Where and when
Tuesday 2 febbraio
With Donatella Allegro, Michele Dell’Utri, Simone Francia, Diana Manea, Eugenio Papalia and, to the accordion, Olimpia Greco
Reading and music within the project Carissimi Padri… Almanacchi of “Grande Pace” (1900-1915), in collaboration with Fondazione Teatro della Toscana.
Cars, airplanes and airships, moving photographs, magnificent shows and long night lights per day… the dream of the belle époque! A light time and full of enthusiasm, in which the globe was described as a single boundless garden! Once destined, it was said, to the happiness and affirmation of Western man, increasingly freed from ancient burdens and toils… once, it seemed, without deep thoughts, of reasoned reasons, prey to sleep and madness, ready to slide unconsciously into the nightmare of the Great War, which would have seen a whole generation of young Europeans throw themselves, at the first calls for total mobilization, in the tremendous adventure of the trench. The relationship with your fathers, you know, is always a complex issue. Love, fear, gratitude, hatred, sense of duty, tenderness…: Everything is mixed in a tangle difficult to extricate, from which good or bad we were born. And the fathers thus become “very dear”: the object of deep affection, but also bulky figures and in many respects “expensive”. About a hundred years ago, a violent blindness generated us – or at least drew some unmistakable features of our face.
The Great War. A handful of years of tragedy, played by characters of operetta, to celebrate, in the loss of a deep sleep, the last days of humanity. A generation of children thrown to slaughter and then… the world we live in. Promoted by the Theatre of Tuscany, the project participated Carissimi Padri… Almanacchi of “Grande Pace” (1900-1915) is a long journey, from February to the autumn of 2016, to reflect together on what led us to that distant sunset, the sunset that a little generated us. A theatrical journey, but not only, in grotesque sauce, from the dazzling lights of the Universal Exposition of 1900 to the glorious May of 1915, to finally come to terms with our “Dear Fathers” – without ever forgetting that, as Brecht writes, «tragedy, much more often than comedy, takes humanity’s sufferings lightly».
As part of the project Dear Fathers, the Museo Novecento will host between April and May two traveling shows in the exhibition halls.