Anghiari si racconta

I was born in 1965 in Anghiari and I lived here till I was 19. From then on I started to wander around the world: I am a theatre vagabond, a rover, rover (in English, in original). I studied in Florence – theatre studies, history of Italian theatre, performing arts in general. I had been involved in music, theatre, cinema since I was young. … I lived in Florence for around 10 years. Then I moved for a short time to France, Marseille, first, for family reasons and then, for work, and then I moved for a while to Africa. And then I came back to live here because…

In 1995-96 this theatre wasn’t active anymore and they said ‘Do you want to be the director of a theatre without any money?’ ‘Ok! It’s me! (in English) It’s me! Perfect!’ So, I came back to work in this theatre and to build a little utopia of a theatre society, which has been only a partial success. Coming back to Anghiari has been a torment and a wonder … mixed feelings because I have dedicated to this town…

The relationship with this community has grown through a number of cultural interventions around the identity of the place. The most important of these is Tovaglia a quadri (Chequered tablecloth), which has been going for 22 years now. At this event, which is held in a piazza in the old part of town, a story is told during a dinner-show. From windows, houses, doorsteps, the inhabitants tell a story, while the audience sit around tables eating dinner. So this has been our main achievement. We have also hosted theatre and dance shows, and films, because many screenplays have been written within our theatre – it has become a place of creation and development of creative projects. And now we have been working for three years with sport theatre, involving international sport champions, artists, musicians… .

We have given life to this space, with some identity problems … because I hail from here, I know very well how difficult it is. I don’t know if you know the Latin proverb ‘Nemo propheta in patria’, no one is prophet in his own country (in English). This has been our… . But we have tried to build a space where there is a respect for the history of the town and, at the same time, a professionalism.

We can say that our group has been the first experiment with professionalism in theatre in a place like Anghiari, a place that already had many theatres, little theatres in apartments … Anghiari had 5 theatres between 1562 and 1800, one… I will show you the photo…. It’s an incredible story and, with other authors, I’ve written a book about it, published by the University of Florence. And this theatre history is a history that the locals themselves have known little about, and so, those theatres, that were so important, nobody took care of them anymore. And the theatres became cinemas.

So, to take the theatre back into the community has been a big challenge (in English), the biggest challenge that we have had to face. It’s been difficult getting people to understand… and so we have used folktales, a form of storytelling with Tuscan popular music.

With Tovaglia a quadri, the people of Anghiari will come if they can identify with the stories. But with things done by others, they’re less likely to come. Younger generations are interested in seeing things that are different. The older generations, I mean from 60 up, they have less curiosity about contemporary theatre, about cultural practises that are not codified by centuries of history, and practices with a strong folk tradition.

This is a bit difficult to understand, because Anghiari has been, since the Second World War, a stronghold of the left, of the communist party, and so you might expect there to be a strong innovative force. In reality, there have been very conservative elements. But there was a mayor here in the 80s, Franco Talozzi, the grandfather of Armida, who you saw here earlier … have you interviewed him? He made an enormous effort to develop cultural activities in the town and to open it up to tourism. He made an effort, he spent money, he made the restoration of this theatre possible.

For 70 years Anghiari has been on the left side of politics, but not now; now there is a new administration that is a centre-right. But this is not a political issue, I am not talking about politics (in English), because what matters is a sense of identity, of belonging. There are stories of great friendships between people of different political orientations.

With regard to relations between generations, you have to put this in the context of this place… intergenerationality exists and is maintained until the moment of entertainment (in English), of fun. In that moment, bang! it falls apart, because young people go to look for fun in a bigger town, and not here, in the group they belong to. This means that you don’t see what you’d see if you went into an Irish pub in Cork or Dublin, where you find all generations, don’t you? From eighteen to eighty. Sure, the same thing happens here in a bar, but the bar is not considered to be entertainment; the bar is a kind of antechamber, like a neutral room. From there, from that decompression chamber, entertainment is elsewhere.

I believe that Anghiari is an open place. Even if in Italy racism is almost becoming a genetic disease, I don’t know of any here, in Anghiari. For example, there are small communities of Kosovarians, Romanians here, as in all small towns in Italy, but there is a sense of respect for people who work … if you work, there is a lot of respect, no matter what your ethnicity.

