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About Grazia Deledda

09 Dicembre 2020
About Grazia Deledda Foto: Maria Vittoria Querini Maria Vittoria Querini
The presence of Grazia Deledda is reborn and lives in the Parco Letterario of Galtellì (the Galte from Canne al vento) dedicated to her

I discovered Grazia Deledda when I was still in school - where she wasn’t studied though - by reading her complete work, collected in three large volumes that Mondadori had published in 1950; they were part of my grandmother's library who, consecrated to those writings, took them on holiday to her country house.
It seems that Deledda loved to write in the early afternoon; by singular assonance, in the early afternoon of my rural summers I devoured her novels and short stories under the gigantic paulownia leaves which, like umbrellas, protected my reading corner. And under those leaves passed the Dame Pintors, Elias Portolu with his convict's pallor, the priest's mother so black and painful and, gradually, the other characters bent but not tamed by the weight of a fatally dramatic life, in the same way where, although bent by the wind, the centuries-old oaks in the Iglesiente resist.

Even some short stories have a dramatic vein without however altering the pleasantness of the story as in the case of Il Cinghialetto. It is the harsh and wild nature that moves Deledda's pen, combined with a lyrical and autobiographical inspiration which - as Natalino Sapegno claims - however distracts her from Verism.
The writer had conflicting critics, but among those who exalted her there was literature historian and Italian academic Francesco Flora: "Grazia Deledda handed over to her books the direct and fabulous memory such as childhood, the island life of her native Sardinia, the boundless dreams of the solitude of an island between sea and sky […]. Her art was an intense virtue of landscape: even men and their terrible passions and sins and their remorse and redemptions are inscribed in the substance of the landscape, as in a form of religion". Deledda is Sardinia, even when she abandons it, as someone has said. Others considered it close to Russian writers because "capable of portraying the driving power of sin as a crisis that frees all the forces of man from their deep prison" (Momigliano).
In 1926 Grazia Maria Cosima Damiana Deledda won the Nobel Prize for Literature "For her power as a writer, supported by a high ideal, which portrays life in plastic forms as it is in her secluded native island, and which with depth and warmth deals with problems of general human interest ".

The last time I went to Sardinia, I chose the east coast to escape, uselessly, from the mistral wind. Nuoro was not far away and therefore a reverent pilgrimage to the writer's birthplace was imposed. A simple but comfortable patriarchal family home, whose rooms were described in the most autobiographical novel (Cosima). The kitchen was the most lived-in environment, the most tepid of life and intimacy. In that large room I stayed for a long time to observe all the objects as if to want to find testimonies, moments of past life. There were some more refined ones alongside the rougher ones such as the wooden shepherd's cutting board, the one with the hollow in one corner for salt. They almost meant the double aspect of that family, a bit bourgeois and a bit peasant as Deledda herself defined it.

The writer left her native Nuoro, an island within the island, to move to Rome. She returned there after her death to rest in the Church of Solitude.
Today the presence of Grazia Deledda is reborn and lives in the Parco Letterario of Galtellì (the Galte from Canne al vento) dedicated to her; not only that, but she flies over the world and cuts through the clouds because her face is stamped on the tail of a Norwegian Airlines plane. An almost unthinkable honor, certainly deserved, for such a shy woman.


Grazia Deledda
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Grazia Deledda

Galtelli' (Nuoro)

Ecco ad un tratto la valle aprirsi e sulla cima a picco di una collina simile ad un enorme cumulo di ruderi, apparire le rovine del castello. L ' occhio stesso del passato guarda il panorama melanconico, roseo di sole nascente, la pianura ondulata con le macchie grigie delle sabbie e le macchie giallognole dei giuncheti, la vena verdastra del fiume, i paesetti bianchi col campanile in mezzo come il pistillo nel fiore.
Canne al vento

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