Books, cooking workshops and lunch in honor of Grazia Deledda
The Sa Mandra Agritourism Farm wishes to celebrate the Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Grazia Deledda, one hundred and fifty years after her birth. And to tell her story, practicing Grazia’s cuisine.
Food, for the writer, is a primary or supporting character that materializes and marks the daily deeds of a people traversing history, tracing their environment, forging destiny by identifying with their own land. Food is not merely a daily necessity; it rises to become an ethnographic, anthropological element, codifying life’s appointments, from baptism to funeral rituals. It becomes a collective rite, the identity of a restricted yet universal community in its elementality.
To heal the centuries-old wounds of Sardinia, the work of my poor and small hand, however artistic or scientific it may be, is not needed. What can my sketches, my stories, my novels do? Nothing. They may give me celebrity, empty and vain celebrity, but they will do nothing for Sardinia. Yet I delude myself and dream too often of the contrary (…) Yet this idea still appeals to me, because I am convinced that the only way to regenerate Sardinia is to cultivate it. The Sardinians are wrong to cry out against the Government, waiting for help from overseas that will never come. But what need is there for this help? It is their laziness; if they applied agriculture to their lands, every misfortune would end. Instead they study law, study medicine, philosophy, literature and Roman law, but leave uncultivated the land that does not produce and that gives neither work nor bread to the poor…
Grazia Deledda
