Remembering Grazia Deledda on the centenary of her Nobel Prize and ninety years after her death, not with academic conferences or official commemorations, but through a woman's voice, the notes of a flute, and images of the wild landscapes that served as the backdrop to the great writer from Nuoro's most powerful stories. "Grazia Deledda – Nobel Women" is the literary concert conceived by the Salpare Association, which premiered last night in the Lo Quarter Conference Hall in Alghero.
The event, sponsored by the Municipality and the Alghero Foundation, featured two artists on stage. Neria De Giovanni, a longtime writer and literary critic, gave voice and substance to monologues from her work "Donne di Grazia," published in 2021 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Deledda's birth. Maestro Elisa Ceravola, on the other hand, accompanied each reading on the flute with pieces from the Sardinian musical tradition and international repertoire. This combination brought to life on stage the intensity of the female protagonists of Deledda's novels: Annesa, the tormented young woman in "L'edera"; Marianna Sirca, proud and contradictory in the novel of the same name; Olì, the sorrowful figure in "Cenere"; Maria Maddalena, the beating heart of "La madre"; and Cosima, Deledda's literary alter ego in the posthumous autobiography that bears her name. Sardinian women, universal women, whom Neria De Giovanni has chosen, studied, and reinvented in monologues capable of conveying the psychological complexity and moral strength that make them still vibrant and contemporary characters.
"I wanted these women to speak firsthand," explains De Giovanni, "because Deledda created them with rare depth, and they deserve to be heard directly, without filters. Each monologue stems from a careful reading of the novels, seeking the inner perspective of each protagonist. They are women who suffer, who choose, who resist. And in this, they are extraordinarily close to us." The narrative immersion will also be enhanced by video images projected during each monologue. The locations in Sardinia where the novels are set will also provide a visual backdrop that will complete the sensorial experience of the literary concert. "The date chosen, Easter week," continues De Giovanni, "is not coincidental but symbolic, coherent in recalling important themes such as guilt, sacrifice, redemption, and the sense of the sacred that run through Deledda's entire oeuvre."
Alghero, a seaside city of culture and openness to exchange, was the ideal setting for a premiere that aims to travel far and wide. The Salpare Association has already announced that the concert, after its debut in Alghero, will be hosted in various locations in Sardinia and throughout Italy, with a schedule to be announced soon. A traveling project, therefore, that brings literature to the region, transcending libraries and university lecture halls to reach a wider audience.
On the centenary of the Nobel Prize, awarded to Deledda in 1926 as the first and still only Italian writer to receive it, an initiative like this reminds us that the greatness of a work is measured not only by the time it was written, but also by its ability to repeatedly surprise, move, and question. And that ability, in Grazia Deledda's female characters, has never been exhausted.
