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I Shardana is set in a free Sardinia, an island where rigorous rules are in force and it's people do not tolerate invasions or spiritual contamination, a time when - as Ennio Porrino (b. 1910) specifies in the score - shepherds were warriors and judges, "when man did not believe in one God but in the power of the stars, and worshipped the dead and the waters". The opera's first drafts date from 1934-35, but the work only debuted years later, on 21st March 1959, at the San Carlo theatre in Naples, with it's final title of I Shardana and Porrino himself conducting. The composer would die suddenly a few months later.