Simone Cristicchi's "Warehouse 18" moves and conquers the audience of the Bellini Theater, telling the pages of a forgotten story that comes back to life thanks to its "musical-civil"
Many applauses and a well deserved standing ovation for Simone Cristicchi, which led to the Bellini Theater of Naples his "musical-civil" 18 warehouse inspired by one of the most painful and forgotten pages in the history of Italy.
A show that sees Cristicchi singer, narrator, teacher and evocator of what Italians have too easily forgotten and made to forget. Because unfortunately in Italy still many (too many) know that 70 years ago our country lost some territories with the peace treaty of 1947, after the defeat of the Second World War. This is theIstria and of the coastal strip to the east, of cities like Pula, Rijeka, Rovigo, Zadar and Dalmatia. All very Italian places, which were handed over to Tito's Yugoslavia, which at that time began its communist dictatorship, between attacks and acts of gratuitous violence against those who had always lived in those lands, in those houses, and who from one day to the others have been identified with the fascists, to be killed, to be killed, to be chased away forever.
From 1 January 1947 and until March of the same year, thousands and thousands of Italians (there are at least 350 thousand of them) decided to surrender to Tito's totalitarianism, and choose the exodus, the risk of emigrating from their native lands, to reach the homeland beyond the Adriatic, and hope for a better future. They brought everything with them, furniture, chairs, wardrobes, beds, mattresses, objects of all kinds, including notebooks, books, shop signs, clothes, accessories, dishes, photographs, toys. Everything that the exiles hoped to be able to use in new spaces to live and which was shipped to Old Port of Trieste, where they would go to recover them once they have stabilized in Italy. Instead, even today, the 18 Warehouse of the Old Port, guards thousands of objects, the content of lost and forgotten lives, becoming a place of memory of those who, due to the unfortunate randomness of history, "People swept away by the hurricane of fate", he found himself a stranger in his own land.
they called us "fascists", we were only Italians,
Italians forgotten in some corner of memory,
like a page torn from the great book of history ...Ah… how do you do it? To die of melancholy for a life that is no longer mine,
what harm does it hurt, if I still look for my heart on the other side of the sea ...
Simone Cristicchi he tells, explains, transmits, illustrates, through simple words, involving musical pieces composed ad hoc for the show, through period photographs, news footage, and interprets. Now he is the archivist Persichetti, an official of the Roman ministry (emblem of the indifferent and disinterested average Italian), in charge of making an inventory of the objects in Warehouse 18 and who, as happens with the matryoshkas, manages to compose the story of the Istrian exodus from the origins; now he is one of the voices of those who did not make it and was forcefully dragged by the Slavic partisans into the sinkholes, of those who the 18 of 1946 August were on Vergarolla beach, in Pula, when suddenly explosions of warfare that killed and injured hundreds of people. "One of the most serious massacres ever in Italy, in peacetime", as Cristicchi himself tells.
Thanks to 18 warehouse di Simone Cristicchi, evoked on stage only by very few objects of memory, such as stacked chairs and tables, the forgotten pages of history come back to life and follow each other before our eyes, from the violence carried out by Mussolini's Italians themselves to the Slavs during the Second World War, to silence of the Istrian sinkholes where many Italians kidnapped and reported missing were killed. Until the massacre of Pola, where people whose corpse was never identified or found, including children, women, men, the elderly, an entire population tormented by the thirst for power and revenge of totalitarianisms lost their lives.
There is no need to take sides to the right or left in the face of these years of forgotten history, but only to ask ourselves the reason for so much hatred and so much violence, but above all for the oblivion wanted by posterity and which is giving way only in recent years. to the truth.
Simone Cristicchi gives proof in this show of great sense of civil responsibility towards its audience and manages to extricate itself well between the narrative moments, the interpretative moments and the sung interludes. The musical closes on an important and fundamental warning for the future, what Cristicchi calls the eleventh commandment, "Do not forget".
And our thoughts, in the end, go to the immigrants of yesterday and today, to the controversies and senseless accusations made against those who have had the misfortune to be born and to live in territories subject to oppression and wars of power that nothing they have to do with respect for the human being. We cannot judge who has decided to leave their land to find luck elsewhere, nor who has decided to stay at home even under a foreign regime.
Lo spettacolo 18 warehouse it is still on stage at the Bellini Theater until Sunday 26 October 2014. To find timetables and ticket prices consult the our card on Napolike.
Photos | VIA
