Maria Grazia Lai, the youngest daughter of the Devilla d'Aritzo family: "The truth comes from DNA, which is how I discovered my father."

In the end, the dead revealed the truth to her. Not the mother who gave birth to her, not her relatives, not the nuns at the Cagliari orphanage where she grew up with her peers without families. Maria Grazia Lai, born in Cagliari in February 1955, is the daughter of Giuseppe Luigi Devilla, born in Aritzo in 1879 and died there at the age of 78 in 1957, two years after the birth of that child, conceived out of wedlock and never recognized.

The old patriarch

The origins of this story, which hails from mid-twentieth-century Sardinia, are all contained within the dates of this man's biography. The age of an elderly patriarch with an important surname and a legacy of fertile lands and servants. One of those notables, a former doctor and mayor of the village, to whom no one could say no, not even the women in the house, single or married, made no difference; only those with a respectful and worthy master could be saved. "I'm seventy years old and I've spent my entire life wondering who my father really was, but the truth has always been denied me. That's why I was forced to seek it on my own, appealing to the Court of Cagliari."

The bone fragments

Few written notes, no interviews, and no photographs to support her story. Last June, after three years of legal proceedings, Maria Grazia Lai Devilla, a craftswoman with a home and family in the Cagliari hinterland, finally obtained judicial recognition of filiation. The panel presided over by Giorgio Latti determined that she is the blood of Giuseppe Luigi Devilla. There is no doubt, thanks to the forensic genetic analysis report, which established, the judge wrote in the ruling, "a biological paternity attribution of 99.9999%. (ninety-nine/999 percent)." The test was performed on the man's remains, a few bone fragments from which genetic material was collected and then compared with that of his alleged daughter.

A mystery to be solved

The exhumation of the body was therefore necessary. "The remains are almost seventy years old, which posed considerable difficulties in carrying out the expert assessment," explain the woman's lawyers, Luca Picasso and Walter Trincas. "Numerous tests on various fragments were necessary, but in the end we were able to prove the father-daughter relationship." This confirmation solved what Picasso, the lawyer, called "an enigma."

Half-truths

Maria Grazia Lai had known since she was a young girl that her origins lay within the Devilla family home, the large house in Aritzo with its internal courtyard and chestnut balconies (now owned by the municipality), where her mother worked. Occasionally, her mother took her into town, so she could gather voices, listen to whispered words, and intuit unspoken truths. "I suffered in silence; it was a pain that no one in my family wanted or knew how to take into account," she wrote in the statement to her lawyers. "I managed to build a family of my own and create a business, but that veil of mystery and silence affected my life. Since I was a child, there hasn't been a single day that I haven't dreamed of discovering my roots."

The plot twist

She made up her mind in 2004, when she was almost fifty. She turned to the lawyers Picasso and Trincas and filed a civil suit for judicial recognition of paternity, convinced that her father was Sebastiano Bachisio Michele Basilio Devilla, who died in Rome in 1962. He was the second-to-last of Giuseppe Luigi's five children, certainly closest in age to Maria Grazia's mother. Once the remains were exhumed and the genetic testing was performed, the dramatic turn of events occurred. The DNA matches showed that she and Sebastiano shared the same biological parent, therefore they were brother and sister. She was a Devilla, and at that point the truth was clear. However, a second trial, another exhumation, and new genetic tests were necessary. Maria Grazia Devilla Lai asked for her father's surname to be added next to her mother's. "Now that I finally know the truth, I am at peace and I feel no resentment or anger toward those who remained silent. I just wish my family would recognize me and welcome me as one of the Devillas. The last of Giuseppe Luigi's children still alive."