Walter Veltroni opens the ‘Todi Festival’ with ‘Beginning of darkness’ on the Rampi and Peci cases

The curtain rises tomorrow on the Todi Festival, which will take place in the Umbrian town from 28 August to 5 September. The first show to inaugurate the theatrical review will be the national debut of ‘The beginning of darkness’ by Walter Veltroni, directed by Peppino Mazzotta with Giancarlo Fares and Sara Valerio. At the center of the text, represented at the Teatro Comunale, the meeting of two stories strongly rooted in the memory of the Italians that the case wanted to have taken place in the same days of August 1981: the story of Alfredino Rampi, the child who fell into the well in Vermicino ; and that of Roberto Peci, the worker kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades in Rome. The artist Arnaldo Pomodoro signed the manifesto of the ‘Todi Festival’. “I thought of resuming, in the form of a graphic sign, one of my Scepters, free from its fixed base and the weight of the material – explains the sculptor – The five aluminum Scepters, which I designed for my personal room at the Venice Biennale. of 1988, will be installed in the Oberdan Gardens of Todi, where they will be able to best express their value of abstract signals as antennas of the future and, at the same time, tribal masks: in the Scepters I wanted, in fact, to express an archaic sense linked to an imaginary technological, futuristic “. After the opening with the text by Walter Veltroni, we continue on the 29th with another national debut, ‘Boomerang – The illusionists of dance’, author and choreographer Cristiano Fagioli. On the 30th and 31st the prose returns with ‘La fever’ by Wallace Shawn directed by Veronica Cruciani and Federica Fracassi as protagonist, a monologue that proposes an elaborate denunciation of global capitalism; and with ‘La vespa’, an unpublished text signed by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and directed by Piergiorgio Piccoli, on stage Guenda Goria and Miriam Galanti, protagonists of a psychological thriller. The first evening of September will see ‘Emigranti’ by Polish playwright Slawomir on stage Mrozek, on stage Riccardo Barbera and Roberto D’Alessandro, in which his personal story as an emigrant to Paris is told, with a reference to the theater of the absurd. The next day, ‘ET – The incredible story of Elio Trenta’ signed by Luigi Diberti and Gianmario Pagano, directed by Francesco Frangipane, starring Diberti himself accompanied by music by Raffaele Toninelli. Three monologues will be hosted on 3 September in the cloister of San Fortunato for ‘Gola and other short pieces’ by Mattia Torre, read by Valerio Aprea, while on the 4th we return to the municipal theater for the show ‘Goodnight stories for rebel girls’ based on the homonymous best-seller by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo, who sees Margherita Vicario on stage accompanied by the music of the Multiethnic Orchestra of Arezzo conducted by Maestro Enrico Fink. Finally, Sunday 5th, the grand finale in the square, with the concert by Loredana Bertè. (By Enzo Bonaiuto)