The poetry festival Cabudanne de sos poetas – September of Poets is held every year on the first weekend of September in Seneghe, a small village of about 1,800 inhabitants in west-central Sardinia. It was born in 2005 from the will of a municipal administration led by Salvatore Cubeddu, the support of the Sardinian Region and in particular the President of the Council Renato Soru, the creative contribution of a number of Sardinian writers, Flavio Soriga, Luciano Marrocu, Bruno Tognolini, Paola Soriga, and the adhesion of the cultural association Perda Sonadora chaired by Mario Cubeddu since its founding in April 2000, which has been entrusted with the administrative and organizational responsibility of the event since the first year.

One year later, the Sardinian Region stabilised the contributions to literary festivals with a special support law. The event aimed to promote the reading of contemporary poetry by presenting the works of major Italian poets and those of important foreign authors to the public.

Over the years, the following have been present at Seneghe: Franco loi, Antonella Anedda, Mariangela Gualtieri, Maurizio Cucchi, Ida Vallerugo, Milo De Angelis, Patrizia Valduga, Umberto Fiori, Franco Marcoaldi, Vivian Lamarque, Laura Pugno, Valentino Zeichen, Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, Francesco Ottonello, Brunello Cucinelli, Elisa Biagini, Franco Buffoni, Silvia Brè, Roberta Dapunt, Valerio Magrelli, and many others. There was a large number of foreign poets from France, England, Spain, Holland, Switzerland, Brazil, Turkey, Kurdistan, Palestine, etc.

The festival also proposed as its basic task the support of poetic production in the Sardinian language, considered in the various places and situations of relationship with the public, from the editorial context to the improvised competition of extemporary poets, from other forms of traditional singing to the use of the Sardinian language in the most recent forms of youth music.

The Sardinian poets writing in Sardinian or Italian present at the festival were numerous: Giovanni Dettori, Franco Cocco, Anna Cristina Serra, Alberto Masala, Marcello Fois, Antoni Canu, Gianbernardo Piroddi, Bruno Tognolini, Giulio Angioni, Franco Fresi, Franciscu Carlini, Sergio Garau and others.

The artistic programme was not limited to poetry but included the participation of essayists, directors, painters, actors, singers, from Giovanni Columbu to the Echaurren-Salaris Foundation, from Bobo Rondelli to Nada, from Giovanni Lindo Ferretti to Paolo Fresu, and many others.

n 2006, a collaboration began with the Teatro delle Albe from Ravenna, which brought part of its theatrical production to the festival squares and, above all, took care of the theatre workshops that involved many young people, bringing them closer to poetry and literary production. From 21 to 25 July 2015, on the occasion of the EXPO, as part of the programming of the artistic activities of the great Milanese event, Perda Sonadora and the Cabudanne de sos poetas participated in the ‘Eresia della felicità’ project, promoted by the Teatro delle Albe with the Olinda cultural association of Milan, which saw the young people of Seneghe present with hundreds of their peers at the event held in the moat of the Sforza Castle.

The artistic direction has been taken care of over the years by most of the participants in the organisation; on several occasions, it has been entrusted to individual personalities: Flavio Soriga, Franco Loi, Mariangela Gualtieri, Roberto Magnani, only to return to collective management as of 2017.

In 2009, the Association Perda Sonadora won the EUR 14,000 prize announced by the Centre for Books and Reading in Rome, an emanation of the MIBAC, Ministry of Cultural Heritage, for the best Italian project for the dissemination of poetry carried out in 2008. Cabudanne de sos poetas was included among the six Festivals in Sardinia called to be part of the Network of Festivals open to young people promoted by the Ministry of Youth and organised by ANCI, led by the Municipality of Cagliari. Together with the municipality of Seneghe, the association organised workshops in photography, theatre, music, ceramics, writing, comics, photography in the two years in which the project was implemented, 2009 and 2010.

The tenth edition (2014) received UNESCO sponsorship.

The festival event was accompanied by a publishing activity that saw the publication of several books of poetry, one of poetry and photography and one containing the diaries read by Paolo Nori during five years of participation in the festival as well as an anthology of all the poets who had participated in the first ten editions of Cabudanne.

In 2020, the festival received the high patronage of the President of the Regional Council of Sardinia in recognition of the regional and national impact of the event.

ASSOCIAZIONE PERDA SONADORA
Via Roma, 22
09070 Seneghe (OR)
segreteriacabudanne@gmail.com
+39 3516945958