Stefano Massini, the first Italian to win a Tony Award (for Lehman Trilogy, a work that tells the story of another crisis in our recent past), continues his examination of European literature. In this period, with society affected in an unprecedented manner by a series of dramatic and extraordinary events – the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the shadow of climate change and the progressive impoverishment of an ever-increasing proportion of the population – the need for stories that help us to understand the present seems more pressing than ever. These are stories that are just waiting to be told and that Massini, accompanied by Paolo Jannacci on the piano and Daniele Moretto on the trumpet, brings to the attention of the audience.
“The stories come from all directions – says Massini – above all in this current period, in the proliferation of channels of communication, in which the bulimia of expressing everything at all costs results in an avalanche of useless sequences. One thus discovers that at the dawn of the Third Millennium a writer is above all this: a diviner, a gold-digger in the Klondike in search of veins that are buried, hidden, lying beneath the sediment. We try, then, to make progress through the storytelling workshop, lending form to the ancient ritual of evocation, that system of metaphors and references which Borges defined as enchantment, magic, the incredible anatomy of reality”.