In the masterpieces of the great playwrights the style is always used as mirror of the dramatic action. It’s interesting how the Italian language, although it is full of fusions and contaminations, clearly differentiate Tragedy and Comedy as two different ways to describe life. The process of forming the Italian language both in poetry and in theatre follows two different currents: One "high-level", Tragedy, and one “low-level”, Comedy, as if they were incompatible. This differentiation was due to the lack of a common spoken and written language. The Italian language, indeed, is the result of the inevitable linguistic and cultural contamination caused by the different colonisations and invasions that Italy has suffered over the centuries for its strategic geographical position in the very heart of the Mediterranean Sea. This conciliation took place, in poetry, in Dante's Divine Comedy, but not in theatre as, instead, it happened in the English language with William Shakespeare. The fact that there isn’t an Italian playwright who formalised the commission of these two styles doesn't mean that it hasn’t ever happened.

This show, indeed, wants to tell the story of the attempt to cross the purity of a language and the essential contaminations with the erudite Latin (Tragedy) with its thousand regionalisms and its contaminations with foreign languages (Comedy). The narration of this long adventure begins in the XIV with Dante Alighieri to end with Emanuele Aldrovandi, one of the youngest and most established contemporary playwrights, going through the pages of some of the most representative Italian playwrights, such as Machiavelli, Goldoni, Alfieri, Pirandello, Carmelo Bene and Pasolini, and with a foray into Giuseppe Verdi's melodrama.

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The performance is part of the events Italia, Culture, Africa and of the Week of the Italian Language in the World.
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