Ute, the island's longest-running cultural association still in full swing, inaugurated the new academic year last Friday with a moment of great significance : a tribute to its oldest founding member, Tonino Conti, who has reached the remarkable milestone of one hundred years, a milestone he has lived with his usual clarity, irony, and passion.
Tonino Conti's life is a journey marked by study, curiosity, and a love of knowledge: from history to philosophy, from literature to poetry, all the way to linguistic exploration and the recovery of dialectal heritage. As UTE President Marina Spinetti noted, "poetry represents the highest synthesis of his cultural journey, founded on a profound knowledge of the language, of words, both in Isulanu and Italian. " His poetry is often imbued with melancholy, "because I was born sad," Conti confided, but also capable of embracing lightheartedness and laughter, as he demonstrated by reading some of his liveliest verses with grace and irony.
For years, out of reserve and shyness, Tonino Conti jealously guarded his poems, until he was persuaded to publish them: first under a pseudonym, in small, artisanal publications, and then, starting in 1989, with the publisher Paolo Sorba, who promoted his work. "My father wanted only Isulanu to be spoken at home," Conti said. "For Italian, there was school..." The Isulanu spoken by his family, of Corsican origin, was authentic, free from contamination: the language of his roots, which he studied, preserved, and transmitted with philological rigor and profound love. Today, no one can seriously write in Isulanu without engaging with his work, which represents a benchmark for the correct understanding and appreciation of this dialect, officially recognized as a variant of Gallurese.
"He taught me to love the dialect and to understand its beauty," said Gianluca Moro, a young island intellectual, recalling the human and cultural bond that binds him to him. A symbolic figure of the most authentic "Maddalenian" identity, Tonino Conti also has a profound knowledge of the island's history and traditions, which he has meticulously reconstructed through his studies, testimonies, and the stories of its protagonists.
