Bread in the food tradition of Sardinia

Abstract (English)

Bread in the food tradition of Sardinia

The subject of this research proposal is the role of bread in Sardinian food tradition which, despite having undergone complex transformation events, due to phenomena of innovation, abandonment, syncretism and revival, within a historical movement made up of acceleration and stagnations, still reveal a strong cultural conservatism, which reaches its maximum expression in the art of figurative and ornamental modeling of bread. A practice that constitutes one of the most marked distinctive cultural traits of the anthropological condition of the islands still today.

The specialization in traditional bread-making, which is a widespread phenomenon far beyond the Mediterranean area, in Sardinia reaches peaks of excellence in terms of quality and quantity through a frequency, an abundance of different breads and variants, as well as a still surprising vitality, which it permeates every point of the island and every occasion: solemn or festive calendar and daily, not found elsewhere.

The figurative modeling of bread, an exclusively famous specialization in Sardinia, certainly reveals very marked similarities and contiguities with other Mediterranean realities, with which it shares a common substratum of myths, symbols, cultural permanence to which the plastic art of bread seems to be traceable.

To the point of hypothesizing the existence of a koinè of some types and forms of bread that have a strong affinity with breads from the African coast, the Middle East and even from Caucasian area. Which shouldn't be so surprising if cosmogonic myths are documented in Sardinia and are also present in Azerbaijan and in the Turkish-speaking world more generally, such as that of the origin of the Milky Way.

However, as an absolutely distinctive fact, the ethnographically based survey of an enormous quantity and variety of types and annexed variants of bread remains, not only for ceremonials, but also for daily use, with strong internal differences and far greater than in other areas, which still lack some repertoirealization and analysis.

It is this segment of the food tradition that we intend to analyze from a perspective that extends from the material function to the still present sign function, that is to say the task of conveying very different meanings from being oneself, that means bread to eat.