fedeli d’Amore (Love's faithful) is a “polyptych in seven panels” written by Marco Martinelli “about” Dante Alighieri and our present day. Different voices speak to us in the individual panels: the fog of a dawn in 1321, the demon of the pit where the merchants of death are punished, a donkey that carried the poet on his last journey, the “scolding” imp who incites brawls about money, Italy kicking herself, Alighieri’s daughter Antonia, and “an end that is not an end”.
These voices speak to us of the refugee, of the poet fled from his own city which has condemned him to burning at the stake; and now he is on his deathbed, exiled in Ravenna, sick with ague. First the fog slips in through the window cracks, enters that little room, and it describes him on the threshold of the extreme transition. Those voices are suspended between the fourteenth century and our own day, and Martinelli’s writing accepts, and not from today, the Dantesque challenge to hold together political and metaphysical “reality”, chronicle and spirituality.
Love is evoked as the polestar of the fedeli d’Amore, a force that frees humanity from violence, that saves “the garden plot that renders us so fierce”. The voices of this “polyptych” are one single voice that can contain numberless voices, that of Ermanna Montanari: air, fire, sound, matter.
This “polyptych” for the stage enriches the itinerary which, together with Ravenna Festival, Martinelli, Montanari and Teatro delle Albe began in 2017 with Inferno, and continued in 2019 and 2021 with the other two parts of The Divine Comedy.
fedeli d’Amore is one more tessera in their ceaseless dramaturgical, vocal, musical and visual research, alongside such wise folk as Luigi Ceccarelli and Marco Olivieri, Anusc Castiglioni and Simone Marzocchi; and it lies in that furrow where the vocal-sound alchemy of the figure is central.

On the occasion of the performances, La MaMa theatre hosts also the workshop by Marco Martinelli I FOUND MYSELF from the dark wood to Paradise (January 25-29), for a "choral action" that will be open to the public at the end of the works.

The project fedeli d'Amore - a polyptych in seven panels for Dante Alighieri is presented in the United States with the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, ATER Fondazione, Emilia-Romagna Region, University of Pennsylvania, Teatro delle Albe/Ravenna Teatro; in co-operation with the Consulates General of Italy in Philadelphia and New York, Com.It.Es, Italian and American Playwrights Project, and Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò New York University.