Bachisio is a simple man, strongly tied to his land. Together with his wife and son, like many other farmers, he is fighting against a large company, “Bentulare”, which has purchased enormous plots of land throughout Sardinia to cultivate them intensively. His son, Michelangelo, a graduate in agriculture, has been trying for years to combine the ancient agricultural knowledge of his grandparents with scientific research and productivity, in a...

“What happens in our lives, what must happen, for something of what we experience – a meeting, a book, a journey, a show – to touch us so deeply that it leaves a mark and becomes part of us?” With this question my meeting with 480 students began, in a beautiful theater in Emilia Romagna. The question surprised them. They were expecting a lesson on the First World War in the theater, not a journey around the world and life. From the banks ...

“I'm afraid. I'm ashamed to say it. Don't say it, but, I would be more ashamed. I'm afraid because I have hope. Because, absurdly, I feel I have still something to lose.” The text of this monologue comes from the novel by Maurizio Torchio, Cattivi, published by Einaudi in 2015. The author's second novel, its protagonist is a prisoner sentenced to life imprisonment and "forgotten" in the isolation cell of an island prison. A tense and ...

According to ICOM (International Council of Museums) the 5 functions of a museum are: research, acquisition, conservation, communication, exhibition. What could a Pier Paolo Pasolini museum be like? In a display case we could put his first poem: of those verses the memory of two words remains “rosignolo” and “verzura”. It is 1929. While Mussolini signs the Lateran Pacts, Antonio Gramsci gets pen and paper and begins to write the Quadren...

A personal story, like those that happen on the train, in line at the post office, in a waiting room... whenever someone wants to listen and finds themselves discovering how different the lives of others are from ours, and how similar to ours are the emotions, needs and instincts that guide them. We imagined a symbolic event, for a few spectators at a time because to tell your life you need the intimacy that cancels distances. Mamadou is a young...

Reading Shakespeare one comes across a reality made of contrasts: the high and the low, the lofty and the vulgar, the comic and the tragic. In perhaps his darkest tragedy, King Lear (written, among other things, precisely in the wake of a plague epidemic that had closed London theaters for a year), Shakespeare takes away from the spectator every certainty, every fixed point. The king talks to his fool and it is not clear which of the two is the ...

In mezzo al mare, performed by Valerio Aprea, is the first monologue written by Mattia Torre, in 2003. In 2012 it was included by Dalai Editore in the homonymous collection of the main monologues that Torre wrote thereafter, expanded in 2019 by Mondadori and in audiobook by Emons Edizioni. Three of these, Colpa di un altro, Yes i can and Gola, as well as an excerpt from In mezzo al mare, are proposed by Aprea himself in a ruthless and hilarious...

“Kon-Tiki” literally means “Sun God”. Kon-Tiki is the name of the raft built in the spring of 1947 by the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, who set out from the coast of Peru determined to reach the islands of French Polynesia by sea. Without oars, without an engine, using only the sea current, the trade winds and good luck: 101 days on the open sea together with a parrot and five traveling companions who had never sailed before. Thor se...

“And if a God makes me shipwreck on the wine-dark sea, I will know how to bear it, because I have a patient soul in my chest: I have suffered so many misfortunes and endured so many among the waves and in war: let this one also be with them.” “Odyssey” by Homer from the nymph Calypso to the meeting with the young Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous. The departure, the farewell to immortality, the storm and the landing on the island of th...

“What you have to prove in criminal trials like this is that what happened was absolutely real.” Interview with P.F., magistrate, 29 Oct 2019   «Unfortunately my father himself was a pervert and caused the hysteria of my brother (all the symptoms of which are identifications) and of one of my younger sisters». Sigmund Freud, Letter to W. Fleiss, 8 Feb 1897   “I told her, 'You have to tell me what he did to you, tell me!' ...

In rural environments, as in urban ones, the war event profoundly changes the relationships between men and women, between parents and children; in particular, the relationships of dependence are altered, redefining responsibilities and roles for the satisfaction of new needs. The young Alba, born in Elva, in the mountains of Val Maira, experiences the First World War as a teenager. Now a woman, she leaves the mountains to realize her dream of b...

Dear guys, I would like to give you a greeting and a wish: that you may live in a better world, in what is called the global village, that it is truly global, where there are no more divisions of race, nationality, religion, where we are all truly brothers, all made of the same DNA, for a world at peace, for a world that loves science and that with science tries to improve everyone's life. Best wishes! Margherita Hack “The Soul of the Earth S...