The Doomsday

Considered one of the biggest Italian jurist, for Salvatore Satta, the true fame comes through literature: indeed, we remember him above all posthumous, after death in Rome in 1970.

Fortunately, his family, tidying up his old papers, found the manuscript The Doomsday, in which the Sanna Carboni Family’s events, on a background of the city of Nuoro, throbbing of life, intersect constantly with death and its darkness.

Two elements join everybody: death, that one day will come inevitably, and the guilt of having lived.

The author’s powerful evocative conscience is expressed with a pleasant, determined and energetic prose. The plot seems to be fortuitous, but the strong emotional tension and the rhythm created by the characters, analyzed psychologically through virtuosity, scan the time of the novel.

Actually, nothing and nobody seem to have a reason of existing. It is a society of loser, lost and incapable individuals. So why is it necessary to lose yourself to this agonizing and cruel multitude of pains? “I write these pages, that nobody will read, because I hope to have a lot of clarity of mind for destroying them before my death”, says Satta. But it is his necessary and inevitable face to face with himself and his life, that he feels to be at the end.


When novel was published, two years after his death, he was ignored both by audience and by critics. But, the next edition, in 1979, proclaimed his success. The comparison with the Spoon River Anthology by E. L. Masters, gone back to the top after the treatment given by De André through his album, represents a resonance. But the truth is that the literary and human value is undeniable.


The Doomsday is translated in about twenty languages; critics approves it very well and Satta becomes a world literary case. Today, after more than forty years since the first edition, for us, this work is an extraordinary experience: a masterpiece of solitude and poetry. Nuoro; ourselves.