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In Tertenìa, on the battered balconies, full of crowded people – with the windows wide open and the curly balustrades festively covered with colorful embroidered blankets, among the wisteria and climbing vines – the cadenced echo of the Ave Maria rose slowly, sharpening with dark fear when, the staggering statue of the Risen Christ, with his hand raised in a harpoon, the mournful black veil of Our Lady of Sorrows was missing. The attempts were repeated several times, amid the worried and terrified sighs of the women in procession – the ominous risk of the destruction of the ancient sculptures always lurking – until the procession of men had the upper hand: the veil of the Virgin, carried on the shoulders women, remained entangled in the trophy in the hands of the simulacrum of the rediscovered son, the side red and ragged, finally freeing the face of the Immaculate no longer in mourning. And so, accompanied by the nervous agitation of the hazy and silvery thuribles, the singing of the women who had accompanied the Mother to “S’incontru” with the Savior, grew in high notes.
Now the women dissolved, amid applause and exchanges of greetings, while the officiant – his disdainful and severe gaze on a tiny body, lost in the highly ornate vestments – amidst the incense fumes that drew doodles in ascent, continued the prayer, to the high sound of the bells, almost intimidating those present with the liberating and obscure litany which, rigorously punctuated in Sardinian, now continued in festive tones. Amidst the staid smiles, the «bona Pasca Manna» therefore ran from mouth to mouth, while the quick hands were wrapped around each other in contrite and rigid embraces, never too affectionate, and yet convincedly magnanimous.
Church of the Assumption
“Pasqua Grande” – this is how the inhabitants of Ogliastra celebrate it, contrasting it with Christmas, which is instead “Paschixedda”, or the lesser Easter – finally had its high redemption, and with it the entire Tertenìa could garrulously go up the slope which from the main Rome would have brought it back, between peeling walls and roofs of mossy and unsteady tiles, to the church of the Assunta. Here, from the large bronze door to the apse, with the majestic Titian-style painting dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin, everything tells of Don Egidio Manca (1906-1957), the curate who erected the “new” church in the 1950s, rigorously in the shape of a Latin cross, with the solemn bell tower next to it in blocks of granite and red bricks, decorating its interiors and giving “its souls” one of the best examples of modern Romanesque on the island.
Foxi Manna, “the beauty of Sarrala”
The history of the Mancas, a family of artists, has marked the architecture of the town on several occasions at the foot of Mount Giulea, 100 kilometers north of the capital, along the Orientale Sarda. Thus, among the photos and ancestral jewels, images and scents of what for me is the land of holidays, come back quickly and indelible. Nostalgic souvenirs of naive and carefree summers, among the large terraces of the “house by the sea”, placidly stretching up to the dunes, now disappeared, of the white beach of Foxi Manna; she is “the beauty of Sarrala”, with the granite Nuraghe Aleri dominating her among thirsty olive trees and mastic trees.
Alberto Ferrero of La Marmora
Just the nuraghe, in the shadow of the pink spiers of Monte Cartucceddu – the only mountain on the island to throw itself majestic and jagged on the sea – marks the placid and crystalline bay where the ancient Roman city of Saralapis was, identified as such by General Alberto Ferrero di La Marmora, and which, along a tormented road – which the hateful fires have devastated several times – goes up to the perched and inhospitable village of the proud and urban Tertenians, which I want to tell with another memory.