De Gasperi: l’Europa brucia

Directed by Carmelo Rifici, Paolo Pierobon embodies the stature and complexity, the lights and shadows of Alcide De Gasperi, a man and statesman who adheres so completely to his political task that he no longer sees the boundaries between himself and the nation, taking on the burden and then inevitably becoming both creator and victim.

‘The play,’ Rifici and Dematté explain, "recounts, through the inner journey of an important European politician, the years of the formation of the Atlantic Pact and the birth of the Europe we know and live in today. Through intimate dialogues with his daughter, a political adversary such as Palmiro Togliatti, an important American ambassador and a young boy who played a leading role in the redevelopment of Matera, we investigate the soul of Alcide De Gasperi in order to dissect our idea of democracy and freedom.
The places where the dialogues take place are symbols of our history and reflect the always private and always public inner space characteristic of the statesman. The performance creates a representation of the European democratic dilemma: the politician wants to prove to the people of the future and to himself the possibility of a good democracy; the dialogues, however, show all the fragility and contradiction of western democracy, which was born, after the Second World War, on the compromise and interests of a few states and of those that were beginning to emerge as superpowers. Through the massive use of the statesman's own words, we set ourselves the task of imagining why and how De Gasperi's language was transformed and we wanted to investigate the human reasons for his choices, in the years from '46 to '54."