Five years after having written the novella La Verità, Luigi Pirandello transformed it into the two acts of The cap and bells, the Sicilian version of which, created for Angelo Musco, debuted in 1917 at the Teatro Nazionale in Rome. In one of the letters sent to Musco, who doubted the qualities of the play and its protagonist, Ciampa, Pirandello wrote of how this was a character “brimming with tragic humanity, not merely living but rather bursting with life”. 
According to the director, Andrea Baracco: «The humility of Ciampa is towering, the ridiculous sullies him; it is as though a blade relentlessly stabs ever deeper into his chest, revealing his heart, at which point he defends himself with vivid and devastating words. He begins his story with a simplicity that is open to touches of comedy, with an irony that bitterly mocks the obtuseness of others, to then plummet”, concludes the director, “into his humiliating defeat, in a sort of lyrical glorification that leaves the spectator constantly walking a line between laughter and anguish.»