Pinocchio is a project by Babilonia Teatri – one of the most brilliant and revolutionary Italian companies of contemporary theatre (Ubu Award 2011) – and the theatre company of ‘Gli Amici di Luca’ Association, that takes care of people with coma outcomes who have undertaken a therapeutic path also including theatrical activities.
The show was created in 2012 as the result of theatrical workshops that took place between the end of 2011 and the Spring 2012 at the Casa dei Risvegli Luca De Nigris in Bologna. The staging was then refined during three artistic residencies in which the actors had been in touch with other operators and theatrical experiences.
After the preview at the Casa dei Risvegli and the Italian premiere at the Teatro Storchi in Modena, the performance has been staged in Italy and abroad, and in 2013 won the prestigious Prize of Theatre Critics at the Venice Biennale Teatro.


Pinocchio undergoes many metamorphoses, suffering for this. Death, rebirth in other forms. Even those who wake up from a coma find themselves profoundly changed. Long times of rehabilitation. Difficult to get back to their life of yesterday. In the heart of the show, the three performers –who get up on stage bare-chested– reveal some signs of that passage suspended between life and death.
Guided by Enrico Castellani’s voice, Paolo Facchini, Luigi Ferrarini, and Riccardo Sielli play Pinocchio, live it, relive it, tell it through their personal experience, through the story, now ironic, now dramatic, of the accident, the coma, the after.
The text, signed by Babilonia Teatri –alias Enrico Castellani and Valeria Raimondi, is inspired by Collodi’s work, core generator of a series of reflections on life, on its fragility and its strength, on will, on the choices made and the missed ones.

Where do those who come back from the coma, from the land of toys, from the theatre go back?

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