Sa Reìna of Nuoro

On the central high ground, a fulcrum of communication between the valleys that stand out as arduous on the ground, Nuoro rises up, the main town of the Island’s culture. The center deserved the epithet of "Sardinian Athens" because of the great cultural ferment that has been spreading here during the last years of the Nineteenth Century until the next, that presents some examples of big artists like Deledda and Satta. But, Nùgoro, will be remembered also as the town of the woman who represented the Sardinian history of the end of the 1800s.


She was called sa Reìna (the queen) for her notorious audacity and her decision power through which she was distinguished among the people of Nuoro, through whose streets she walked wearing elegant clothes embellished with traditional jewels with the precious shining. Maria Antonia Serra Sanna lived in Nuoro between the 1800s and the 1900s and she consecrated her life to support the brotherly will of satisfying the ambitions of economic and social improvement of their own family. Indeed, the Serra Sanna family did not have rich origins.

Their father Giuseppe, better known as tzio Peppe (Uncle Peppe), had around ten sheep that produced a little. His children, not resigned to poverty, did a profitable action, but dangerous, as rustling, that dragged towards a sentence of imprisonment for thefts of cattle.


From this moment, they became fugitive living in the Sardinian hinterland, although they carried on their activity of monopoly on the territory and of revenge towards their accusers. Their sister, Maria Antonia, supported this plan. She was a woman with an intelligence that was out of the ordinary and was faithful to her brotherly relationship. Therefore, they became a rich family of property and cattle owners able to living life or death towards who obeyed them and towards who, on the contrary, opposed to them or accused them in front of the judges for the action done.


Sa Reìna, did not choose the state of being in hiding, but she shared it at freedom, becoming a dynamic supporter of the action of her brothers, Giacomo and Elias. It is told that, equipped with a fake beard and a rifle on her shoulders, as well as wearing trousers and a mastruca (so-called the jacket made with leather of sheep without sleeves, typical of shepherds) she went to woods walking for many kilometers on moorlands and mountains in order to keep permanent the relationship with her brothers.


The crucial reason that justified these attitudes, unusual for a woman, consisted in reinforcing the possibilities of support and encouragement of Giacomo and Elias’s state of being in hiding, giving them from time to time munitions, food and important news. Her choice not to escape was provoked exactly by that. Therefore, she allowed the presence of a constant relationship between her fugitive brothers and the village that obeyed them out of breath. For Sa Reìna it was enough to pronounce the simple words "I will talk with Elias" for stopping the minimum allusion of opposition to her requests.


The reason of this power of a simple name, binding the other life, is recognized in the character ferocity showed by her younger brother through his own actions compared to Giacomo, not less influential and incisive, but certainly not ferocious at that level. Giacomo and the dreadful Elias, did not spare nobody, incited by the intention of dominating a territory that was considered as own for beginnings and in the perspective of rebellion to the Law of the Government, considered an invader foreigner to which not to concede its existence.

In the town of Nuoro of the end of the 1800s, there was not a place for the National legislative implementation; there was an only rule to which giving importance, totally rooted among people, despite sometimes suffered by them. The vehicle between the village and the adjacent territories where the Law of the Government, parallel, could not be applied, was the Lady of Nuoro, Sa Reìna. Her role was that concerning the demand of some tributes through money or cattle by the owners of Nuoro and of the adjacent villages, without the help of a masculine servile support.


With a strong and dominant behavior, she showed her determined will of no submission to a man also in her private life as a nubile and independent woman. She gave ostentation of that during her strolls along the boulevard in Nuoro about which the lieutenant Giulio Bechi talks in his book Caccia grossa, where he tells the random meeting with the woman "with the big shapes and with a daring face, overshadowed by the dark stars of eyes".
When she moved, someone stooped in front of her, but most of people got out of the way for allowing her the free crossing. A strong woman with a daring beauty, but, at the same time, with a haughty and intense gaze, indicating her combative speak or better called…the heart of the family (…) an accident sent by God on the Earth for a punishment of mankind!", according to the words told by the delegate to the lieutenant.


The historical events prove the arrest in 1899 during that happening called by Bechi as the "Night of San Bartolomeo". Everything happened between the fourteenth and the fifteenth of May: the whole Barbagia was put under siege. The city of Nuoro was divided in seven districts and in the strategic points handcuffs and chains were accumulated. The roundup, organized by one hundred of Carabinieres under the command of the Captain Patella, was addressed to deprive the bandits of every accomplice. More than seven hundred people were arrested, some were released immediately then; instead, other were released during the investigation.


Among the multitude, also Maria Antonia was arrested at home and also in this circumstance her haughty gaze marked the neglected face because of the amazement for the unexpected event. The same gaze, that was addressed towards the chest of her family, served as an evidence for Carabinieres for finding the refuge of the documents of the proof of accuse. In 1900 Sa Reìna, the Lady of Nuoro with the haughty gaze, the sister of the bandits known as the Senatores, was sentenced for eighteen years of prison.