Cagliari
The Sassari Brigade band performed in the hall in Via Roma
From the school desks of Cabras and Riola Sardo to the regional council chamber to celebrate Sa Die de sa Sardigna. Three classes of the primary schools of the comprehensive institute – respectively the 5th A of Cabras, the 5th D of Solanas and the 5th E of Riola Sardo – together with their classmates from Sant’Antioco, participated in the initiative in Cagliari in memory of the insurrection popular in 1794, when the Piedmontese and the viceroy Vincenzo Balbiano were expelled.
The president of the Regional Council Piero Comandini opened the ceremony, followed by senator Marco Meloni.
The musical band of the Sassari Brigade performed the official anthem of the Region, Procurade ‘e moderatere, before the interventions of the representatives of the Sa Die Committee, Luciano Carta and Gianni Loy, of the pupils, of the regional councilor for Public Education Ilaria Portas and of the President of the Region Alessandra Todde.
At the end the band performed the Brigade’s anthem and other songs.
School pupils with the president of the Todde Region and the president of the Comandini Council – Photo by the Sardinia Region Press Office
Below is the full speech by the President of the Region Alessandra Todde
President Comandini,
counselor and counselors, boys and girls, we Sardinians have the right to celebrate ourselves and our history. And it is with emotion that I take the floor to celebrate with you “Sa Die de sa Sardigna”. For too long we have told ourselves that we had no history, taking it for granted that our past was only a succession of dominations, a void of true history, the one with a capital S, the one produced by active subjects who fight, create, dream . Today we are here to remind ourselves, and anyone who loves this land, that we have had a history of our own, imbued with the world, woven with great aspirations, certainly complicated by falls but also rich in high moments. We are a people who have faced contradictions but also custodians of great potential that we still have to fully unfold.
By knowing this story, sharing it, meditating on it, translating it day after day we build the tools to fuel our desire for unity, freedom and prosperity. This is why we must celebrate ourselves without incense: Sa Die is not and must not be a day of bombastic words to compensate for the other 364 days of the year. Sa Die is not and must not be a hangover of pride or revenge that exempts us from dealing with our conscience and our political action every day of the year.
Sa Die is not the end but it is a commitment. The commitment to get to know ourselves, to deal with ourselves. To improve ourselves, to act differently. Self-determination, as we have said, walks on the shoulders of an educated people. A self-aware people. Our national conscience as Sardinians is a task, and Sa Die is the opportunity to make the commitment to carry out this task with renewed, constant, convinced enthusiasm, calling every woman and man of Sardinia to participate.
Even more so I say this when speaking to you young people, who are the builders of the present and the near future. Our generational pact has broken and we can rebuild it through knowledge of our history that helps us create a new common collective consciousness. Sa Die is not a lonely day: it wasn’t lonely then and it doesn’t have to be lonely today. The events we commemorate did not begin and end on that 28 April 1794. That day of uprising – which the most fearful part of the ruling class immediately branded as “popular emotion” – had its roots in the mid-eighteenth century, in the rediscovery by the Sardinians of their national diversity, as well as in the growing popular awareness of a condition of injustice of which feudalism was the most visible sign. This current, fed karstically by our very long history of sovereignty, evidenced by the revival of the Sardinian language, was fed at the same time by the Enlightenment, reformist and revolutionary currents of thought that crossed Europe.
This is why Sa Die was more than an impromptu rebellion. For this reason its culmination is not the temporary expulsion of the Savoy ruling class and its exemplary nature does not lie in the spirit of reclamation that innervates the “five questions” that the Sardinian ruling class addressed with naive trust to the Savoy sovereign. Sa Die talks to us about constituent times. Times in which a parliament comes back to life, patriotic virtue ignites souls, our communities experiment with federative pacts to free themselves from the feudal yoke, an important part of the Sardinian ruling class places the happiness and dignity of the Sardinian nation as its objective.
