Paolo Mantegazza

In 1869, the state of endemic crisis in Sardinia reached the tables of the deputies of Parliament, who decided to appoint a Commission of Inquiry to evaluate the situation and remedy it. It includes Quintino Sella - as Minister of Finance - and Paolo Mantegazza. Born in Monza in 1831, Mantegazza is a very learned doctor, an expert in anthropology and a lover of letters, a passionate traveler and former author of several books.
Perhaps because he was already a writer and traveler, he derives from his island experience a small but flowing book, “a good script, more with his heart than with his team”, entitled “Profiles and landscapes of Sardinia”, published in Milan in 1869. This is a long story, initially conceived as an article in episodes for a magazine, then published by Brugola from Milan. Without denying repeating pages already written and now read in several parts of Europe (the opening quote by Baron von Maltzan is significant), the Monza resident feels the greater need to make “love a beautiful and very unhappy island, that we Italians are wrong to forget too much and to love too little”. This sincere affection permeates the entire work, which is first of all the fruit of a man of government, who feels the need to emphasize the unity and continuity of the island with the rest of Italy, not only as a political fact born of those years, but above all as an element for a new development, the result of a synergistic action in which, as a member of the Commission of Inquiry, he felt invested at that time. He argues: “Now it is appropriate that the island and the peninsula forgive each other their sins, [...] and prepare for the new times, and set out with common forces to fertilize an almost deserted land that has before it a future without borders.”
The description begins with Cagliari and Sassari, “the two gems of Sardinia”, praised for a long time, and by contrast it describes the vast solitary spaces, immovable “not shortened by the railways and crossed by the plow” that separate the cities from the stazzi, from the villages of the hinterland. It tells in colorful pages about people and their customs, the quality and above all the variety of clothes that are enriched from country to country with new tinsel, and the mystery that surrounds women whose hidden beauty is accentuated by the veils that cover their garments.
The work ends with an appeal to the new generations to exploit the island's resources, and the Sardinians to find first of all in themselves the stimulus to action, and to abandon the vice of “sophisms used as rationalists” and to cease the habit of feeling sorry for each other.

Update

25/6/2026 - 13:28