…I was a fighter who was not lucky in the immediate fight, and fighters cannot and should not be pitied, when they fought not because they were forced to, but because they themselves consciously wanted to.
Antonio Gramsci
Gramsci Antonio called Nino tells fragments of the life of one of the most precious men of the twentieth century. An absolutely private life: in the background, and only in the background, the tormented relationship with the PCI and the Socialist International, the misunderstandings with Togliatti and Stalin.
And the shadow of Benito Mussolini. In the foreground instead the ferocious suffering of a man that fascism wants to break scientifically, who lives in desperate solitude, and in ten years of imprisonment, day after day, fades away in pain and in the absence of the people he loves: his wife Julka, his sons Delio and Giuliano. He saw the first when he was very young, the second he never even met. The beautiful letters to his sons were the starting point: very tender epistles to Delio and Giuliano, to whom Gramsci writes without ever mentioning the prison and his physical and mental condition, giving the best of himself as a man, parent and pedagogue. But alongside these, the letters of a son devoted to an elderly mother who waits for him in Sardinia and does not understand. Letters from a brother. From a husband.
The corpus of Antonio Gramsci’s letters to his family is a masterpiece of humanity, ethics, spiritual honesty and suffering, a novel within a novel, which opens up thoughts, doubts, mysteries that to tell in the theatre is a surprising adventure.
