Napoli Teatro Festival Italia is an international theatre festival held annually in Naples in the months of June and July. It’s promote literature for theatre. Assedio delle ceneri, designed by Renato Quaglia and Gabriele Frasca, consists of the following contributions by authors:

Luciano Barca
Meet Professor Smith (“Vi presento il professor Smith”).
“There is no less transparent and less competitive market today than that in which present money is exchanged for future money”.

Stefano Boeri
Anti-city (“Anti-città”)
“Antibodies to the spread of an Anti-City are not part of a generic “antiperiphery”therapy. Instead, they are political”.

Alessandro Dal Lago
Coffin fluids (“Fluidi feretri” )
“Because they’re not alive anymore and they’re not dead yet. The barracudas and sharks are not afraid of them, and they play with their reflections on the shallows”.

Luca Doninelli
My mother’s face (“La faccia di mia madre”)
“Yeah. You tell me. Why does the horror pass and fly away so lightly?”.

Jolanda Insane
For Assedio delle ceneri (“Per l’Assedio delle ceneri” )
“The first word is not death / it’s not the resuscitation of corpses / the first word is freedom”.

Piergiorgio Odifreddi
Are we men or are we clerical? Preaches on secularism (“Siamo uomini o clericali? Predica sulla laicità”)
“To act “as if God were not there” does not mean at all giving up our being moral men, but rather is the only real way to take full responsibility for them”.

Thomas Ottonieri
Lapilli of gravitation (“Lapilli de la gravitazione”)
“And the raw chàos of the devastation, which from the stars to the lives forever will mark this unfortunate territory, is only the sign of an occultly superior order”.

Patrizia Valduga
The kindergarten of the old west (“L’asilo infantile del vecchio occidente”)
“What we possess we can lose at any time, but what we have donated we can never lose”.

Lello Voce
Creation from the ashes. (“La creazione dalle ceneri”)
“He preaches for the day that will be odd. At first the sound was only one. A unique hissing sound. There was no disorder and there was no light”.

Roberto Paci Dalò is in charge of the music and direction of Assedio delle Ceneri. As usual, he works with a few elements: soft light, smoke and clever sound interventions that emphasize the seventeenth-century layout of the church, the Certosa di San Martino.

The thick blanket of smoke, specially created for the staging, characterizes an already serious and mysterious atmosphere. The smoke is perfectly accorded with the theme of the Memento Homo, that is “Remember, man, what dust are you and what dust will you return”.  The light, minimal and intriguing, breaks through the fog. Finally, the sound comes, made up of timbrical references and acoustic overlaps, is able to evoke the “cultural ghosts” of the past.