Back on stage Per sempre, a physical and visceral monologue conceived and performed by Alessandro Bandini – winner of the 2025 Mariangela Melato Award for young actors – in which he gives voice and form to the poignant and mysterious love story between Giovanni Testori and Alain Toubas. A play about the need to feel loved unconditionally and about pain, a visceral plea to be able to love, a cry not to be forgotten.

Between 1959 and 1962, Testori and his beloved Toubas – whom he met in late 1958 through mutual friends – maintained an intense correspondence, comprising over two thousand handwritten letters in French, which have never been translated, transcribed or published to date, as well as drawings and postcards that are equally unpublished. This extensive correspondence reveals a passionate, at times manipulative, love and a disarming humanity, showcasing a little-known side of the intellectual from Novate Milanese and offering the chance to re-examine part of his work with a fresh, original and contemporary perspective.
Bandini engages with the private and poetic language of Testori, a leading figure in the literary and artistic culture of the second half of the twentieth century, crafting an original play based on an unpublished collection of letters and postcards, on verses from I Trionfi – the famous love poem that opens the poetic trilogy dedicated to Alain Toubas – and on the writer’s private dedications to the young ‘Franzese’.
Per sempre arises from a total, head-to-head engagement with Testori’s words: words which, by becoming embodied in the speaker, transform into the endless struggle of a human being confronting their own fears.