Before the restoration, the stage space was a real stratified time machine. Roman cisterns, medieval walls, baroque elements and nineteenth-century structures overlapped in an extremely fascinating temporal synthesis. A Baroque imaginary inscribed in the modern times, that makes us live in various eras at once. But it is the period of the immediate post-war period that inspires this work. Between 1945 and 1947, the largest German-speaking city outside Germany was Rimini, on the north-eastern coast of Italy. 150,000 people lived in “Enklave Rimini”, the prison camp controlled by the English army that housed former soldiers and officers of the Wermacht. A very special camp made up of universities, daily newspapers, symphony and dance orchestras, philatelic clubs, galleries; art, cinema, hospitals, printers, theatre companies. It is the first European denazification laboratory.
A set of fields distributed on the beach between Riccione and Cervia. A multicultural society where – in addition to German – Russian, Ukrainian, Flemish, Danish, Romanian, Polish, Hungarian, Italian, English are spoken.
Printed in the Deutsche Druckerei Miramare, the camp newspaper “Die Brücke” is published. Every day the newspaper publishes speeches by the prisoners of the camp as well as providing an in-depth geopolitical scene of the entire world. It is a valuable document entirely kept at the Biblioteca Gambalunga in Rimini.
Prothesis on the eastern border, in those days Rimini is at the center of Europe. Eighty percent of the city was destroyed by Allied bombing and became a refuge for exiles and refugees, such as those arriving from Istria and Dalmatia. An incredible heterotopia made up of 75,000 inhabitants upstream of the railway and 150,000 at sea. Perhaps an evocation of what would happen in the years to come.

An exceptional cast with the presence on stage of Luisa Cottifogli (collaborations with Quintorigo, Giovanna Marini. The Chieftains, Ivano Fossati) and Chiara Cattani (virtuoso harpsichordist). The lyrics of the songs are by the poet and writer – and curator of the work of Samuel Beckett for Einaudi – Gabriele Frasca. Designer Patrizio Piscaglia (the creative soul of the Messagerie brand) has created the costumes. Arnaldo Ciavatta designed the lights for projects presented all over the world, working in collaboration with artists from all disciplines. Filmmaker Davide Montecchi created the video content from archive material from the Photographic Archive of the Gambalunga Library. The historian Alessandro Agnoletti was the first to rediscover the history of Enklave Rimini.