Back to the theatre.  We are about to start the 22nd theatre season, this year. Yes, we have a lot of financial difficulties, even with the support we get from the Tuscan region, which is for specific projects like the contemporary dance – we are Anghiari dance hub (in English), a contemporary dance project, which is quite famous throughout the whole Italy. The theatre is a space where we manage to do things even without money. We do it for passion more than anything else, and we include small projects that bring in very little money in comparison with the mainstream. It is rather hilarious to think that a theatre like this can be run with very little income. It is like saying this is the true socialist style!

I don’t know if I’ll live here forever, but we are living here now, yes … and we also have a number of European projects. For example, we now have a project called ‘The Backstage’ (in English). It is a project on… a kind of skills bank for young people, young technicians under 30. We have been successful at working on projects that put us in contact with different experiences in other European countries, from East Europe, and our work mainly involves the development of forms of storytelling, of narration. Recently we won the MigrArti Project 2017, an award from the Italian Ministry of Culture, working on the life histories of over 100 immigrants, most of them 2nd generation.  Right now, we are involved in 3-4 projects that revolve around storytelling. And we are always looking for new connections – our adventure is a liquid body, always looking for new channels.

We also collaborate with the Free University of Autobiography in Anghiari and the Diary Archive of Pieve di Santo Stefano. The archive was established in 1984, and it was a seminal event… its work is regarded as very important across Italy. But its specific location is significant – the Tiberina valley is called ‘the valley of memories’ because there is a long tradition here of keeping memories alive through forms of storytelling. So, the archive introduced professional activities – training, studying, research – which, to use a technical term, codified (in English) storytelling abilities that were already present. I’ll give you an example, my grandmother was a storyteller, yes, my grandma, she was a storyteller. So, I am in the family line of this tradition of storytellers, I am a new form of storyteller.

In all our activities, we have professionals working together with particular communities. You can’t separate the two … I don’t know if you are familiar with  Pasolini’s work …. Now we are working with a group of 17-18-19 year olds. We have worked with old people; we have worked with prisoners (in English); with many different groups of people. I work with non-actors, non- professional actors, but the framework and the structure are professional.

We have projects around migration. For example, there’s a project on the connection between Argentina and Anghiari. In Argentina, the project was initiated by the filmmaker you can see there behind you, Fernando Pino Solanas…he has made some very beautiful films, very important films. Solanas has been a teacher for us in the search for memories. We have gathered information and restitched pieces that had come unstitched, connecting memories, even if painful, between these two worlds, Tuscany and Argentina. And when this project came into being, two worlds came in touch again, memories came together again.

There is a story of a family, 4 brothers, mother, father, 6 of them migrated to Argentina. The 5th, a daughter, remained here because she fell in love with a man who didn’t want to leave, and the whole family went over there, and she stayed here, got married… and her father and mother died there, and she didn’t ever see them again. But these are stories …there are so many. To go to Argentina, it took 20 days by boat, 20 days. There was a woman, for example, who was 84 years old when I interviewed her – she has died now – she didn’t speak a word of Castilian, the Argentinian Spanish; she only spoke Tuscan and she used words that had disappeared in Italy; they were no longer in use here. Because she left with great regret, she never wanted to come back to Italy, never. Never means never – she had built another world there … but these are stories…

All the projects on migration carry with them a load of sadness, pain. For example, there is an Anghiari woman, who doesn’t speak a word of Italian anymore, whom I have only met by mail, who lives in the centre, in the desert heart of Australia. She left Anghiari and never returned. We spoke about her family last year in Tovaglia a quadri. We told the story of her family’s migration to Australia … and today, there are many young people going to Australia, to work or for… who knows for what reason. People leave here in the hope of finding something … the land of milk and honey (in English).

Mine is a family of migrants. My father didn’t go to Argentina, by sheer coincidence, because his best friend migrated there in the ’50s; my uncle worked in mines in Belgium, in France, and I have another uncle who went to Manchester, in England, for many years. And they all came back – they wouldn’t have been able to live away from here.

My father died many years ago, so now I have only my mother, although, right now, she is not too well. I have a sister who lives in Sansepolcro; nephews, uncles, cousins, all in Florence – we’re Tuscans, going back generations.

My daughter is 16. She lives here and she studies at the lycee in Sansepolcro – languages, English, French and German. For our own children we always want the best, but I don’t know what will be the best for her – perhaps going abroad to study, away from Italy, but I am not sure … . Of course (in English) I hope that she will stay, but I don’t know if that is what I should wish for her: to stay or not, this, I don’t know.