Sardinia gives you this feeling of being away from the rest of the world – it’s an island, true and true. It’s as if there’s Sardinia, and then there’s the rest of the world – and other places seem far away, remote, almost surreal.
Nuoro was isolated from the rest of the world.*
Nuoro is the main city in one of the Sardinian provinces; although at 40,000 inhabitants, it’s barely a city at all. Nuoro was built on hills, 45 minutes from the coast. Growing up, it always seemed like such a sleepy town, such a boring place to live – it almost made me feel claustrophobic sometimes, and I couldn’t wait to move on to greener pastures.
Every time I go back, that feeling creeps back, and it always throws me. How can someone feel that way about the place where they were born, grew up, went to school?
I decided to take those feelings head-on, and tackle Nuoro the same way I did Zurich when we first moved back: look at it as a tourist would, with a keen eye for anything beautiful and characteristic, and without the jaded heart of the seasoned (and often bored) local.
So I went looking. Searching for beauty, for something that spoke to me, something that told me a story about this city I never tried to get to know well. I went looking… and hoped I could look at it all with with new eyes.
From the window of her house she could see the nearby mountains of Orthobene with their dark forests and jagged grey peaks. Farther off was a chain of limestone mountains which sometimes appeared violet, sometimes lemon-coloured, sometimes dark blue, depending on the variations of the light. And in the distance, the snowy peaks of Gennargentu emerged.*
Where else would I start, but with the Monte Ortobene, which is part of so many happy childhood memories? Nuoro’s very own little mountain is barely 3,133 feet tall, but it has always been a popular spot with Nuoresi of all ages: kids can ride their bikes and run around in the parks and playgrounds, and in the summer it’s the best place to escape the heat and enjoy a fresh breeze, take a walk or have an ice cream or a drink with friends, while you patiently wait for the weekend to arrive so you can drive down the the beach.
Unlike the Swiss mountains, which manage to look elegant and rise proud and majestic, Monte Ortobene has a distinct wilderness to it, all thick vegetation and uneven rocks.
Sant’Onofrio is a hill not far from the Monte Ortobene, and it’s home to the last castle in the city, as well as a park with a panoramic view of most of the town.
Nuoro is full of churches, most of them oddly conservative compared to many other Catholic churches around Italy.
However driving down from Sant’Onofrio, I couln’dt help but notice how beautiful the bell tower of the cathedral looked against the blue sky – and when I heard a the lovely voices of the children’s choir rising out of the church’s dark interior… I am not Catholic, but I simply couldn’t resist the lovely atmosphere, so we parked the car and walked around the piazza, listening to the choir, enjoying the cool breeze and taking some pictures.
But I couldn’t forget Nuoro’s claim to fame and one of Italy’s best-known writers: Grazia Deledda, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926. Her old home is one of Nuoro’s main tourist attractions, and it just happens to be in a part of town that is in and of itself very characteristic, having changed very little in the past century.
Quotes from Grazia Deledda’s books are everywhere on the walls of old buildings in alleys all around this part of town, including one that leads us, once again, towards the Monte Ortobene.
"The Ortobene rose above the grey streets, pink in a sky that was the color of ash."
I am certainly not a Nobel Prize winner, but I can’t help but relate to Grazia Deledda – she, too, found Nuoro constricting, she too looked forward to being able to leave and see new things and new places. But she managed to find inspiration in this closed-off place, at a time when women had little to no freedom to learn, experience things and even be themselves . I find that incredibly inspiring. And oddly, it might just be what brings me a little closer to this town that never quite felt like home.
“Our great anguish is life’s slow death. This is why we must try to slow life down, to intensify it, thus giving it the richest possible meaning. One must try to live above one’s life, as a cloud above the sea.”**
I always thought of myself as someone who could enjoy life. I managed to do it in every place I have lived in or visited, even Zurich – why not right here in my hometown? I have a few more days to figure it out.
How do you feel about your hometown? Does it feel like “home”? Or if you, like me, couldn’t wait to leave, do you feel differently about it now?
Credits: quotes marked with * from Presentation Speech by Henrik Schück, President of the Nobel Foundation (at the time) before awarding Nober Prize in Literature to Grazia Deledda in 1927. Quote market with ** from one of Grazia Deledda’s letters.
All images property of yours truly. Please do not use without permission.
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