Museo Deleddiano

Grazia Deledda was born in this Nuoro townhouse in 1871 and lived here until her marriage in 1900. Ten rooms across three floors now trace her path from Nuoro to Rome and the 1926 Nobel Prize, using her own manuscripts, photographs and personal objects.

Why it matters

This is the birthplace of Grazia Deledda, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926. The house stands in the Santu Pedru quarter, which together with Seuna forms the oldest part of Nuoro. The municipality repurchased the property in 1968 and entrusted it to the Istituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico, which opened the museum on 5 March 1983. The institute, known as ISRE, still runs it, and the core of the collection came from the Madesani-Deledda family — above all Fernanda, the writer's daughter-in-law — in the form of manuscripts, photographs, documents and personal objects transferred from Rome.

What to notice

The museum occupies ten rooms across three floors, linked by a central staircase, with a courtyard and garden shaded by old oaks. Lower rooms reconstruct the domestic world of Deledda's childhood; the kitchen and pantry were furnished following the descriptions in her autobiographical novel "Cosima", down to the scents of stored foods. A first-floor room is devoted to the Nuoro season that contemporaries called the Athens of Sardinia, with the painter Francesco Ciusa and the poet Sebastiano Satta among its protagonists. On the top floor is her bedroom. Among the documents, the original Nobel diploma and medal from the award to Deledda are on display, and texts and images follow her from the Barbagia of her youth to her Roman years.

Context and history

The building is a three-storey residence of a well-off Nuoro family, put up in the second half of the nineteenth century. Deledda lived here until her marriage in 1900, moved to Rome the following year and rarely returned; the house was sold in 1913. Declared a national monument, it was bought back by the Comune di Nuoro in 1968 and transferred to ISRE in 1979. The museum opened in 1983 with the family's donation, closed in 1997 for restoration and reopened in 2000 with a new layout, refined again in 2006. The present display follows both the writer's difficult bond with her hometown and her personal and literary life after the move to Rome.