By Luigi Mattiello on https://www.facebook.com/LibriESogniIncisoSuUnGranelloDiSabbia
This is Ovidio Marras.
They told him look Ovidio we will pay you by the pound for your land.
We will build five-star hotels in Tuerredda with luxurious suites for rich people, we will make a new PortoCervo, you name the price and we will give it to you. But Ovidio, a Sardinian shepherd, almost 90 years old and proud, replied that he has never gone to Porto Cervo, and to tell the truth he doesn’t even know where it is.
He added: look, I’m not selling, this is my father’s land and my father’s father’s land and I’m keeping it and you around here have no right to build.
Ovidio sued, alone, against real estate mega-groups represented by throngs of lawyers. They mocked him as a moth-eaten old fool who had set himself against powers that were too strong, against those who wanted to lay a 910,000-square-metre concrete slab, more or less the size of a ten-storey building, on one of Sardinia’s most beautiful and uncontaminated corners.
Instead, Ovidio won.
He won, alone, and definitively He won at the Court of Cassation.
They will not be able to build, and what has already been built will have to be pulled down.
His land is safe, it is the land from where his father left every day with the cattle for the pasture, in the sun, under the proud, pure wind, and returned in the evening, for a piece of cheese and a piece of bread.
I would say that with Ovidio he won a certain precious idea of dignity, even – you think – more precious than money.
Text and photos by: Massimiliano Smeriglio
An Extraordinary And Ordinary Life 