Bread in the food tradition of Sardinia.
The subject of this research proposal is the role of bread in Sardinian food traditions which, despite having undergone complex transformation events, due to phenomena of innovation, abandonment, syncretism and revival, within a historical movement made up of accelerations and stagnations, still reveal a strong cultural conservatism, which reaches its maximum expression in the art of figurative and ornamental modeling of bread
The specialization in traditional bread-making, which is a widespread phenomenon far beyond the Mediterranean area, in Sardinia reaches peaks of excellence in terms of quality and quantity through a frequency, an abundance of different breads and variants, as well as a still surprising vitality, which it permeates every point of the island and every occasion: solemn or festive, calendar and daily, not found elsewhere.
The figurative modeling of bread, an exclusively female specialization in Sardinia, certainly reveals very marked similarities and contiguities with other Mediterranean realities, with which it shares a common substratum of myths, symbols, cultural permanence to which the plastic art of bread seems to be traceable.
To the point of hypothesizing the existence of a koinè of some types and forms of bread that have a strong affinity with breads from the African coast, the Middle East and even from the Caucasian area.
It is this segment of the food tradition that we intend to analyze from a perspective that extends from the material function to the still present sign function.
