In a remote and nameless village, in a distant time (or was it very recent?), due to a supreme authorities’ unquestionable decree, enacted with the aim of purifying humanity from the cancerous disease of vanity, it was established that all the mirrors should be broken, as well as all the pictures of humankind. At the 30 days, anyone discovered possessing or using a mirror would be punished with a penalty from twelve to twenty years in prison. Anyone discovered building mirrors would be sentenced to death.

From here begins the parable of different crossing destinies of a swarming humankind that day after day, in that remote and yet so close country/world, scrambles around in order to cope with power’s threats and violence, struggling to conquer freedom.

A tragi-comical transcription of the stubborn investigation made by Elias Canetti about the obscure bond between the individual, the mass and the terrible patience of power. In its strange architecture La Commedia della vanità is a vivid catalogue of all the themes and obsessions that inhabit the European culture which has nearly come, in the “entredeux-guerres”, to its collapse: the bourgeois’ ego crisis, the horror of violence and power, the troubling and inescapable threat of death, the irreducible survival instinct…

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