Blessed Antonia Mesina

Antonia Mesina was young and beautiful when she met her murderer.

Thinking about her, the daughter of an unruly and harsh land like the interior area of Sardinia, looks like the flowers that give a color to the dry stone walls, covered with climbers, or to the bushes of flowery plumbago, compared to different blood of bougainvillea.

But are purple, white and yellow colors of a climbing passion flower, the passion flower with a perfect and complex shape, that seem to resemble mainly and better to the spiritual fate of the Beatified Person of Orgosolo.


From these hues and these symbols takes life the suggestive human figure of Antonia Mesina, who draws strength and emotional intensity from the abundant nature of the countries around Orgosolo from which, as a very young victim, could take the most beautiful and the best. Limpid and clear like the sky, then she could bring back dignity to a bare and ungrateful land.

A model of humility, she obstructed the aggression of a wild land going against her torturer with bravery and will, until her sacrifice. This energy of spirit is current in the present life, an example not to be overpowered by the unfair, malevolent, easy and superficial things.

The story of “Nenetta”, is short and simple like her life. She was born in the spring of 1919, thanks to her mother Grazia and her father Agostino in Orgosolo, in the heart of Sardinia, at 620 meters of altitude, on a mountainous complex of Supramonte, composed of calcareous uplands full of cliffs, peak sides that take up the middle-east part of the Island.
Together with her there were other eight brothers, to whom she dedicated most of her life, concentrated to the chores with her mother.

Come in the Catholic Action, when she was ten years old, she was already “Favorite”. Her spirituality was represented by the “usual to be loved” and her first virtue was purity, for which she did a certain Crusade promoted by Armida Barelli (National co-pioneer of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart), following the heroic example of Maria Goretti, a mocking fate for her too, who, obviously, unaware of her future, read her biography, as proves the book that she put on her night table. The same simple and ordinary, represented by daily activities, such as picking up wood from the forests around the village.


On 17th May, this action that was as familiar as well-accepted by her, amazed her and put an end to her life falling onto pain and discouragement forever her family and the whole village. Indeed, was a young man of Orgosolo, who followed her and prepared an ambush attacking her and trying to dominate her, but without being able to. Nenetta fought with all her strength, at the cost of own martyrdom, with an unprecedented violence.

Her body, lacerated by the stones, in a lake of blood, seemed to water a land, sometimes spread with envies and severe cruelties and, despite it, releasing it from rancor and barbarity, giving herself again to her land, regenerating it in a atmosphere made of peace, humility, strength, generous nature, good bread and simple things. Exactly what Antonia Mesina loved very much in her immature life as a young girl.