The experience of Gaspare Finali , Mazzinian ideas, minister, mayor, jurist, parliamentarian in the post-unification phase. For twenty months, between 1856 and 1858, he was an exile on the island where he held the role of chief accountant of an agricultural and industrial company based in Macomer.
The researchers Walter Falgio and Daniele Sanna dedicated to him " From exile in Sardinia to the institutions of the Kingdom, materials for a biography of Gaspare Finali " published by Franco Angeli as part of the "Contemporary Sardinia" series of the Sardinian Institute for the history of anti-fascism and contemporary society. «The choice to dedicate a volume to the figure of Cesena - the editors of the volume clarify - therefore responds, first and foremost, to the need for a rereading of his reflections on the Sardinian experience, undoubtedly little known and consequently little studied». The Sardinian period has a great weight in his intellectual development.
The thought
«Finali's writings on the island experience - declare Falgio and Sanna - cannot be counted solely among the works on Sardinia, an undiscovered land left by nineteenth-century travellers. They contain distinctive and original aspects such as, for example, the numerous and frank economic considerations always filtered through the point of view of a worker and an intellectual who held the position of chief accountant of the Agricultural Industrial Society of the Sardinia of Count Pietro Beltrami of Bagnacavallo ».
The historian Luciano Marrocu explains in the introduction that «Finali and Beltrami have a common path which, starting from a youth of republican fury, brings them together in Sardinia. If we then think about the very special relationship that Garibaldi had with the island, we wonder if there wasn't something in nineteenth-century Sardinia that attracted the men of the democratic Risorgimento." The work edited by Falgio and Sanna, which adds to the meritorious research work of the historian Gianfranco Murtas, analyzes in a timely manner the profile of a thinker and a man of action of the highest order in the pre-unification scenario and then in the subsequent moment of construction of Italy.
The view on the island
The book also contains the Sardinian memories of Gaspare Finali (born in Cesena in 1829 and died in Marradi in 1914). He wrote in 1906: «The character of the people is serious and melancholy, as is manifested in the chant that accompanies the popular dance, which has no agitation, but a few well-composed movements. Those people do not love the sea, and it is their great detriment. Some attempts for the agrarian and economic redemption of Sardinia did not succeed, and I regretted it, as if I had been born there; We hope that the latest measures will bear all the desired results."