Dediche alla Città di Napoli

Un progetto by Marco Balsamo

A cura by Patrizia Bologna

directed by Fabrizio Arcuri

assistant director Paola Rota

interpreti

Sergio Rubini, Mimmo Borrelli, Peppe Lanzetta, Ascanio Celestini, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Valeria Solarino, Isabella Ragonese, Laura Morante, Marco Baliani, Antonella Stefanucci, Michele Placido

testi by

Benedetto Croce, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pino Daniele, Mimmo Borrelli, Peppe Lanzetta, Ascanio Celestini, Erri De Luca, Anna Maria Ortese, Fausto Paravidino, Henry James, Marco Baliani, Montesquieu, Stendhal, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Walter Benjamin, Elena Ferrante, Antonella Cilento, Raffaele La Capria. Great stage and screen actors perform in a cycle of readings, directed by Fabrizio Arcuri, that the Napoli Teatro Festival Italia 2015 dedicates to Naples. The project's setting is the terrace of Castel Sant'Elmo, the monumental complex overlooking the whole city, with a breathtaking view of the gulf and its islands. Naples has always been an exceptional destination for artists and intellectuals who immortalised it in their writing. Goethe, for example, wrote: «Whatever is said, told or painted, Naples surpasses it all: the shore, the bay, the gulf, Vesuvius, the city, the surrounding countryside, the castles, the promenades… I forgive all those who lose their senses at the sight of Naples!» Remembering Goethe and his Italian Journey, some authors (Ascanio Celestini, Marco Baliani, Mimmo Borrelli, Peppe Lanzetta) were asked to write an original, unpublished love letter to Naples. Other texts were chosen from past literature, selecting pages able to convey the city's atmosphere. Eleven performers give voice to these confessions, accompanied by live music, composing a mosaic of twenty-two evenings at sunset, between present and past, new authors and great masterpieces.

«Dediche alla città di Napoli is a kind of daily prologue to the Festival, a way of entering the folds of a city rich in resources, to celebrate its vitality and history, to find vanishing points and new perspectives.

Unpublished texts and classic tales gathered together offer us a prism: a Naples full of contradictions and humanity, many layers coexisting and intertwining in a succession of emotions, images, true and invented stories, legends and reality.

The enchanted gaze of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary traveller alternates with the lucid historical vision of the twentieth-century philosopher, echoing in the prose of contemporary authors, Neapolitan and not, to create these postcards which together try to convey, in a mosaic, an overall view in all its complexity – a gaze that is constantly both centrifugal and centripetal.

Our Virgils will be the voices of great performers, alternating with the more personal voices of the authors themselves, which together with live music will be the brushstrokes of these watercolours at sunset.

It will be a chance to discover and explore the roots and nature of some of the stereotypes attached to Neapolitan culture and, at the same time, in the more contemporary writings, new starting points that trace those same roots in order to strip away the clichés and reveal new trajectories.»

Fabrizio Arcuri