Giovannin Without Fear

Musical reading from the “Italian Fairy Tales” by Italo Calvino

Stefano Fresi

Lucia Mascino

Massimo Mercelli, flute; Maria Cecilia Berioli, cello

Giacomo Vezzani, live electronics

Selection and choice of texts Lucia Mascino
Sound Dramaturgy Giacomo Vezzani

For the 100th anniversary of Italo Calvino’s birth (1923 – 2023), it was planned to bring some of the writer’s celebrated “Italian Fairy Tales” to the stage.

In the late 1950s Giulio Einaudi entrusted Calvino with a crazy undertaking: to bring back from dialect into his imaginative Italian some of Italy’s most beautiful regional fairy tales from the Alps to Sicily. Calvino threw himself enthusiastically into that project, and the work understandably became a must-have in twentieth-century Italian literature, for children but not only. In fact, they are iconic stories that are ageless, with unchanging appeal, directed to young and old alike.

Of the more than two hundred fairy tales that Calvin transcribed, a selection has been made, which gives evidence of the richness and emotional power of this rich folk heritage, from north to south.
Two of Italy’s best-loved actors, Stefano Fresi and Lucia Mascino, have been chosen to play these little masterpieces as the main characters in the narrated fairy tales. They took an active part in the production of the event, collaborating with the artistic direction from the conception stage to the executive production stage of the show.

The musical dramaturgy that will accompany the narrative journey is created ad hoc as an interaction to the text, on the emotional dynamics of the individual tales. It will be a mix of applied music (live electronics) and live music, and is an original work by Giacomo Vezzani, one of our most highly regarded authors of music for theater in Italy and abroad.

• Reduced single seat – 16€
• Single full seat – 20€