Good morning team,

I'm Alex! I'm back! Thank you Saxey for the last fortnight of Fem Fridays, they were a true delight.

One of the places I was away in was Sardinia, so let's have some links about the women of this amazing island today. Linguistics fans may enjoy the note that the Sardinian language more closely resembles Latin than any other living language. For the literature fans, here's Grazia Deledda, the Nobel Laureate who had four years of primary school education and a pet crow:

At home, Deledda had a pet crow called Checcha […]. When journalists and photographers crowded the house the following day, they were astonished to find Checcha fluttering through the rooms. When the crow finally escaped the hullabaloo and flew away, Deledda asked the visitors to leave also, so that the bird would return. "If Checcha has had enough, so have I," she reportedly said as she showed her guests to the door.

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1926/deledda-article.html

Another thing to know about Sardinia is that the food there is astonishingly great. Obviously I would never tell you something banal like this unless I had something to show you around arcane, woman-only knowledge, and GUESS WHAT I DO, it's a pasta that only women know how to make, and then only three of them:

in a modest apartment in the town of Nuoro, a slight 62-year-old named Paola Abraini wakes up every day at 7 am to begin making su filindeu – the rarest pasta in the world. In fact, there are only two other women on the planet who still know how to make it: Abraini’s niece and her sister-in-law, both of whom live in this far-flung town clinging to the slopes of Monte Ortobene.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20161014-the-secret-behind-italys-rarest-pasta

Finally, in a call back to the embroidery and sewing links of three weeks ago, here's a documentary on traditional Sardinian dresses, which are embellished and changed over a lifetime and show the events of a life on them. There is video at the link as well as an interview with the director:

the dress is a code to express the condition of the woman at a particular period. The interesting thing is that, [unlike] the black of mourning, the dark red can be reversed by using natural substances to dye the wool. For example, in case they mourn the loss of a child and then become pregnant again, women might decide to bring the dress back to a light red color to express joy for the birth of a new child.

https://voices.nationalgeographic.org/2016/04/19/imagine-making-one-dress-youll-wear-every-day-for-life-short-film-showcase-filmmaker-qa/

HAPPY FRIDAY,

Alex.