In 1960, Rocco and his brothers, based on the stories of Ponte della Ghisolfa and Gilda del Mac Mahon was released. That same year saw the direction for L’Arialda, which was followed in 1967 by that for La Monaca di Monza. Now, a new chapter has been added to the story of the relationship between Luchino Visconti and Giovanni Testori: Luchino, a never-before-seen biography currently being published by Feltrinelli. The text dates back to the first six months of 1972, when the director was busy with filming for Ludwig, while the writer was working on Ambleto, the piece written for Franco Parenti that would inaugurate the Salone Pier Lombardo in January 1973. In the book, Testori claims to know Visconti “inside and out”, something that “I believe very few do”; a situation that allowed him to paint an intimate portrait that uncovered the most secret aspects of the great director’s character. For this reason, writes Giovanni Agosti, who curated the publishing of the work, Luchino is “extremely different from any other book – as many as there are – about the Milanese director. Testori sketches a profile in layers, which aims to dig deep into what, at the time of writing, was defined as Visconti’s poetry”. As is almost always the case with Testori’s work, there is an intrinsic theatricality to this test. This led to the idea to bring it to the stage of the Teatro Strehler, on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the writer. The voice is that of Umberto Orsini, a privileged witness to the relationship between Testori and Visconti, and the actor who played Candidezza in Arialda from 1960 and Max von Holnstein in Ludwig.

Duration: The play is currently in production

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