“Just to the extent that we claim to establish discrimination between cultures and traditions, we identify ourselves in the most complete way with those we try to deny.” (Claude Lévi-Strauss)
Translation by Bee Jensen
In a time when our Mediterranean is a clash of cultures, we are forgetting that ours too is the result of strong and continuous relations with all the civilisations with whom we have had contact. That the uniqueness of our traditions is not the result of isolation but rather of the influences to which our island has been subjected to over the centuries. Despite us trying to defend our way of life, there is a continuous exchange of information, contacts and human relations from which we can not defend ourselves.
The usual ethnocentrism, especially in the West, is a defence of customs and habits, but it is nothing but the fear of what is not known. And even if in our language words like ‘primitive’ and ‘wild’ have disappeared everything we see different in our world, we attribute it to an irrational chaos that is nothing else than a different culture of the same value as ours.
For this reason, in recent weeks I have been reminded of the various anecdotes concerning the Sardinians and those who have been in contact with our island over the centuries. And we know that Sardinia in the Mediterranean is a places with a civilisation as old as it is different from the rest of the European continent. It has not always had the same initial affinity as other places; remembering that affinity is not only a moral but also a scientific attitude. It must be said that many travellers who have had the opportunity to talk about the Sardinians have not always had a good grasp of our customs and habits. However, many traveling this island with a scientific approach, have instead appreciated and recognised the characteristics and dedicated their lives to this study. Others, travelling hastily only dazzled by an El Dorado consisting of a rich nature, have even seen it as a desert and devoid of inhabitants.
The story of a naive person
One of the latter was the great Honoré de Balzac, a man of passion, always poised between wealth and bankruptcy. At a certain point in his life, he had an idea to make a fortune in exploiting the mines of Sardinia. A friend told him that you could extract metals like silver even from the dross of previous work. “Now a friend of Borget, a great chemist, knows how to extract gold and silver from whatever mode and proportion in which it is mixed with other materials. And cheaply” he wrote in a letter addressed to a friend, Madame Hanska, a Polish countess with whom he had a secret affair. He traveled a lot to meet her in different parts of Europe, but the money was always low and his art did not generate enough money. “[…] Know that in what I undertake there is much more desire to end the suffering of others than desire for personal wealth. When there are no income from funds you can only make a fortune with ideas like the one I am going to bring about”: this is the sentence, taken from a letter addressed to his mother, by a man on the edge who glimpses a glimmer of hope in a distant land unknown to him. It is Sardinia in the early nineteenth century, very poor from a socio-economic point of view but rich in its metal deposits. This attracts adventurers from half of Europe convinced that the future is right here. But Honoré does not have the cunningness of an entrepreneur nor is he a technician who can understand the extent of an investment in mining. After having landed on Sardinian soil, he realises that this adventure is not going well as the concessions have already been acquired by others. And not just that. The person who at the beginning had supported and advised him in the enterprise, had now betrayed him by preceding him in business. He discovers that the difficulties are bigger than what he expected and, therefore, slowly moving away from his dream of wealth, he begins his exotic journey far from civilisation: “[…] A whole desert realm, wild tribes, no cultivation, savannahs of wild growing palms; wherever the goats graze all the shoots and prevent the vegetation from growing beyond the area […] “and he continues:” […] This is a region where the inhabitants make a horrible bread turning green oak acorns into flour and mixing it with mud; a stone’s throw from the beautiful Italy. Men and women go naked with a rag of burlap to cover the private parts. I saw, on Easter day, packs of them in the sun along the earthen walls of their dens. No home has a fireplace; the fire is lit in the centre of the house which is covered with soot. The women spend the day grinding and kneading bread and the men look after the goats, the flocks and everything is uncultivated in one of the most fertile countries in the world. “In short, in his quick appearance on the island, he realises that he is close to the “bel paese” (considering Sardinia out of civilisation) and an island inhabited by “wild people”. Therefore it’s imperative for him to return to his civilised country and forget the fragments of a dream on Sardinia.
The ethno-anthropological tale of Valery
Travellers were not always so disappointed by their visits to the island. Especially if their approach to what they encountered was different from that of the naive and careless Balzac. This is the case of Antoine Claude Pasquin, better known by the pseudonym of Valery, who, like so many travellers of that period, recorded their every impression during visits to the most exotic places in the Mediterranean. The romantic style of his stories covers not only the images of unspoiled nature, which he photographs in a month and a half of travel. But also meetings with the population and the different facets of an ancient culture that fascinated him totally. His visit takes place in the spring, when the Sardinian countryside explodes with an incredible beauty and is filled with the colours and scents of the Mediterranean. In his diary there are descriptions of heavenly places, as in the case of the visit to the Canonica valley near Iglesias, when he is captured by the beauty of the countryside: “[…] is surrounded by beautiful green valleys. The contrast between the black, smoky, decrepit dwellings of man, and the laughing, eternal youth of nature, leads to a religious admiration for its author “.For him the songs of nightingales and the sound of the stream is a gift of music: “the blackbirds, the blackcaps, and the famous nightingales of Iglesias were in the middle of their victory; that musical evening remains for me one of the most significant and sweetest concert memories”. As first glance his book sounds “easy” and “hurried”. But when reading it carefully you notice that the author, even if at times overwhelmed by his own romanticism, always maintains a scientific attitude in the observations of the trip. He is not as naive as poor Balzac, he arrives on the island after having traveled to the Italian peninsula, and notices the many differences. He knows well the condition of social unrest that reigns on the island in that period. One thinks of the revolts against the editto delle “chiudende” (privatisation of land) and the conditions of poverty in which the majority of the island’s population live. And even if he always tends to avoid these issues that were not easy to understand for an average reader at that time, he sometimes devotes a few lines to social problems. Such as when he talks about orphanages, or about health, when he complains about the shortages of vaccinations: “The progress of vaccinations is rare and slow on Sardinia”. And no doubt it is known to him that by other travellers of his time the island is regarded as a place that is almost in Africa. He is intelligent, smart because his visits are guided by various intellectuals who open the door to an unknown Sardinia. He demonstrates attention to the customs and habits of a different people, even if at the beginning he recognises a similarity with Corsicans and in doing so makes a mistake. He then chooses for his stories the distinctive features of Sardinia that he considers most suitable to enter European civilisation and to establish itself as an ethnic variety. It would have been easy for him, as it was for many, to arrive in Sardinia and describe a population of “bearded men, with large knives and black robes”. Leaving the reader with a vision of a rather primitive civilisation, as according Balzac , consisted of “real wild people”. He does not do that and even praises the beauty of customs, traditions and monuments, showing that he never adopts a simplistic approach to observation. Like when he visits the church of Sant’Efisio in Cagliari and his story becomes almost a mea culpa for the furious attacks that the island suffered from his fellow countrymen: “[…] embedded in the wall, near the entrance and close to the ground, French bombs and cannon balls fired against Cagliari for 6 hours in 1793 with much fury and ineptitude “. Although brief, his journey has allowed him to write lines with a scientific cut. This makes his work, not just a tourist guide of the time as someone wanted to label it, but an ethnical-anthropological essay for this modern thinking of his time, with its precise and detailed observations of the life of the people he met in Sardinia. And even if in his story it is not totally clear that this very different culture could not be considered to be of the same value as other cultures, the curiosity that drives him to this description of Sardinian traditions, affirms that concept in a certain and indisputable way.