The three of them have almost three hundred springs and a wealth of memories that are still crystal clear.
Salvatorangelo Onida, 97, and his wife Giovanna Caterina Schirra, only a year his junior, are among the living witnesses of how Ghilarza has changed over the decades. They recall the air-raid shelter in wartime, the roads that didn't exist, the difficulties of the past, but also the unity that existed. Maria Antonia Piras, also 97 years old and a lifelong neighbor, joins them after an hour of pleasant chat that makes one feel enchanted when one looks and hears them.
For her, too, dive into memories. Let's start from the bomb shelter, now completely disappeared. In via Alghero, in its place, stands a house and the road. “It was at the service of the school, but when it was closed it happened that the population also used it. They sounded the siren”, says Salvatorangelo Onida. "Excuse me, can I sing you a song?" Of course! And here then is that his wife, with perfect memory, sings one of the songs that at the fascist time she and her companions sang every day. Do you remember all of it? "Of course yes!". And after a while the good-natured protest because the many anecdotes of the past did not allow it to conclude. And then please. The husband is once again taking up the thread of the speech: “The shelter was underground, but not very deep. At the end of the war they destroyed it. In Ghilarza there were all the military corps, there was the subsistence kitchen which distributed lunch throughout the area. From the current sports field, the military tents almost reached the cemetery”.
Salvatorangelo Onida remembers that they had tried to bomb the dam. And he continues: "In the novenary of San Giovanni there was Mussolini's militia, from the Tadasuni bridge, up to after the town, there was the military laundry for all of Sardinia". Many, many changes over the decades: “There were no roads, Ghilarza and Abbasanta were not united in a single town. Ghilarza, especially after the end of the war, had a great development. Especially after the 1950s construction sites were continuous. We were the first inhabitants of via Cagliari, it was 1954”.
Memories shared with his wife who adds details and recalls how women's lives were between home, school and the countryside. Many anecdotes follow one another, such as when in 1943 the Germans "took a vehicle from the company I worked for - remembers Onida - and overturned a load of tins: they didn't leave one".
The conversation is then joined by Maria Antonia Piras, who arrived in via Cagliari four years after the Onida spouses.
"Before there was more respect and unity," he says. But Salvatorangelo immediately intervenes: “Today, however, there is well-being”. And the evening passes slowly remembering the times that were.