July 19, 1992, Palermo. In via D’Amelio, Davide Enia He is on the phone with a classmate. They await the outcome of the maturity exam just carried out. In the summer heat of Palermo, everything is motionless.
“In the kingdom of unfinished speeches”, the phone calls stop with the deaf noise of a bomb. Entering the window, Enia sees the last shreds of that bloody war started on May 23 before with the Capaci massacre. Enia’s parents are far away, in Livigno. As soon as he heard the gracious news on the radio, they try to call him, but all the lines for Palermo have jumped.
In a nearby bar, the death of the magistrate Paolo Borsellino runs from mouth to the mouth, until he turned into a definitive sentence: “Sicilian sti should all die”.
On the stage of the Piccolo Teatro Grassi of Milanstopped in the center of the scene under a ruthless ox eye, Enia tells a wound that, after thirty -three years, continues to bleed and smear Italian history. Those days resurface violently, especially when they are not commemorated by the pulpits of the high offices of the state, but told by those who, that day, saw the leaves of the trees fall in the height of summer on the rubble of the building in via d’Amelio, of the five agents of the escort and of Paolo Borsellino.
It is also the story of Father Pino Puglisi, Not the hero and the national martyr, but the religion teacher of hundreds of boys from the Vittorio Emanuele II high school. Or the dead killed on the street, found by chance by a child returning from school, leaving in the Palermo tunnels.
The bewitching exoticism of that apparently distant world, governed by its own rules and crystallized over time, is evoked by the Abbannià, the cries of the Ballarò market, with which Enia and Giulio Barrocchieri fill the room.
The spectators, confused and fascinated, try to decipher their meaning. It seems to witness the unfolding of a secret ritual, in which you can only peek for gestures and coded words, dense movements, absorbed looks.
When Enia enters the subterfuges, in threats, in the tear strategies discussed in the houses of the bosses of Cosa Nostra, In the secret bunkers built to hide the children of the collaborators of justice, the lights of Paolo Casati become even more intense. And when the headlights go out, Enia’s evanescent shape remains impressed in the retina.
Self -portrait It is of a poignant and evocative power, capable of demolishing the granite walls of the time and reconstructing them with stories of simple, daily stories. Stories of people who lived in Palermo in the nineties, in the shade of one of the greatest political murders in Italian history.
The woven tapestry unravels before the eyes of the spectators, revealing silent and hidden truths, unpublished perspectives that return all the moved humanity in the face of the inhuman reliability of the mafia. “We must name things,” says Enia in a subdued tone. We must appoint them to return a human thickness to them, to remember that that ferocity does not belong to the beasts, but to real people, “people transformed into bloodthirsty vampires”.
It is the portrait of an entire generation: A people who grew up among the brushwood of Cosa Nostra, accustomed to moving in the dense network of violence and terror woven in the metropolitan plot of Palermo.
The monologue, enriched and commented musically by Giulio Barrocchieri, will be staged at Piccolo Teatro Grassi Until April 17th.
