But you are an ambitious woman, and you wanted to come back as mistress where you had lived as a servant: so now you will see what you have gained by it!

With such a gloomy basis, it is unsurprising that the novel looks onto the village in the dead of night. And, not missing a trick, every description of the locations is accompanied by the unsettling howl of the wind. In this excerpt from the beginning of the novel, Maria Maddalena is following Paul, who remains unseen and has gone out at night in suspicious circumstances. Her anguish is amplified by the nocturnal atmosphere and silence of the little village, which we can see was inspired by Lollove:

The wind seized hold of her roughly, blowing out her skirts and the handkerchief over her head, as though it were trying to force her back into the house. But she knotted the handkerchief tightly under her chin and pressed forward with bent head, as though butting aside all obstacles in her path. She felt her way past the front of the presbytery, along the wall of the kitchen garden and past the front of the church, but at the corner of the church she paused. Paul had turned there, and swiftly, like some great black bird, his cloak flapping round him, he had almost flown across the field that extended in front of an old house built close against the ridge of land that shut in the horizon above the village.

The uncertain light, now blue, now yellow, as the moon's face shone clear or was traversed by big clouds, illumined the long grass of the field, the little raised piazza, in front of the church and presbytery, and the two lines of cottages on either side of the steep road, which wound on and downwards till it lost itself amidst the [scrub] in the valley. And in the center of the valley, like another grey and winding road, was the river that flowed on and in its turn lost itself amidst the rivers and roads of the fantastic landscape that the wind-driven clouds alternately revealed and concealed on that distant horizon that lay beyond the valley's edge.

In the village itself not a light was to be seen, nor even a thread of smoke. They were all asleep by now in the poverty-stricken cottages, which clung to the grassy hill-side like two rows of sheep, whilst the church with its slender tower, itself protected by the ridge of land behind it, might well represent the shepherd leaning upon his staff.

The [alder] trees which grew along the parapet of the piazza before the church were bending and tossing furiously in the wind, [like] black and shapeless monsters … and in answer to their rustling cry came the lament of the poplars and reeds in the valley. And in all this dolour of the night, the moaning wind and the moon drowning midst the angry clouds, was merged the sorrow of the mother seeking for her son.