Wild Romagna, from Deledda's wild boar to flamingos

(by Elisabetta Stefanelli)

In Cervia Grazia Deledda spent her long summers, the Sardinian writer did so for many years from 1920 until her death in 1937, and she often took long, solitary walks in a landscape, among pine forests and dunes, then uncontaminated where she dreamed of being a seagull. Here she certainly happened to meet many species of animals and there are over thirty short stories written by the author that have animals as protagonists, many even suggest the title. Like the moving one that has Il cinghialetto as the protagonist. But from then to today many things have changed in the landscape of the area and the spectacular thing is that if many species have disappeared, others have found a new habitat becoming the symbol of a beautiful territory that despite urbanization, maintains a habitat that is wild at times. Eraldo Baldini and Massimiliano Costa tell the story in the book 'Romagna Selvaggia, ieri e oggi' (Il ponte vecchio), which was the focus of a meeting in the latest edition of the festival dedicated to Grazia Deledda, ''Una Nobel a Cervia''. The Nobel Prize winner spent her days in the garden of Villa Caravella, which at the time overlooked the sea and which she bought in 1928. ''Certainly - says Massimiliano Bruno - the writer had the opportunity to meet an otter every now and then. Now there aren't any more, they disappeared in the Seventies. It lived in the marshes and was so widespread that people used to say 'you're dirty like an otter' because of this species' habit of playing by rolling around in the mud. Then at a certain point it was considered harmful and the campaign against its spread was so violent that it led to its total elimination''. The same fate has happened to many animals in the area over time, for example there were bears that never came back while the wolf has returned. There were pelicans and beavers, foxes, badgers and beech martens, all animals considered to be culled. The protagonist of one of her short stories is the turtledove (La morte della tortora), but it is not the collared turtledove that we see today and that only arrived in Romagna in the 1960s. It was the wild turtledove, a migrant. Then in her stories there are horses, eagles and, of course, wolves. Legend has it that in the pine forest of Cervia there were deer, from which, according to some, the town took its name. ''It is a legend that comes from afar - explains Costa - because the pine forest was home to deer until the eighteenth century. It is mentioned in a text from 1774, Istoria Civile E Naturale Delle Pinete Ravennati where there is talk of an occasional presence of deer while the fallow deer was introduced later. What is certain is that at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Deledda was here, there could not have been any. Today, however, in the forest of the Mesola nature reserve there are at least 200 deer.'' What Grazia Deledda has certainly never seen, and is now one of the major, wonderful attractions of the area, is the pink flamingo. ''The first ones arrived in the nineties, two scattered specimens were however reported in 1937 but the first real colony in the Salina di Comacchio dates back to 2017. In 2021, 10 thousand nesting couples were counted there. To date, Comacchio is the only nesting place.'' Deledda could however observe the wolf: ''the wolf is not a mountain species, it fled to the mountains to escape from the influence of humans who hunted it. Human colonization - Costa continues - pushed it towards more remote areas and here it found a balance with wild prey. Now the wolves are back, as are the wild boars and they are starting to be so numerous that they have gone from being a totally protected species to only protected. It must remain in balance, that it does not come into contact with the human species. We must not allow it to interact with us because this ruins its balance.''