Ermanna Montanari’s daily life is marked by being, fundamentally, an actress, and despite having created sets and costumes, conceptions and direction over the years, it is the stage that continues to be the magnet for her. “The days of the show – says the founder of the Teatro delle Albe – are sacred liturgies for me, all the daytime energy is oriented towards the night, towards that darkness illuminated by the artificial light of the spotlights.” The time of writing is instead an “other” time, it is a time that breaks in, that awaits for the right condition to manifest itself. That was the case in the Nineties for Rosvita and in 2017 for the Miniature campianesi, when serious illnesses forced Ermanna to immobility, to stop the tours. And so it happened in March 2020, when not a personal illness, but a pandemic hit the whole world: with the theatres shut, social life almost cancelled, Ermanna Montanari found herself to confront again with that world of her childhood, Campiano, “on the edge of that well that is memory”. “This has resulted in 28 new stories that increase and enrich the Miniature campianesi published by Oblomov in L’abbaglio del tempo: “as if to stop – explains Montanari – and look back, it was necessary a stroke of fate, a decision of elsewhere. Stopping the time, or accepting the fact that it stops, so as not to be dazzled by it, seems to me to be here, as far as I am concerned, the origin of writing”. L’abbaglio del tempo is the true novel that tells of “the affective beauty of an invented place”, the book of secrets with which Ermanna Montanari reveals her, our, place of the soul.

“You know when you enter this book, but you don’t know when you leave, because they are stories that penetrate your bones and live inside you. Voices, conversations, which buzz and rumble in your inner labyrinths, in which it is pleasant to get lost.” Igort