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

Marco Martinelli

Teatro Stabile Torino

Eight hundred years after the death of Saint Francis and on the 100th anniversary of Dario Fo's birth, Matthias Martelli has accepted the challenge of revisiting the Nobel Prize winner's work and telling the story of the Poor Man of Assisi and his subversive message. Martelli offers audiences a portrait of a contemporary Francis—mad, necessary, and luminously unconventional. The result is a multi-voiced monologue, a teeming mosaic of bodies and characters, ranging from the comical to the poetic, from the grotesque to the melancholic, without ever losing sight of cutting irony and laughter. The show arrives in Turin after a long world tour, which, along with Mistero Buffo, has taken Martelli and the Teatro Stabile di Torino to five continents.

Holy Monday Francis

Gobetti

The season opens with a show that celebrates the essence of theater. With Una delle ultime sere di carnovale (One of the Last Carnival Evenings ), Valerio Binasco returns to Carlo Goldoni, with an ensemble comedy that intertwines feelings, weddings, and farewells in a melancholy and delicate atmosphere, where love resists life's hardships and loneliness. Against the backdrop of a coming to an end, a light-hearted and profound reflection on the stirrings of the heart unfolds, amidst revealed truths and subtle illusions. On stage, a vibrant and vibrant cast—(in alphabetical order) Andreapietro Anselmi, Natalino Balasso, Mauro Bernardi, Marta Cortellazzo Wiel, Matteo Cremon, Michele Di Mauro, Giordana Faggiano, Milvia Marigliano, Daniele Marmi, Elisabetta Mazzullo, Orietta Notari, Nicola Pannelli, Aron Tewelde, Ivan Zerbinati—brings life to an intense and vibrant stage score.

One of the last evenings of Carnival

Teatro Carignano

An elderly professor awaits his son's arrival in his room, who will accompany him to a retirement home. During his wait, marked by anxiety and melancholy, he converses with the memory of his late wife, amidst memories, tenderness, and truths about old age and death. Le ultime lune di Furio Bordon, directed by Paolo Valerio and starring Alessandro Haber, is an intense and poetic play. After being chosen by Marcello Mastroianni as his farewell, it has been translated and performed in dozens of countries over the course of thirty years. At times poignant, it lucidly explores family bonds and the fragility of the passing of time.

The last moons

This hilarious comedy, a finalist for the Tondelli Prize, sarcastically depicts a grotesque and dystopian near future. The backdrop to the protagonists' stories is marked by two events: the European Union's agenda has established that the last orgasm on earth will occur by 2030, and at the same time, Italy finds itself invaded by a horde of bears with inordinate sexual appetites. Amidst this collapse of desire and untamed animal instincts, a journalist, a zoologist, and a couple in crisis navigate the inertia of pointless and lifeless afternoons by reading newspapers and exercising in the living room. On stage are Gianni D'Addario, Niccolò Fettarappa, Lorenzo Guerrieri, and Rebecca Sisti.

Orgasm

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

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

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

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

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

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.