"I'm Sardinian, but in this land I'm an illegitimate daughter." Thus begins Paola Marras's outburst, telling her story—her own—of a woman forced to deal with a "stepmother" Sardinia that, instead of welcoming her children, rejects them as strangers.
Paola, a teacher in Veneto, urgently returned to San Gavino, the island, because her father is seriously ill.
A journey that, he says, turned into an obstacle course of expensive plane tickets and bureaucracy that paralyzed every right.
“To get there, I paid 125 euros for a ticket, and I was even lucky,” he writes, “because prices go up as if we were flying to New York, not Verona or Venice.”
Now, however, he has to get back to work. And prices are rising mercilessly : almost 300 euros for a flight on Monday, September 21st, the same amount on Sunday. Legalized robbery, he reports.
The problem is that Paola no longer has residency in Sardinia . This means no territorial continuity.
"For the state, I'm a tourist. A tourist rushing to her dying father's bedside. A tourist paying the golden ticket to hug a disabled parent."
And here comes another wound : the father, seriously disabled, does not yet have the 104 because in Sardinia a medical examination can take more than a year .
"A year of waiting for a certificate, a year of stamped paper while real life collapses around you. A year without rights, without permits, without support."
Harsh words, which turn into a direct indictment . "This is how Sardinia, the stepmother, works: it shows you the picture-perfect sea, but if you have to travel to care for a father, it bleeds you dry with impossible flights; it fills you with flags and folklore, but if you ask for a basic right like care for a sick person, it puts you in line and leaves you there to rot." And again : "It sells you as a proud son of this land, but treats you like a number, a burden, a nuisance."
Paola's cry, however, is not just personal . It is the voice of hundreds of Sardinians living abroad: men and women forced to spend entire salaries to return to their elderly parents, families waiting months for a certificate, workers without protection because the rules remain trapped in bureaucracy.
"I experience continuity firsthand," he accuses. "The choice of having to pay half my salary to return or give up being with the ones I love. The continuity of endless lines, closed doors, rejected applications. The continuity of a Sardinia that leaves you alone, while politicians fly to Rome on tickets paid for by us ."
And he makes a clear appeal: "Enough with the robbery flights, enough with the snail-paced checks, enough with feeling like second-class citizens."
Sardinia, she concludes, isn't just beaches and tourism to be sold to the world, but is made of flesh and blood : "of aging mothers and fathers, of children struggling between flights and a certificate so as not to abandon them. We are not tourists: we are Sardinians. And a real mother shouldn't be begged for the right."
