Valery

Valery is the pseudonym of Antoine-Claude Pasquin, curator of the king's libraries in the Palace of Versailles and Trianon, both under the reign of Charles X of Bourbon (1824-30) and under the subsequent reign of Louis Philippe of Bourbon Orléans (1843-48).
His “Journey to Sardinia” occupies the second volume of a larger project, which, like others contemporary to him, included an account of the trips made to the main and most unexplored islands of the Mediterranean, entitled “Voyages en Corse, à l'île d'Elbe et en Sardaigne”.
Valery arrived on the island at the end of April 1834 and stayed there for about a month and a half, traveling it, after landing at La Maddalena, from north to south and back, for a total of more than eighty stages. Endowed with a vast culture, he arrived on the island inspired by those feelings of romantic rediscovery of the past that many before him had already attracted him, and which permeates his approach to the knowledge of a new and extremely different reality: of romantic origin is not only his perception of landscapes and nature, but also his enthusiasm for man and his cultural manifestations that are an expression of the past, of the enhancement of that feeling of “origin” that is part of romantic historicism.
He is a shrewd, inspired traveler, who notices things and lets himself be involved in them, who indulges in the stimulus to meditation offered by a panorama, a fountain of crystalline water, an expanse of succulent fruits, to the point of being intoxicated by them. He makes most of his journey in the month of May and perhaps sees the best that nature offers, but also the spring of the people for whom “the month of May in Sardinia is a perpetual festival”; his stops in the various countries are dotted with rites and processions, sacred parades that merge with horse races, poetic competitions, cattle fairs.
The Sant'Efisio festival (described on the return trip) is the most solemn festival but it is also “the most unique of shows due to the richness, the variety of costumes, the joy of the dances, and the joy of abundant snacks on the grass.” The sacred and the profane are told within a changing framework, which is that of political change, of the hope of abolishing feudalism, an event that Valery's journey captures at the height of its development, and to which he entrusts the fate of technological and social development.

Update

25/6/2026 - 13:33