Maria Carta 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. Throughout her 25-year career, she covered the richly diverse genres of traditional music of her native Sardinia, 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 as well as internationally.
Career
Maria Carta in 1957 won the Miss Sardiniabeauty contest and later participated in the national Miss Italy competition. Around 1960 she moved to Rome, where he met the screenwriter Salvatore Laurani, who later married. She attended the Centro Nazionale di Studi di Musica Popolare, directed by Diego Carpitella, at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia and at the same time she pursued a musical and ethnographic research path with important productions and collaborations. In 1971 she made two albums: Sardegna canta and Paradiso in re, and in the meantime she attended the ethnomusicologist Gavino Gabriel. The same year RAI broadcast the documentary Incontro con Maria Carta, in which Maria sings and recites with Riccardo Cucciolla. In 1972 she played at the Teatro Argentina in Rome in the Medea by Franco Enriquez. The same year she met Amália Rodrigues, with whom she held a concert at the Teatro Sistina. In 1973 the two artists made a tour in Sardinia. In 1974 she participated in Canzonissima, interpreting the traditional Sardinian Ave MariaDeus ti salvet Maria. She reached the final and was ranked second in the group of folk music with the song Amore disisperadu. In 1975 she held an important concert at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. In 1976 she served as Communal Councilwoman, on the side of the Italian Communist Party, in the city council of Rome and remained in office until 1981. In 1980 she participated in the Festival d'Avignon, in 1987 she performed in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City and in 1988 in St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco. 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, and Franco Zeffirelli, who cast her as Martha, the sister of Lazarus, in Jesus of Nazareth. 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. In 1991, the President of the Republic Francesco Cossiga named her a "Commendatore della Repubblica".
Death
Maria Carta gave her last concert in Toulouse, France, on 30 June 1994. Ill with cancer, she died at her home in Rome on 22 September 1994, aged 60.
