Inaugurated in June 1995, the Nivola Museum lies to the south-east of Orani. The site, devised by the architects Umberto Floris and Peter Chermayeff, is located on the "Su Cantaru" hill opposite the village, offering a splendid view all around. It currently has three sections: the outside area, the large area indoors of the former public wash-house and the offices.

The works on show there chart the key stages in the artistic development of Costantino Nivola and the lifelong relationship he maintained with his native land, demonstrating him to be one of the most original and creative sculptors of our age.

Ugo Collu, President of the "Costantino Nivola Foundation", introduces Nivola on the museum website as follows:

"The name of Costantino Nivola belongs alongside the many outstanding figures born in Nuoro and the Barbagia region: Francesco Ciusa, Antonio Ballero, Mario Delitala, Sebastiano Satta, Grazia Deledda, Salvatore Satta and Salvatore Cambosu, to mention but a few. Moreover, it stands there with particular merit: his humble origins and quiet life serve to bring out his artistic gifts and total dedication, yet at the same time his work bears no trace of provincialism or localism, actively welcoming and exalting forms and meanings which consider man's global nature. Those who knew him realised that he was a simple and shy man, rather quiet, a little coarse - his blunt and decisive expressions seeming to well up from an inner silence and absorbed meditation. However, he was capable equally of sublime outbursts and thoughtful interiority. Natural and visionary, at times he was impetuous and instinctive. A little diffident towards adults, he loved children and would gladly have remained a child. This is difficult to understand unless one is familiar with his homeland, which almost entirely accounts for his character and work.

Nivola's childhood was poor, in a small village of the Barbagia region. His father wanted him to follow his examole and become a builder, but the young boy liked drawing, and was not easily satisfied. For the Nivola family, even the purchase of a drawing book was a luxury. For this reason Costantino painted wherever he could: on stones, in the street, on the steps of his house, on walls. All around nature stood, undefiled: granite rocks, pink earth and talcum. The family life of Nivola is the key to understanding his work. Everything stems from his infancy and his childhood vision of nature and the surroundings. The bread-making ritual is a good example of this: for Costantino's pleasure, his mother would bake bread, filling the house with its sweet smell. In Sardinia, the bread made for a festivity is wrapped up extremely elegantly, assuming an almost religious significance - a real work of art. With their friends from the neighbourhood our women begin this operation at dawn, designing spontaneous latticework patterns on it.

Many of us saw Costantino Nivola work clay with the same gestures his mother used to model the bread for the feast. Almost mythical, exemplary gestures, to be repeated in the most solemn moments, to adorn and animate life. Nivola's Terracottas are the result of those ancestral gestures: both "Beds" and "Beaches". The bed considered as a cradle of rest, a defence from weary toil in the parched countryside and at the same time the theatre of man's most intense emotions: love, solitude, dreams. The bed as a place of reflection and hope. In "The Beds", therefore, the whole range of these feelings is explored: from the barely noticeable, almost swallowed up figures, to those who stand out unambiguously, seduced, on their knees, thoughtful, or perhaps intent on loving, as sensuality triumphs.

"Beaches" also derived from these maternal geatures. Costantino moulded the figures without looking, preferring to speak or sing to himself, as if repeating a familiar gesture, connatural to his being. In these panels, significantly, the beaches are always deserted. People are only visible in the water, small dots shrouded by the sea. On land, the sand is pure and unchanging. This was Nivola's childhood sea. Nothing but the triumph of nature. Yet the last beaches are different: Here the sea almost disappears.

  In the foreground a tangled and disturbing crowd, on the beach only naked bodies obsessively covering a nature which no longer exists.

Nivola did not hide his painful disillusionment with that lost world, which he now considered his ex-nature. Bodies on the beach like several levels of piled-up cars in the streets: this was no longer humanity. Everything in Nuvola goes back to his infancy.

His wife Ruth recounts how he developed what later became the technique of sand-casting instinctively. Playing with his children on the beaches of Long Island he enjoyed leaving firm footprints in the sand and then filling them in with cement. By the same technique he produced the magnificent panels which now decorate the long corridor at Harvard University. An utterly original and clearly not chance technique. Here the childhood experiences of helping his father, an almost religious desire to sublimate his father's "builder" status and a natural, playful spirit, which he never lost, all merge - ingredients of an infancy which he always kept inside.

Above all, however, Nivola devotes special attention to women, his mother in particular, turning them into the absolute form, pure idea. Woman is law and government, she is the secret of life. Man, on the other hand, is many-sided and complex, because he lacks this original virtue. To express this tortuosity Nivola turns to cubism. To represent his mother, on the other hand, he uses shapes so rarefied that they border on the metaphysical. Her materiality is quasi-sublimated: all that remain are the fertilised womb, breasts and that reassuring embrace by which she opens her entire being. She is a warm welcome, protection and liberation: she is the wings for the flight of her children and a nest for their return. She is the one, the simple, the origin. Only a single term is left to describe her: superhuman. And superhuman is the vision that she represents. A leaden substance that becomes a host of light. She is his mother, the archetype of the Mediterranean Mother and the mother of all .
Few up till now have paid any real attention to the extreme dedication of Nivola to his artwork. Life circumstances, which forced him to move around continuously, made him a citizen without home, a stranger even at home. In compensation, however, his mind was opened to the idea of a full and universal human family. The reduction of humanity to one with the architypal figure of the Magna Mater demands a single race, the human, and the breaking down of ideological and geographical barriers. The objective is a universal brotherhood, sustained by the unconscious masses and the rich patrimony of interior resources present in Mediterranean tradition, a lay religiosity beyond dogmas and differences of faith. Nivola thought of the world as a big community, whose ideal form would be: solidarity, participation and peace. For this reason, he showed increasing annoyance towards progress which continually lost sight of the centrality of the person.

