| Additional information: |
Non Potho Reposare I cannot rest …t’assicuro ch’a tie solu bramo… I assure you that I desire only you Canto della nostalgia. Nostalgic hymn. Non potho reposare, amore e coro I cannot rest, love of my heart, Pessande a tie soe donzi momentu. I am here thinking of you every moment. Non Potho Reposare is a melody composed by Giuseppe Rachel in 1921, on a poem, a declaration of love in the vernacular of Barbagia (a district in the centre of Sardinia), by Salvatore Sini, a poet and a lawyer from Sarule, a little village on the massif of Gennargentu. Although it is apparently simple music for simple people, it progressively acquires pathos and intrinsic content of new and profound character. In the early 1950’s, the poverty of the Sardinian people led to massive emigration, in search of a better life. Sardinia became, therefore, a reservoir of workers for menial tasks in the industrialised European countries. Particularly the coal-mines in Belgium, Holland and Germany gave the emigrants an opportunity for survival but, in addition, also a condition of frugality which they cheerfully bore. Under these conditions nostalgia assumes a yearning disposition: the land of origin becomes the beloved woman and a love song changes into a song of suffering and of hope at the same time. Non Potho Reposare represents the immensely strong feelings of belonging, ‘the Sardinia-sickness’, historically rooted in the soul of the Sardinians, and which comes out of the beauty and the peculiarity of their land and of their own deep feelings of loneliness, as well. This also applies to those Sardinians who never experienced emigration.
|
