After the desserts, the bread. From Saturday 13 July, on newsstands with L'Unione Sarda, the second of the five volumes of the series dedicated by Ilisso Edizioni to "The Sardinian table". In the history of humanity there is no more perfect nourishment than bread, in which the virtuous meeting of the four elements is at the origin of a product that has become synonymous with life and culture, whose sole but essential presence in homes has always represented the possibility of a livelihood: "He who has bread does not die", goes the popular saying, not surprisingly. As an essential food in every pantry.

Millennia of history - "Pane in Sardinia" thus celebrates another excellence of our territory : through essays and in-depth studies the reader will be able to follow the story of island bread-making during its thousand-year evolution, starting from the most ancient archaeological and documentary sources up to the our days, with focuses ranging from anthropology to ethnography, from literature to the arts. A story with a multidisciplinary approach, therefore, for a volume that at the same time also aims to be a catalog that enhances the extraordinary variety and beauty of the productions of our region by presenting them through a classification by type: daily bread, "seasoned", ceremonial, votive ; and also breads for children and breads not to be consumed but to be kept in reserve, or to be used as amulets.

Cultural nourishment - Talking about bread making in Sardinia, as this book effectively reminds us, means referring to a real cultural specialization , an area in which the need to nourish oneself met beauty and which, not surprisingly, inspired the great anthropologist Alberto Mario Cirese, in noting the unparalleled variety of the hundreds of Sardinian breads, the enthusiastic and flattering definition of "ephemeral plastic art". The many variations and types of bread, proposed following a careful selection, are documented through splendid color images and period shots, the result of specific photographic campaigns and archive research : through them it is possible to admire the creativity of the modeling , diversified according to the occasions of preparation, conservation, offering and consumption, but also knowing the various moments of the bread cycle, in the patient process that begins with sowing in the field and ends with cooking in the oven. Among pages that make everyone discover the aspects linked to the processing, we encounter ancient pintadere and Nuragic bronzes intent on offering ritual focaccias, millstones from the Roman era and donkey grinders still in use until the last century; we remember almost forgotten breads such as corn, acorn and barley breads, and we note the current "revenge" of the so-called "poor" breads; we admire scenes in which sieving is an act of love and we are enchanted by iconic female figures surrounded by golden ears, emblems of fertility and abundance. Because the history of bread, in Sardinia, is above all the history of the countless women who for centuries have carried out a domestic process as tiring as it is refined : between the pages, their hands intent on this exquisitely feminine task - sunk in the dough, white with flour, busy handling small wheels and scissors with care to create enchanting decorations – meet those of the writer Grazia Deledda and the artist Maria Lai, who were able to draw inspiration from that same nucleus of meanings and raw materials and translate it into as many stories and masterpieces.

Celebration and identity - Leafing through the volume (on newsstands for 12.90 euros plus the cost of the newspaper) the reader will find a passionate homage to the nourishment par excellence and to the symbol capable of marking time , a food through which, in the ordinary moments of everyday life and in the extraordinary moments of the celebration, the community manages to recognize itself as a people with its own identity and culture.

(Unioneonline)

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