Technology, once slave, is now master, with cities a prey to noise and congested by cars to the point that they banish man. Nivola's last works on New York evidence the seriousness of this loss of centrality: skyscrapers side by side form deep, narrow voids and inside a mass of cars, buses and trams tangle in an accumulation of cold and shapeless material. It seems like the chaos before the evolution of the world: completely random. The fruit of a civilisation governed simply by doing to the impoverishment of being. To bring man back to his centre: the masterly elements of this cry are found in Nivola's utterly original town squares.


The finest example of this is the square which Nuoro council dedicated to its most famous poet, Sebastiano Satta. It is a space-oasis breathed into the confusion of a city suffocated, like every city, by noise and traffic. A critical and innovative architectural space. The granite blocks rise up from the ground, drawing out irregular meeting places; they seem to repeat an ancient, obsolete liturgy of conversation and solidarity. These monoliths recall ancestral times, divinities, people of strength, wisdom. The extraordinary effect of this piazza is found undoubtedly in the perfect integration with the tones of the surrounding landscape: raising one's eyes to the distant mountains the granite scene is continued with great stylistic efficiency.

But the deeper and almost ascetical message contained in the design encourages one to think of another way of living: the piazza is a place symbolic of contrast, oriented towards a community way of living in the city. In the same spirit, Nuvoli published the plan of urban renewal for Orani in the magazine "Interiors" in 1953. "Orani pergola" - as the plan was named - was at the time only an imaginative idea based on the values he continued to hold and spread. The pergola as an extension of the house and quiet meeting-place: a means to rebuild neighbourhoods, a place to listen to community discussions and sweeten the bitterness of dispute. Here, nature and culture meet on equal terms. Nivola seems to realise this connection with ease, because of his radical choice. His entire theory of aesthetics is subject to an environmental ethic. Thus, nature is not what man has, but what he is. It does not belong to us, we belong to it, as on the lap of the Great Mother.


For Nivola, then, nature is sacred; it is the true source of art. From it come the nourishment of intuition and the simple and real materials of an ontologically resistent art.
In this sense Nivola is an antimodern, a survivor of the animistic renaissance, who professes the inseparability of subject and object, welcoming its essence and truth only in its entirety. To accept one's own singularity in the face of a wider humanity is difficult in our times, so preoccupied with localism or universalism. The ideal way to mature intellectually still existed a few decades ago, moving in concentric circles from one's experience of home in the village towards an awareness of the interior unity of humanity. Electrical and telecommunication, eliminating spatial distances and contracting the planet, has almost reversed this process. The first thing we are aware of today is an almost infinite space which, only in the most reflective, is made to bear some relation to one's upbringing and current enviromnent, both of which influence us unconsciously. Without this exchange between living and being one cannot speak of personal, intellectual and artistic identity, an interpenetration which Nivola managed in exemplary fashion.

The cultural nourishment he received in childhood continues to sustain Nivola throughout his career. In some ways, one could say that his art speaks Sardinian. The ethical references, the resonances and intonations of his poetry are Sardinian or at least recognisably Mediterranean, thus including Sardinian civilisation. A generous smattering of simple, material and spiritual values, whose rejection is the cause of the moral crisis of our time. These are proposed by Nivola as both an ancestral memory and as a catalyst for universal healing.
For Nivola, this is a real plan for the future. The return to work and tiredness, the image of Eros and suffering in its multiple forms, the bringing together of

human divine powers (mother, family, professions), the promotion of simple, healthy materials (sand, clay, cement, bronze, wood...): these are the tools for the reorientation of man.

In this way, Costantino Nivola is simultaneously both eternal son of Orani and of the entire world, a man firm in his roots and, thus, capable of openness and global availability. Art is freedom, but must also be something good. On several occasions Nivola repeated that his intention, especially for his public works, was to transmit joy and positivity. He felt, therefore, a duty and a responsibility towards his contemporaries, he heard a little voice inside speak to him of limitation, encouraging him to open up to new experiences.

Beauty and Good must not be separated. If, then, we dwell a little longer on Nuvoli's work, we find a kind of blatant visual philosophy. A universe of fundamental principles and meanings offered as framework for the renewal of humanity, a wonder-pill of principles against the diseases of individualism, technologism, prejudice, consumerism and nihilistic relativism, all the consequences of late capitalism.

A Sardinian mother and the hope of the marvellous son - represented by a protrusion on a smooth lap to indicate the urgency of that which must happen- is flavoured with luminous symbolism: we can look with optimism to the futrure of humanity, only provided that we perceive the labour pangs and push hard to ensure its full maturation. This step requires courage and intelligence. Nivola has left us many pointers on how to get there: whether we arrive or not depends on good will."