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Rating: Every time I return home, from Trieste to Crotone, it takes me twenty hours. Twenty hours by train, twenty hours of dark landscape changing beyond the window.
Twenty hours of Italy beneath the tracks.
There is something similar, much less tiring, much more exciting. And it is this show by Marco Paolini, recorded at the Teatro Strehler in Milan in 2000.
Indeed, because this "Bestiario Italiano" is a journey into the history and geography of the Bel Paese, a long journey - of only two hours - that crosses all of Italy, from North to South (and the Center? We and this fixation of always finding the Center...). There is industrious Veneto and fascinating Palermo. There is scorching Catania, Naples, with its prejudices, then Genoa, "endless litany," moody and anxious Trieste.
There are roads, viaducts, bridges, junctions, railways, and ring roads that cut through Italy, unfinished works of a never-completed country.
And then the poets, the languages, the dialects. Paolini, in fact, delights passionately with words not his own. He dives into the Sicilian drone, the harshness of Friuli, the musicality of Genoese, and the vitality of Neapolitan, of course passing through his Veneto.
It's a show of captivating and crafted rhythms, this one. And it's not the words that take center stage but also the music. This time, however, there are no Mercanti di Liquore accompanying him, but a guitar, a double bass, a violin, an accordion, and three female voices. They too, in their way, tell stories, recite, suggest, lead by hand through what is not just a simple theatre show, but a serenade.
A real declaration of love for a country that, despite its variety and endless contradictions, carries centuries of experience on its shoulders and still exerts a certain charm. Even on those who live there.
Perhaps.
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