‘Dante Alighieri Florentine fugitive’ with the Rebibbia inmates

“The theater as an opportunity for redemption, the prison as a place of redemption and not just a place of detention, Dante’s pietas as a viaticum for a different life”. This is the message of the recitation of three cantos of Dante’s Inferno, by as many inmates under maximum security who, for the first time in almost thirty years, were released for three hours and under escort from the Rebibbia prison. to stage today at the Roma Tre University an extract of ‘Dante Alighieri fugitive from Florence’, directed by Fabio Cavalli. The authorization was granted in the form of external work and not of the prize permit, for recognition of the rehabilitation function of the theatrical activity in prison. “We believe in the practice of theater in prison as an instrument of redemption, as a decisive element in building a bridge between the penitentiary community and external society”, explains the rector of the University of Roma Tre, Luca Pietromarchi. On stage, the three inmates-actors recited the songs that Dante dedicated to Count Ugolino, Ulisse and Paolo and Francesca in their original dialect. Three translations in Neapolitan, Calabrian and Sicilian to make the parallelism between the condemned and the damned even more realistic. For Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, “in the civilization of every people, theater has always occupied an important space. It has been in art through representations, in religion through liturgy, in society itself with its rituals. This is why the experience of theater in the Rebibbia prison is particularly suggestive and significant “.