The sermon is a form of prayer widespread by the Jesuit fathers in the major Italian centers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This stylistic code had as its object the admonition of the faithful from sins but also (and above all) from the abuses of nature determined by a lifestyle that would have led humanity to destruction. “Assedio delle ceneri” is a project conceived by Gabriele Frasca and Renato Quaglia, which they commissioned to five intellectuals (the economist Luciano Barca, the architect Stefano Boeri, the sociologist Alessandro Dal Lago, the journalist Luca Doninelli, the mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi) and to four poets (Jolanda Insana, Tommaso Ottonieri, Patrizia Valduga, Lello Voce) of neo-sermons centered on contemporary themes. The new scriptures have been combined, in this volume as well as in the theatrical version of the project, with two seventeenth-century sermons by Giacomo Lubrano, a Jesuit of Neapolitan origins who helped contribute to the diffusion and success of this form throughout the peninsula.

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”.