Fedeli d’Amore (Love's faithful) is the new stage poem by Marco Martinelli focused on the exceptional vocal research of Ermanna Montanari (awarded “2018 best Italian actress” for this performance). The text revolving around Dante and our own present times, has been selected by Italian and American Playwright Project curated by Valeria Orani and Frank Hentschker and published by PAJ (Performing Arts Journal) Publications directed by Bonnie Marranca.
On the occasion of the New York premiere of the performance fedeli d'Amore (Love's Faithful) - A polyptych in seven panels for Dante Alighieri at La MaMa Theater (Jan. 26-27-28), the Italian Cultural Institute in New York and Valeria Orani organize this appointment with Teatro delle Albe: screening of Martinelli’s short film Ulisses XXVI (15 min) and panel Fedeli d'Amore with Ermanna Montanari, Marco Martinelli, Bonnie Marranca, Frank Hentscker.


About Ulisses XXVI (director’s note)

As we began developing the idea for this film, Ermanna and I asked ourselves, “What voice would Dante’s Ulysses have?” A Ulysses more “gothic” than Homeric emerges from the pages of the Divine Comedy. Could we really hear his voice of fire, filtered through the maelstrom of preaching and popular legend? And if his voice is the “murmuring” of a flame, as Dante describes it, what voice does that flame have? Sometimes the questions we ask at the beginning of a project find no immediate answers, but it turns out that the making of the work shows us the way. Like Bruno Munari said, “If I make, I understand.” Given the many years we have spent with Dante and his work, we gladly accepted Adl’s proposal that we produce a short film about Canto XXVI of the Inferno, to be screened at the conference “Dante and Other Classics: from Petrarch to Wole Soyinka”, which took place April 28 & 29, 2021.
Some months before, on the suggestion of our architect friends Massimiliano Casavecchia and Stefania Gambirasio, we had visited in Ravenna the crypt of the Church of Santa Maria in Porto. That underground chamber where monks were once buried struck us as the right place to insert the shades of Dante and Virgil in the eighth chamber of the eighth circle of Hell. It was there, with the kind permission of Father Lukanowski, that we shot the first part of the film. The second part, with the flames, was shot on the stage of Teatro Rasi, formerly the Church of Saint Clare, dating to the 13th century, where we imagine Dante, a Franciscan, must have regularly attended mass. Ermanna discovered the “voice & figure” of Ulysses: the intimate, stunning tone of a soul consumed by fire, transforming the entire space into a mirror of flame; and a diaphanous body, both carnal and transparent, that renders the ungraspable manifestation of that voice, revealing itself as it slips away.
Marco Martinelli
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