In the land of painted walls, even the most terrible of tragedies becomes an opportunity for community art.
But how to recall in the key of revival and hope sixty-eight victims, three hundred homes destroyed, the loss of huge quantities of foodstuffs, along with more than a hundred cattle and two thousand sheep? How to engrave in the visual memory a message of trust that is based on tears and blood and the rubble of more than two-thirds of the entire built-up area?
Looking to those who have always been called upon to write the future: children.
Thus was born the mural of S’Unda Manna, painted by muralist Angelo Pilloni on Monastir Street: a blue line – like the clear water that gives life and no longer brings death – traced by the joyful hand of a child, imprinting on the wall and in the collective imagination the height reached by the water on that dark, end-of-the-world night. Indeed, children are given the gift of imagining a future even when it seems that everything is destined to end. The work, created in the 1990s, underwent restoration on the occasion of the one hundred and thirty years since the calamitous event, by the same author, who included in this one the vivid detail of the two newspapers that, at the time of the events, covered the affair: L’Unione Sarda and the New York Times.
Indeed, the echo of the small Campidano municipality, made of mud and washed away by the waters of the two streams of the Riu Mannu and Flumineddu, crossed not only the Mediterranean but also the ocean: as early as October 24 the news occupied the front page of the New York Times, and then appeared closely in the Los Angeles Herald, The Morning Call, the New York Tribune, but also in the Spanish El Siglo Futuro and El Isleno, and in Australia in The Daily Northern Argus, the Leader and the ‘Rock Island Daily, passing through major newspapers in Switzerland, Germany, France, Russia and Argentina.
