Adelia Belci, the late record-breaking grandmother from Santa Maria Navarrese, had turned 103 just over two months ago. She was a centenarian from the Ogliastrina Blue Zone, but she was not originally from the Ogliastrina Blue Zone, having been born in Pola, Istria —when Istria was still Italian—on December 21, 1922. An Istrian who became Sardinian, a bit Sassarese and a bit Ogliastrina, for love, over eighty years ago.

Because Adelia had arrived in Sardinia in 1945, at the end of an adventurous journey, at the end of the Second World War, following her husband Vincenzo Griva, from Baunei , whom she had met in Pola, where he, a soldier on board a submarine of the Italian Navy, was stationed at the Military Arsenal.

During the war years, Adelia and Vincenzo lived and overcame all the difficulties of the war together, and the two always talked about the day when he, as an Italian soldier, was lined up with other comrades during a roundup to be sent to a German concentration camp . Thanks to Adelia's prompt action, who had a bicycle ready for use behind the train the soldiers were boarding, Vincenzo managed to escape . After the war, Adelia moved to Sassari (where her husband worked) with her first daughter, born in Istria, but she always returned to Baunei to give birth to her children, who would eventually grow to six in total .

Widowed since 1977, the year of her husband's death, the Istrian-Sardinian grandmother was able to count on the company of thirteen grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren in her old age, who were able to admire her in good health even as a centenarian, given that at the venerable age of 101 she was one of the protagonists of a television documentary on the theme "Centenarians and Ultracentenarians", produced by an English TV station, for which she personally prepared and cooked gnocchi for the entire crew.