Felicità. Primo studio

Conceived and performed by Lucia Franchi and Luca Ricci
with Mirco Ferrara and Federica Festa/ Francesca Amati
Directed by Luca Ricci

Inspired by the autobiographies by Claudio Foschini, Massimo Bartoletti Stella, and Vincenzo Rabito preserved at the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale

(Rabito’s autobiography was published by Giulio Einaudi Editore under the titleTerra Matta)

Produced by CapoTrave

with the support of Regione Toscana, Teatro Libero di Palermo, the Province of Arezzo, the Municipality of Pieve Santo Stefano, and the Rete Teatrale Aretina.

Does a state of mind that we can call happiness truly exist — for us? It is Montale’s fear that drives us to call it by name, lest we lose sight of it amongst the houses, like children lose sight of their balls. Then there are the dreams we have every night, the memories that resemble dreams, our desires: Luca imagining Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto transformed into a “Madonna of Diaries”; Lucia’s peasant grandparents; Mirco and his karate fighter’s struggle against a reality he cannot change.

And finally, there are the stories preserved in the Archivio Diaristico Nazionale. Over ten years we have read nearly four thousand people’s lives. Together, side by side, they form a richness we feel compelled to tell: certain autobiographical chronicles reveal how happiness is both attained and lost. What remains are fragments.

We chose three stories:

a break-in thief, from the suburbs of Rome, to whom the cars on the motorway to Naples restore a sense of lost freedom; a Sicilian farmer fighting in the First World War, who laughs whenever he has “food and whores”; a teenager from Romagna who, hidden in the darkness of a parish cinema, clasps in his own the hands of “a red-haired little girl.”

The performance won First Prize in the Young Artists Selection promoted by Teatro Libero di Palermo, the Sicilian Theatre of Innovation.

Premiere: Palermo, Teatro Libero di Palermo, November 25, 2003

“A lively and delightful hymn to life (…) capable of conveying the multiplicity of reflections and facets that separate the tangible natural world from the supposed and desirable ‘realm of grace.’

— Christian Chiaruzzi, Giornale di Sicilia, 27 November 2003

“Remarkable is the ability to create an incessant and varied stage movement, to invent a non-existent set design that lives and pulses through simple objects used with flair and imagination: from the coffee pot dangling over a makeshift fire to model cars, from shoeboxes to a plastic globe, from skipping ropes recalling the mythical leaps of lost childhood to bare chairs on which nascent dreams of love are laid.”

— Agata Motta, La Sicilia, 29 November 2003