Salvatore Satta
Il Giorno del Giudizio

Even when they seem to speak of life, and the living, few books describe Death, and its immanence, better than "Il giorno del giudizio" by Salvatore Satta (1902-1975).

Perhaps this is because this book is, in its turn, the work of a dead man himself: dead not only in the obvious sense of having been gone for over three decades, but in the sense of never having been a professional writer, of never having wanted to publish this text while he was alive, likely preserving it as a personal relic of a past that had to remain isolated in the intimacy of its protagonist, without overshadowing or altering the image of a scholar of civil procedure law, a subject of which he was a professor in various Italian universities.

Whatever Satta's actual intentions were, it is nevertheless fortunate that the book was published, originally in 1977 by a publishing house specializing in legal publications and subsequently by a more well-known publisher, who contributed to elevating the author's work to a small cult, widespread and translated across half the world.

The book tells us, in a rhapsodic manner, loaded with narrative ellipses, the story of a small Sardinian town at the start of the 20th century - a provincial, remote, and peripheral Nuoro, whose capital and cultural reference point was Sassari - and through it, the small stories of its inhabitants, especially that of the Sanna-Carboni family, led by the patriarch, Notary Sebastiano, who governs over his wife Vincenza and his children in an affectless, distant manner, where each individual seems not to matter as such, but as a small piece of the generations that preceded and will follow him.

The depiction of this circle of people, variously connected to the Sanna-Carboni family and the social context in which it was embedded, ensures that the book has no true protagonist, lacking an plot and a real narrative center, benefiting from a series of transitions that make the plot lively and fragmented, even though it is centered on the common suggestion of the vanity of life, and the lives of the individual characters upon which the author dwells.

The narrator himself cannot be defined either as an omniscient character who dominates and rationalizes the scene, afterward, or as a mere recorder of memories and meditations, notwithstanding the evident biographical references to the Sanna/Satta family: the sensation given by reading the book, considering its genesis and publication mode, is that of one of its protagonists speaking to us about a concluded experience, of a reality finished and buried, whose voice reaches us almost as an echo from the Nothingness, leaving us a testament, and at the same time, a warning.

In particular, the temporal distance that separates the book's writing and narration from the actual unfolding of the events ensures that the reconstruction of Nuoro and its inhabitants, the depiction of the individual characters, is not filtered by an elegiac or consolatory dimension of a rural and ancient world that is no more, nor by the regret of something that cannot return, but rather by the awareness, and almost certainly the deaf fear, that all that has been bears, at the same time, the mark of the Finite and the Infinite, in such a conflict as to open an abyss in the soul of everyone.

"Finite," it all is, precisely because it is buried by the dust and earth that cover the protagonists' graves and will cover the remains of the author himself, making it a concluded experience, about which nothing can be said, nothing is expressible, except through that long epitaph that, in essence, is the book.

The writer, though not acting as a biographer, adopts the weight of the inevitability of the characters' destinies, renouncing to embellish their corpses, their lives, in a now dreamlike, now fanciful dimension: we are thus in opposition to a certain Italian verismo, where adherence to truth occurred through the abstraction of the historical person and the creation of symbolic characters as an epitome of a way of thinking and being (from Verga to Tomasi di Lampedusa), as well as to a free flow of Europeanizing thought where the personal dimension of memory intertwines with universal themes, making the characters in turn shadows of the protagonist, tools for self-analysis or confession (Svevo, Buzzati).

"Infinite," it all is, because the lives and deaths of the characters, their oblivion barely stemmed by the Author aware of the very futility of his narrative, seem to fade gradually in the face of the incessant succession of generations, of new times, getting lost in the immensity of Time that man cannot even attempt to grasp, while simultaneously being expressive, in individual pains and intimate sufferings of each, of one's inner anguish in regard to the mystery of Life (lived, not lived, simply accepted) and the certainty of its End, which at the same time marks the beginning of an eternal Time in which the individual experiences, hopes, and anguish will be nullified.

Therefore, this is an Infinity devoid of the romantic and sublime dimension typical of certain nineteenth-century poetry (I think of Leopardi), as the awareness of infinity and indefiniteness is neither elaborated nor transcended by poetic synthesis and intuition, but rather signifies a bewilderment and the impossibility of giving meaning to existence, in the moment when, by postulating infinity, the individual loses meaning, and all senses are possible, until a "Judgment" universal will occur: whose outcomes are as unknowable for the individual as is the very God in whom one believes without knowing. It is perhaps an unease reminiscent of the early Montale, and it is probably not incorrect to draw a parallel between the rough island landscape described in this book and certain inhospitable Montale's Liguria; although the bewilderment is rendered deeper by the senility and old age of the writer, richer in experiences than the young author of "Ossi di Seppia," and by the fact that the writer is a man of faith (and not an atheist) who, however, does not seem to believe in the false certainties of certain religiosity, rather capturing the unknowable aspect of Creation and the final Judgment.

A universal work, this one, almost as much as the Judgment to which the title alludes, mistakenly considered by some as an excellent regional literature product or as the valid but negligible outcome of an old professor's pastime.

Although underestimating this work, relegating it to a mere literary accident in an infinite library, would indeed validate its profound and devastating significance.