3 minute read
out of place HOLIDAYS
The magic of cinema is undeniable but there’s another one that’s even older and unique each time: it’s the theatre.
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Italy is the cradle of the modern theatre: actually the Western theatre was born in Greece around 25 centuries ago but the modern theatre was born in our country between 1700 and 1800. It’s the horseshoe-shaped theatre, the stalls, the balconies divided according to their order and the perspective backstage. We don’t intend to talk about the posters, the festivals or the big theatres but we just intend to highlight some details that can be considered a good reason to discover our villages. So let’s start with a peculiar thing: the pocket theatres! One of these theatres is located in Barlassina, in the province of Monza-Brianza, it’s the Antonio Belloni Theatre, 98 seats dedicated to the opera and the classical music. It was an important furniture factory in the past that belonged to the Belloni family and it’s a theatre nowadays that offers a very interesting programme. Another famous theatre is the little one of Vetriano, a tiny village on the hills near Lucca that deserves a visit. It was built at the end of the 20th century then it was acquired by the FAI (Italian Environmental Fund) in 1997. It’s around 71 metres wide and it contains 60 seats and it was entered into the list of the Guinness Book of records as the smallest historical theatre in the world. The theatre of Concordia of Monte Castello from Vibio is really tiny too, it’s in the province of Perugia, in a village that deserves being discovered by strolling around its streets sided by beautiful stone houses. It was inaugurated in 1808, it keeps all the features of the theatre of Goldoni, it’s a perfect precious miniature that was reopened in 1993 after a careful restauration.
Another Italian tradition is the theatre of puppets: Alcamo is a village in the province of Trapani that keeps ancient Arabic origins and you can see the puppets on show inside the castle of the Earls of Modica, a Medieval castle featured by an interesting architecture and history (it was a prison in the 19th century). In Caltagirone (Catania), famous for its wonderful staircase of Santa Maria del Monte (142 steps of painted pottery tiles) there is the Museum of the Sicilian Puppet Theatre where you can see the room where the shows are held, a collection of more than seventy wooden puppets dressed in precious silk, velvet, brocade clothes and handcrafted metal armours. The stage is equipped with some hand-painted wall paper: one thing is sure, not only kids will be captured by the heroic deeds of these chivalric epics.
Who loves and knows the magic of the theatre also knows that you don’t need a theatre to “do theatre”: just think of the street theatre, of the shows in unusual or natural spaces. In this regard let’s remind the Theatre of Silence, a non-theatre in the open air that exploits the shape of the hills near Lajatico, the Tuscan village in the province of Pisa where Andrea Bocelli, the creator of the initiative was born. Every year a stage and the stalls are put on (there are around 8thousand seats) and only one show is held then the place gets back to its silence from which it takes its name. Just one tip: book much in advance since the tickets sell like hot cakes! Lastly, here are the ghosts! They are not just the protagonists of the plays and the performances (who hasn’t seen, at least once, the “Canterville Ghost”?), they are spooky. Among the several legends related to the stage ghosts, we can tell you one story related to a village: the village is Tortolì (Nuoro) where the S. Francesco theatre is set, it was built in the place of a church (never consecrated) where it seems that the ghost of a monk materializes from time to time, haunted by the guilt after having killed a girl with his confreres and buried her in the walls of the monastery. And if you are there but you don’t like the supernatural don’t miss a visit at the Nuraghe di S’Ortali ‘e Su Monti, a beautiful archaeological site you can visit with the local guides and enjoy the beach of Cea in Summer at Bari Sardo, famous because of its red granite cliffs that pop up from the water.
