Spoltore (Pescara) – A meeting of high historical-cultural profile took place in Spoltore on the afternoon of 18 October 2024 at the Art Gallery of the Mutual Aid Workers’ Society (Soms), chaired by Luigi Spina.
Franca De Santis presented two anthologies dedicated to the centenary of Eleonora Duse‘s death, published by the Tabula Fati publishing house.
Pierfranco Bruni
“Eleonora Duse. Like the wave on the dune, the Divine that became fire”, first published in May which collects the contributions of 28 academic authors, with the scientific direction of Pierfranco Bruni (president of the Capital of the book 2024) who discuss with critical thought and notable expository ability on the artistic-cultural life of the most famous theater actress that Italy boasts between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the passage through the Belle Époque, between troubled loves and unattainable balances , until the Great War which reawakens a renewed love of country.
The second anthology, released in September 2024, entitled “The Divine and the Poet, in the recitation of the dream” instead collects the compositions of poets whose D’Annunzio breath is perceptible from the first pages, followed by the works of young people who perhaps, for the first time on this occasion, wear the clothes of the Divine Eleonora Duse and the Vate Gabriele d’Annunzio, to retrace their sentimental partnership and poetic growth. “These guys are very good – commented Franca De Santis – who have been able to grasp the most delicate aspects by proposing them in a modern key and in current situations contemporary to us”.
The much more streamlined, fresh and lively second volume offers us Gabriele and Eleonora here among us.
The meeting was articulated very well by the journalist and historical essayist Cristiano Vignali, an expert on D’Annunzio who was able to keep the bar of attention high with targeted and pertinent questions and interventions, so much so as to involve the president of Soms Luigi Spina who, with suggestive interventions, combined the Duse discourse and Italian politics at the end of the nineteenth century through friendships shared between the actress and women belonging to the Royal House.
Cristiano Vignali pointed out how “Duse’s theatrical originality was that of moving spontaneously and with great expressiveness, human warmth and femininity, things that in some Italian theatres, such as those of Papal Rome, were almost unknown until a few decades ago.” Before. Furthermore, Vignali remarked how “the figure of artists, poets and cultural personalities in general, such as Eleonora Duse and Gabriele d’Annunzio, contributed to creating the Italians, that is, the national cultural identity of the Bel Paese, for example through shows of Italian classical culture such as Francesca da Rimini by d’Annunzio, masterfully interpreted by Eleonora Duse on the stage, or Juliet and Romeo in which Duse acted since she was a child in the street shows of her parents’ theater company. Precisely for this reason – concluded Cristiano Vignali – Eleonora Duse and Gabriele d’Annunzio are two great Italians, children of an Italy which, as history demonstrates, has always been alive in the hearts and minds of artists and writers and which was born with ancient Rome , well before the legal and administrative union of 1860”.
In Cristiano Vignali’s historical-political speech, Antonio Fares, professor and expert in geopolitics, joined the audience with a speech on the history of the origins of the Italian nation.
At this point, Franca De Santis, editor of the two volumes, could have opened the discussion on one of her essays published last year, again on the difficult balance between those who oppress and those who are oppressed in the context of Manzoni’s Adelchi.
Also present at the meeting was the publisher Marco Solfanelli who then stopped with the attendees for refreshments and a toast in honor of the Divine and the Pope. Two great Italians.
