Following last year's success which culminated in the staging of the play E il dico no, the Osservatorio sul presente (observatory on the present) returns, a project born from the collaboration between the Università degli Studi di Milano and the Piccolo Teatro, with Nando dalla Chiesa and Marco Rampoldi. This year the theme is Le storie degli altri (Other people's stories) and will see the staging of four plays - 5 centimetri d'aria, Lontano da qui, le ribelli and Qui e ora – solos or dialogues presented to a restricted group of spectators, in which the profound rapport between actor and audience communicates the themes examined with an intense theatrical and emotional strength.

5 centimetri d'aria (5 centimetres of air) is subtitled Storia di Cristina Mazzotti e dei figli rapiti (the story of Cristina Mazzotti and the kidnapped children) and begins in 1972: the kidnapping of Pietro Torrielli jr marks the beginning of a tragic sequence of child abductions carried out by organised criminal groups in Lombardy. A story of violence, of exorbitant ransom requests which are required in order to finance the up and coming drug trafficking operations, of ever increasingly cruel conditions of survival as the Cosa Nostra takes over the 'ndrangheta, and hostages who often never return home; like "Cricri", 18 years old, whose body was found in a city dump forty years ago.
A story, previously touched upon in one of the most moving moments of E io dico no, which inflicted a deep wound on Lombardy, and in particular in "industrious Brianza", and which, as the families involved in these tragedies rightly point out, has been almost completely forgotten.