“A Kingdom that is never a Colony of any other Nation, but separate and independent from the States of the Mainland”, this is how the Sardinian Parliament expressed itself once self-convened in 1793.
“The Sardinian nation contains within itself great resources to be able to develop a great coercive force, in order to enforce its political constitution”, says L’Achille della Sarda Liberazione, one of the symbolic pamphlets of the Sardinian revolutionary three-year period.
This is not the opportunity to discuss how and why this spirit was broken, so much so that it has come to us obscured if not completely forgotten. Today’s opportunity is rather to look at ourselves in the mirror of history and understand together whether, thanks to this history, we can do more and better for our people and our land. If we can find in it food for enormous challenges, such as those of those who have to face the multiple crises that seem to condemn Sardinia to a destiny of depopulation and plunder.
In 1798, in his Essai sur la Sardaigne addressed from Paris to the Sardinian Parliament, the great jurist from Sassari Domenico Alberto Azuni wrote: “My sole purpose is to remind the Nation of the study of political economy, and to stimulate it to put every care into commerce, industry, manufacturing and navigation. The position of the island in the center of the Mediterranean, between the two great continents of Africa and Europe; the multiplicity of its productions, the considerable surpluses of which can be exported annually; the security of its ports; the richness of its seas, should make it aware that it is destined by Nature to have a distinguished rank among the trading Nations of the Universe”.
In 1799, in his Memorial written from exile, the leader of the Sardinian Revolution, Giovanni Maria Angioy, said: “Despite the bad administration, the insufficient population and all the obstacles that hinder agriculture, commerce and industry, Sardinia abounds in everything necessary for the nourishment and subsistence of its inhabitants. If Sardinia, in a state of languor, without government, without industry, after several centuries of disasters, possesses such great resources, it must be concluded that well-administered it would be one of the richest states in Europe”.
These words of trust perhaps sound distant. And perhaps their premise sounds even more distant: “publicly testifying to the attachment to the homeland”, contributing to the “happiness of the Sardinian nation”, making Sardinia a European state.
The point is not to resolve the distance between us and that past in a day, much less with a speech. The point is not to be afraid to remember these words and that spirit, even these words and that spirit, for which so many sacrificed their lives. If we have the strength to deal, from tomorrow, in our concrete operations – as a Government, as a Parliament, as a ruling class, as a Sardinian society in its entirety – with this legacy, then we will truly open a difficult but necessary path to a conscious, effective, productive diversity.
In other words, while we celebrate, we have the opportunity to ask ourselves whether it is better to continue with a story of reclamation, in which we Sardinians ask others to take charge of our problems and their solutions, or whether it is not appropriate to enter into a phase of real self-determination, in which to shape a new Sardinian policy, in which to build with all the passion and intelligence possible institutions at the full service of the Sardinians and Sardinia.
The first way to change your story is to tell it differently. It’s telling ourselves differently. Even at the cost of questioning those stereotypes and that proud sense of identity which behind a veil of comforting habit hides the difficulty in giving oneself high values and clear objectives. Reasons for unity. Reasons to advance. For too long we have been trapped in a narrative that is “against”. A story in which others have the power to decide our lives and we have no choice but to rebel to demand less oppressive treatment.
But this is not our story. It is not the only one that our past has left us as a legacy. It’s not the best we can tell ourselves and, above all, our sons and daughters. There is a story of self-determination yet to be written, yet to be done. And so when we sing the verses of ‘Su patriotu sardu a sos feudatarios’, written by Francesco Ignazio Mannu in 1795, during the revolutionary uprisings and since 2018 the anthem of Sardinia, we go beyond the claim and strive to build, design, invent what we want our island becomes. Sa Die de Sa Sardigna is an opportunity to remind ourselves of this.
The President of the Todde Region and the President of the Comandini Council with the band of the Sassari Brigade – Photo by the Sardinia Region Press Office
The band of the Sassari Brigade – Photo by the Sardinia Region Press Office
Sunday, April 28, 2024
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