A click. An offer. A breath held in front of the screen. Over 1,500 kilometers away, a group of Sardinians wins a statuette that tells three thousand years of history at Christie's auction. The Nuragic Priestess will return home to Sardinia, thanks to the Nurnet association and a crowdfunding that in ten days has mobilized passion, identity and memory.
Stolen who knows when and ended up in a London auction, its return involved about 150 donors. Small and large offers that, added together, won against silence and oblivion.
While the countdown was starting in London, a land has been moving on the web in recent days, choosing to “bring back to domu sua” a fragment of its past. Not to lock it in a private case, but to return it to the community, with the commitment – already declared – to donate it to a public institution that will make it visible to all.
"We certainly won't keep it in our headquarters," explains Antonello Gregorini, president of Nurnet, "we want people to be able to see it and admire it. We will decide together with our supporters which museum to entrust it to, with one clear condition: that it remains on display with the writing " Purchased through the contributions of civic-minded Sardinians, after having been disterrau and furau" ".
The bronze represents a hieratic female figure, wrapped in an aura of mystery, interpreted by some as a priestess, by others as a shaman. The spirals carved on the body have rekindled the debate among archaeologists, enthusiasts and "sardopatici", as Antonello Gregorini, one of the promoters of the operation, likes to call them.
"The Nuragic Priestess is beautiful and moves us. Period," she writes on social media. "Opinions about the origin and meaning are many and conflicting, but it has always been this way. We believe in it and so do many friends."
