main
index © Jeff
Matthews 2002-2012
Sardinia
index
Grazia Deledda
 Italy’s only
woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature
was born in 1871 in the mountain town of
Nuoro in Sardinia. It is at 2,000 feet (c.
550 meters) and in rugged country. At the
time, if you wanted to go
from Nuoro to Caglieri, the regional capital
in the south, you went by horseback, and it
was a three-day ride. * The
entire island was a foreboding and distant
place, even farther beyond the ken of the
average continental Italian than Sicily, the
great island to the south. It is fair to say
that Grazia Deledda introduced Sardinia not
only to the world but to the rest of Italy
by transforming the island into “a land of
myths and legends,” as she, herself, once
said.
|
 |
Deledda was born to write and, indeed, was
somewhat of a child prodigy. She attended only
elementary school (as was common in the
education of most girls in rural Italy of the
day); she spoke only her native Sardinian
dialect of Italian, but took private lessons
in standard Italian (and English and French).
At the age of 15, she secretly submitted a
short story called Sangue Sardo (Sardinian
Blood) to a magazine in Rome. They published
it, which fact shocked her traditional
Sardinian family and community. The idea of a
woman—much less a 15-year-old girl—writing
stories for publication horrified them. She
resisted all attempts to talk good sense into
her about the role of women in society and
kept writing. By the time she died at the age
of 60 she had written 30 novels and numerous
collections of short stories. She presented
the inner lives of her characters—their
secrets and repressed libidos—against the
backdrop of their rituals and customs in the
wild nature of Sardinia. She succeeded in
showing the emotional crises and drama of
rural life, of peasants with the same problems
of moral choice as anyone else. The Nobel
committee had this to say in its award speech
for the 1926 prize:
In Grazia Deledda's novels
more than in most other novels, man and
nature form a single unity. One might
almost say that the men are plants which
germinate in the Sardinian soil itself.
The majority of them are simple peasants
with primitive sensibilities and modes of
thought, but with something in them of the
grandeur of the Sardinian natural setting.
Some of them almost attain the stature of
the monumental figures of the Old
Testament.
Grazia Deledda married at the age of 24 and
moved with her husband to Rome. There she kept
up a steady, simple life—tending house in the
mornings and writing in the evenings.
Most Italians I know—if they have read Deledda
at all—know her 1913 novel Canne al Vento
(Reeds in the Wind). Other works include Cenere
(Ashes) (1904), La Fuga in Egitto (The
Flight into Egypt) from 1925, and a
posthumously published, autobiographical
novel, Cosima,
(1937).
*Nuoro. The population today
is 36,000; one-hundred years ago, it was
about 8,000. Even today, if you say you are
going to Nuoro, people tell you to watch out
for bandits, though I don't know the last
time anyone saw a real live bandit there.
Maybe. The town is now well-linked into a
modern highway system, but if you speak to
old-timers in the Italian national police
force, the Carabinieri, they recall
even older-timers who used to dread getting
stationed to that part of Italy. Forget Fort
Apache. They were so far out in the hinterland
that even the bandits couldn't find them.
Perhaps an advantage.) (back^)
|
to main Naples index
to Sardinia index
|