Sale e Tempo
Sardinia’s and Sardinians’ time is a theme cherished by Dessì. The concept of time is recurrent in his pages, where Sardinia appears as sunk into an idea of time that is definitely different from the rest of Italy.
A slowness coupled with a sense of time have survived in the Island, savouring of prehistory and ancestral links with the land and its origins. Such slowness goes along with the silence of nature and of men. Actually, silence is word; slowness should not be seen as laziness at all, but rather as reflection and thought. Therefore, Proto, a farmer from Parte d’Ispi, leaves every day at dawn to work the land to which he belongs, with his cork-like hands, his nails split like those of goats. Everything turns into a harmonic system of silent exchanges of time and toil. So, the white bread eaten by Proto is not just simply bread: it is the product of the joint efforts of man and woman, kneaded with flour, salt and time – the time of sowing, harvesting, milling, bread-making.
Freshly-baked, warm bread is compared to a birth from a ‘Motherly Den’ – it is Life. This is why bread is precious and, accordingly, it has to be wrapped in a snow-white napkin of flax, woven and finely embroidered by a remote great-great-grandmother – once again, Time, that of those who preceded us, leaving their personal mark.