Gino Bottiglioni

“Living in Sardinia for a very long time, it happened to me, as to many others, that I could not resist the desire to get to know a little intimately that island full of interest and attractions, for those who want to study its nature, its history, its people. In my wanderings around the land of the Sardinians, expected above all to collect linguistic documents, with the intention of using them to examine some dialectal peculiarities that were not yet well illuminated; and to obtain from the living voice of the people the native, frank and genuine speech, I thought that the best means was to induce my sources to freely narrate what could interest them most, that is, various legends that came to them through the stories of the elders.” This is what Gino Bottiglioni, a glottologist born in Carrara in 1887, writes in the introduction to his “Legends and Traditions of Sardinia”.
He arrived on the island for the first time in 1915 - he stayed there for three years - and a second time in 1927, as a teacher of Comparative Grammar of Classical and Neolatine Languages, at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Cagliari. He is the author of numerous linguistic studies, and especially of a monumental work, the result of a long research: the “Italian Ethnographic Linguistic Atlas of Corsica”, published in Pisa in ten volumes.
The main purpose of his trip to Sardinia is therefore essentially linguistic, at least at the beginning - in fact he collects a large amount of ethno texts that he offers both in accurate phonetic transcription and in Italian translation -, but the large space assigned to the introductory essay “Elements and General Characters of the Sardinian Legend” demonstrates an attention that is not secondary to the study of demology. This aspect is in fact investigated thoroughly and independently with respect to glottological studies, which the author reserved the right to deal with separately in a special essay, however, never published. The work is a set of one hundred and twenty-seven prose texts that come from all over the island, collected in their dialect varieties, and that want to bring together the vast heritage of Sardinian folk legends (even if the author himself denies “that the few notes that follow here on the general characters of the Sardinian legend exhaust the very interesting topic”), and deal from the miraculous origin of churches and sanctuaries to legends related to the world of the dead and to fantastic beings, to episodes of revenge and village rivalries

Update

25/6/2026 - 13:10