Name: Letters to Bernini
Start: 2026-11-15T16:00:00
Location: Gobetti

Marco Martinelli

Teatro Stabile Torino

It is August 3, 1667. In his studio as a sculptor, painter, and architect, the elderly Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the greatest artistic authority of Baroque Rome, angrily evokes the shadow of the hated Francesco Borromini, the brilliant architect from Ticino. When the unexpected news of his death arrives, his anger gives way to compassion: the suicide of his rival leads him to reflect on the constant war between artists and to recognize the value of the man he has considered an enemy for a lifetime. Martinelli offers us a surprisingly contemporary 17th century: poised between the birth of New Science and the barbarization of the present.

Letters to Bernini

Gobetti

Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Alessandro Ferroni bring to the Italian stage for the first time Escaped Alone by Caryl Churchill (1938), one of the greatest contemporary English playwrights. With clarity and irony, the play addresses the "joyous scandal" of female aging in a world obsessed with youth. Four women meet one summer afternoon: between tea and banal conversations, they imagine sudden catastrophes. What emerges is a disturbing tale of the uneasiness of the present, where everyday life and dystopia intertwine seamlessly. Churchill's sharp writing, here translated by Monica Capuani, leads the viewer into an atmosphere devoid of consolation but rich in poetic tension. On stage are Caterina Carpio, Tania Garribba,Arianna Gaudio, and Alice Palazzi.

Escaped Alone

Teatro Carignano

In the contemporary Italian theater scene, the Berardi/Casolari duo stands out for their work that intertwines stage writing, autobiography, and reinterpretations of classics. Their essential and direct theater uses irony and a critical eye to explore our present, marked by personal crises and political tensions. In 2026, the President of the Republic awarded the pair the honor of Officers of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

Hamlet Take Away

Born in Lebanon in 1968 and shaped by a life as an expatriate between Paris and Montreal, Wajdi Mouawad is today a leading author and director in contemporary theater. Incend i is a modern tragedy, starting with Oedipus and reversing its perspective: at its center is the figure of Nawal, a woman who confronts her destiny and attempts to transform it. Her story becomes a collective female memory, in which pain, silence, and anger are transmitted like invisible legacies. A memory that burns, but which can be broken through confrontation with her children Jeanne and Simon. For the playwright, truth is never given, but must be conquered and traversed. After Come gli uccelli , Marco Lorenzi returns to Mouawad, directing Frédérique Loliée and Filippo Dini, on stage alongside Aleksandar Cvjetkovic, Elio D'Alessandro, Gennaro Di Biase, Giovanni Drago, Barbara Mazzi, Emilia Piz, and Sara Verteramo.

Fires

The Children of the Haste

Tennessee Williams wrote Trigorin's Notebook in his later years, in 1981, to engage with a work he had always felt deeply close to: Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. For him, the Russian master was a playwright capable of compassionately describing the vulnerability of artists, humankind's longing for love, and the painful gap between one's aspirations and reality. He thus created a rewrite that retains the core of the original play while accentuating its emotional tensions, the conflict between youth and maturity, and the predatory dimension of artistic success. Leonardo Lidi, together with students from the School for Actors, brings together in this work his poetic research on these authors, who have repeatedly recurred throughout his career, and adds a new chapter to the project dedicated to the American playwright, begun with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Trigorin's Notebook

Fonderie Limone Moncalieri

A simple yet universal story, that of a child and his relationship with the world around him, but, above all, a life lesson for all ages. Valerio Aprea brings a story by Sandro Bonvissuto to the stage and transforms it into a poetic reflection, leading us to the brink between childhood and adulthood. On a summer afternoon, a father teaches his son to ride a bike: it's a moving moment, capable of evoking in all of us an important formative stage, one that involves not only the learning of a motor skill, but the discovery of so much more.

The Day My Dad Taught Me to Ride a Bike

Alessandro Bandini celebrates the words and works of Giovanni Testori, staging an original dramaturgy constructed from the unpublished corpus of correspondence that the Lombard writer exchanged with Alain Toubas, to whom he was romantically linked for over thirty years, between 1959 and 1962. Two thousand letters that today recount joys and fears, distances and closenesses, infatuations and daily torments, and become further evidence of Testori's language, its vivid vocabulary, its recurring symbols, and its visionary grammar. It is the man, before the writer, who speaks: a soul struggling in the storm of his own love and who, unknowingly, while writing to his beloved, generates the poetic language that will come.

Forever

Lunetta Savino is the protagonist of Brechtian epic theater's masterpiece, which director Leo Muscato restores to its most popular, emotional, and dialectical form. Courage is not a heroine, but a merchant who endures war to gain survival and profit, a contradictory figure who lives in conflict as if it were a permanent market: slippery, elusive, in short, human. She combines a sense of motherhood confronting a ferocious system, a stubborn incorrigibility, a cynical capacity for speculation during a time of crisis, and the keen sense of alertness of those who live in a permanent state of emergency. The live music, with its decidedly rock edge, transforms the stage into a concert of light, sound, and bodies.

Mother Courage and her children

"Abracadabra" is a magical word, fairytale-like and arcane, the formula of a childish spell that can make what isn't there appear. In Babilonia Teatri's new, poetic, and moving work, it also becomes the bridge between the world of death and that of magic, embodied by the protagonist, magician, comedian, and performer Francesco Scimemi. Abracadabra is a show that takes us by the hand and leads us into territories from which we often escape, where tricks and illusions reveal what words alone cannot. On stage, alongside Scimeni, are Enrico Castellani, Valeria Raimondi, and Emanuela Villagrossi.

Abracadabra

In My Stupid Intents , a novel-turned-revelation by the young Bernardo Zannoni (Campiello Prize 2022), animals speak, use dishes, tables, beds, and light fires, but their lives remain a struggle for survival, harsh and merciless, like nature itself. The VicoQuartoMazzini collective brings to the stage a literary work populated by beasts who seek God, brush against him, and reject him, oscillating between a desire for humanity and feral brutality. A young lame marten, played by Giuseppe Cederna, is sold by her mother to an old usurer fox, who entrusts her with a sacred book: the parable of a being who tries in vain to rise above his own nature. The cast also includes Arianna Scommegna, Leonardo Capuano, Michele Altamura, Jonathan Lazzini, and Gabriele Paolocà.

My Stupid Intentions

Inspired by the Apocryphal Gospels, the show blends narrative theater and song theater to explore the encounter between the human and the divine. While the places of Jesus' childhood are more familiar to us, Mary's journey is less explored: a forced motherhood, a destiny devoid of choice, a journey of surprising relevance. Between 1969 and 1970, Fabrizio De André reworked these events in La buona novella, distilling poetry from the lights and shadows of humanity and restoring familiar stories in a radically new form. The show, returning to the Gobetti after its success in 2025, takes these songs and brings them back to their original sources, intertwining words and music in a suspended narrative. On stage are Bruno Maria Ferraro, Celeste Gugliandolo, Pietro Ballestrero, and Fiammetta Piovano.