Maria Carta

Maria Carta (24 June 1934 – 22 September 1994) was an Italian folk music singer-songwriter. She also performed in film and theatre and, in 1975, she wrote a book of poetry, Canto rituale (Ritual Song).

She was born in Siligo, Sassari, Sardinia.

Throughout her 25-year career, she covered the richly diverse genres of traditional music of her native Sardinia (Cantu a chiterra, ninne nanne—children's lullabies, gosos, Gregorian chants, and more), often updating them with a modern and personal touch. She succeeded in bringing Sardinian folk music into wider popular awareness, in demonstrations at a national level in Italy (like the Canzonissima in 1974) as well as internationally (especially in France and the United States).

She caught the attention of such directors as Francis Ford Coppola, who gave her the first two of her widely seen film roles as the mother of Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II (1974), and Franco Zeffirelli, who cast her as Martha, the sister of Lazarus, in Jesus of Nazareth (1977). Carta lived in Rome for many years and she served as Communal Councilwoman from 1976 to 1981 on the side of the Italian Communist Party.

In 1985, she was awarded, as songwriter, the Targa Tenco for dialectal/regional music. In the last years of her life, Maria Carta gave her time to the University of Bologna where she conducted a series of classes and advised student theses on which she had relevant personal, human experience and scholarly background.

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