One hundred candles, a still bright gaze, and a life straight from a novel. Maria Giovanna Branduzzi, Bonacini's widow, crossed the century mark surrounded by the love of her daughters, grandchildren, and the entire community that, over the past sixty years, has come to know her as one of the silent protagonists of Sardinia's development. Originally from Reggio Emilia, she still bears the mark of a dual identity: her Emilian origins and her Sardinian lifelong legacy. For it is precisely in Sardinia, the land she chose and that chose her, that the most intense part of her story was written.
Hers is no ordinary story. As soon as she graduated high school, still a young girl, her father, who ran a business selling citrus fruits and dried fruit from Sicily, entrusted her with organizing the complex transportation network. A task that, for a young woman in those years, represented a small revolution in itself. In her early twenties, Maria Giovanna moved to Palermo. With a truck license in her pocket, she took charge of organizing transportation. It was the first real test of a life that would continue to intertwine family and business, home and work, without ever choosing one over the other.
In the 1960s, she moved to Sardinia, first to Marrubiu and then to Arborea. Here, alongside her husband, she embarked on a significant entrepreneurial venture, managing an asbestos cement plant. She worked as an accountant, managing the accounting and administrative aspects of the business. This commitment continued while raising her two daughters and maintaining her family life.
Today, at one hundred years old, she retains a surprising clarity of mind and a still fresh and curious spirit. To her grandchildren, gathered around her, she loves to tell the stories of her great-grandfather and the many episodes of a life always lived on the front lines: from the trucks she drove in Palermo to the years managing the Marrubiu plant, to the daily life in Arborea, where time seems to have stopped to listen to her. "Maria Giovanna was able to carve out a role of responsibility for herself at a time when it was not at all a given for a woman," emphasizes Mayor Manuela Pintus, "a life always lived on the front lines, between work and family, which represents a precious example for our community and for the new generations, and which today we look to with admiration and gratitude. Moreover, her older sister, also over a century old, distinguished herself as an accomplished engineer at a time when few women pursued this career path, and even today she enjoys excellent health, practicing regular physical activity: further testimony to the strength and vitality that distinguish this family. Maria Giovanna Branduzzi's story is, ultimately, also the story of a Sardinia that in the 1960s was opening up to new energies, new families, and new entrepreneurs from far away, capable of connecting with this land to the point of feeling it as their own. It's no coincidence that, despite her daughters repeatedly suggesting she return to Emilia, Maria Giovanna never wanted to leave Arborea, which had now become her true home. One hundred years after her birth, that story of roots and belonging continues to be told, with pride, by her.
