Gemma Alighieri's Divine Comedy, written for the Accademia dei Folli by Tiziano Scarpa (winner of the 2009 Strega Prize with Stabat Mater), is part of the classic reloaded series, in which the Folli revisit the great classics of world literature: after I promessi sposi, Madame Bovary, Don Quixote, Frankenstein, and The Odyssey, in 2025 the Turin-based company will tackle the work of the great poet Dante Alighieri.
Dante wrote poetry about Beatrice but was married to Gemma Donati. He did not dedicate a single verse to her, who gave him four children, which must not have pleased her very much. This is where the story of the show begins: Dante hides in exile, in a city that resembles one of the many degraded places in our world, where wars, climate disasters, and cynicism rule. In fact, Dante is an immigrant refugee who stays at home doing housework: he only goes out incognito late at night to chat with the bartender when the bar below his house closes.
Gemma is responsible for bringing home some money to feed the family. Dante believes that his wife earns an honest living, but in a society that marginalizes and exploits immigrants to the point of exhaustion, Gemma, who does all sorts of precarious odd jobs, feels entitled to commit petty and serious crimes to get by. It is precisely one of these misdeeds that gets her into trouble and forces her to flee.
It will be the beginning of a hellish journey full of surprises, in which this woman's courage leads her to do what even her husband, the great poet, had not dared to do: corner Evil itself.
Via Niccolò Paganini 0/200, Torino