AGI – “Scaldati was the comic of Kurosawa, Fellini, Bunuel and Alan Ford: he was the dreamy and tragic soul of Palermo.” seems to have forgotten his death. “Scaldati was my friend, my brother, my teacher,” he tells AGI Imparato, who, with his partner, continues the theatrical project of the great Sicilian playwright, collecting his spiritual and artistic testament.
“In reality – emphasizes Imparato – this will should be confiscated from Palermo, but Unfortunately Palermo did not realize the greatness of Scaldati even when he was alive. We’re trying to continue a difficult task that was already difficult for him. At Scaldati’s funeral on 2 June 2013, then-Councillor Giambrone said that Palermo owed Scaldati a debt and that debt was never paid. Today we should do it, and with interest. “We should develop an overall project for the Scaldati character.”
Scaldati was born in Montelepre, a small village on the outskirts of Palermo, and soon moved to the city with his family. Here he completes his studies, which he breaks off before he can graduate from elementary school. At just twelve, according to a biography on the website of the Cini Foundation, which acquired the playwright’s archives, starts working in a tailor’s shop frequented by theater actors; This profession will be the origin of the nickname “il Sarto”.and it will prove fundamental to the development of his interest in theater and the acting profession.
In 1964 he joined the troupe of Nino Drago and made his debut as a co-protagonist in John Osborne’s Remember in anger; During this period he represented texts by Samuel Beckett, Eduardo De Filippo, Dario Fo and Luigi Pirandello on the stage of the Bunker Theater for four years and came into contact with some of the interpreters who stayed with him for a long time: Gaspare Cucinella, Melino Imparato, Ninni Truden, later Gigi Burruano, Fabio Cangialosi, Toti Giambertone, the La Bruna brothers, Rory Quattrocchi, the Spicuzza brothers and Tobia Vaccaro joined them. In 1974 he founded the Piccolo Teatro in Palermo together with Nino Drago. In 1975, one day after the premiere of Il pozzo dei pazzi, he founded the historic Compagnia del Sarto, which remained active between the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1984, she starred alongside Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia in the Taviani brothers’ film Kaos. During this period he directed some of his best-known plays, including Cavaliere Sole (1979), La guardiana dell’acqua (1981), Indovina ventura (1983) and Assassina (1984): these, along with The Well, are some of his masterpieces The Fool, The Guardian of the Water, Eyes. “I would like to explain that to the director and friend Franco Maresco, the scholar reports Viviana Raciti in “The Pious Fantasy Between Mafia and Anti-Mafia”, (Viella-Verlag) – the thorn in the side of Italian theater, except that the others don’t care; Mine is a theater that talks about real things, real emotions and constantly asks itself why one makes theatre, why one is there, questions oneself, who one makes theater for. Our theater is the vehicle of poetry, a violent poetry in the sense that it constantly wonders what to do and implicitly asks for a path to a more supportive relationship between men, and that doesn’t look in the mirror but is with not satisfied with himself”.
Just as success on the national stage begins, Scaldati sets out to establish a theater laboratory in the heart of Palermo, in the popular Albergheria neighborhood. “By narrating and thus taking on the role of spokesman for an entire oppressed community,” explains Raciti, who oversaw the creation of the playwright’s archive for the Cini Foundation, ” Franco Scaldati’s theater gives the vanquished, the least, the dignity to speak to them. His theater serves to liberate us from this state of misery, from this cultural, social and identity misery in which Palermo has been living for some time.”
“Even today,” says Learned, “his works are followed by the public, even though Palermo no longer exists: it was a sacred and tragic Palermo, while today it resembles other cities in the world, which has lost its truest soul, namely Helsinki .” or in London. Palermo was a metaphor Scaldati used to describe humanity, violence, beauty and ugliness, the fantastic and surreal world“.
Scaldati’s characters, who inevitably used dialect, are often the “shadows” of cities: loan sharks, prostitutes, accomplices to the police, petty criminals, mafia workers whom the playwright somehow “protects” because he knows they are their victims too, Drowned and not saved. The massacres of 1992 and the assassination of Don Pino Puglisi in Brancaccio also marked a turning point for himwhich is to be expected: “At that time – so it says in “The Belly of Palermo. In the footsteps of Falcone and Borsellino” – the young gentlemen come out handsome and painted. At the sight of which eyes does the fact happen? No one there was interested in the thing, but the spy’s soul gets confused in the semidarkness. Without light, an eye sees invisible. The hand is raised in a ritual gesture. A drop of fire tears apart the Dark Shadows. The shot of the gun, it was a spurt of blood. The lion froze, the flies stopped in the air, even the orchestra of angels fell silent. His heart was the hiding place of one of his mysterious stars. At dusk, engaged couples meet secretly. One thing begins and another dies.
