Bianca Pitzorno and her “favourite place”

For me, it’s the dark, damp streets of the Castello district in Cagliari, but everyone has their own favourite places and it’s right to preserve them – or at least to try to do so. This is the inspiration behind the FAI’s initiative, Italian Environment Fund (FAI), ‘I Luoghi del Cuore’, where anyone can vote and nominate, until 15 December on www.iluoghidelcuore.it, the most beloved places in Italia that deserve a future.

The writer Bianca Pitzorno, too, has chosen a place in her beloved native Sardinia – Sassari, Stintino and, above all, the Sardinian countryside with its so-called ‘blue of the distance’ – as well as her adopted home of Milan, reflecting on just how much they have changed over time. She recounts this herself in *i* *I luoghi che leggiamo* , the first video podcast exploring the places dear to writers’ hearts, produced by the FAI.

“There are several places that I hold dear to my heart but which are no longer what they used to be. When I was a child, going to Stintino – where I could walk barefoot and go to bed with a candle on my bedside table – was like going to paradise for me. Nowadays, when I go to Stintino – which has become a trendy resort, a sort of ‘Costa Smeralda for the less well-off’ – I can’t say it’s a place close to my heart. I think this happens to everyone over the age of 80; the world has changed so much that the places close to our hearts have remained only in our memories.”

Today, however, he rediscovers that magic in the Sardinian countryside, “which has this blue of the distant horizon, horizons that stretch off into the distance, where we do not know who is there or who lives there; this sense of losing oneself in a gentle yet somehow mysterious landscape”.

A few words must also be said about my hometown, Sassari: “I’ve been away from Sassari for over 50 years; I rarely go back, and I have few relatives left there… Sassari has changed for the worse; it used to be called ‘the drawing room of Sardinia’, and we’ve had two Presidents of the Republic… Sassari was a small, middle-class but which also had its own farming community, because, unlike the rest of Sardinia where the countryside was vast and farmers lived out in the countryside, in Sassari the farmers had small vegetable gardens just outside the city walls and every evening they would return to sleep in the city; they were part of the local community. (…) The historic part they’re restoring now had a certain charm. We have a beautiful Baroque cathedral, for example, St Nicholas, which is richly decorated, and many other churches, including the little country churches that surrounded the city. There are still some beautiful portals made of carved tuff stone that used to provide access to the countryside.”