Project Miracle in Milan

Miracolo a Milano is a project aiming to bring together languages, sounds, characters and legends of our imaginary and political world, starting from the work and the personality of Cesare Zavattini.

In 2007, for the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Teatro Municipale Romolo Valli, the Fondazione I Teatri di Reggio Emilia commissioned the composer Giorgio Battistelli with a new work.
The novel Totò il buono, written by Cesare Zavattini, and his movie adaptation by Vittorio De Sica, (Miracolo a Milano), a masterpiece of neorealism, were the foundation for this new project. The result was a project divided into three different shows.

“This is a story about oil, angels, miracles,” Zavattini writes, introducing his novel.

Working within his immense production both written and testified, Totò il Buonoooo was born, a dramaturgy in which Totò’s fable dialogues and is invaded by the figure of its author, a secular oracle of Italian culture. From Totò’s fable we reach La veritàaaa, a film-testament in which the provocateur Zavattini is expelled from society and chased by a crowd of ordinary people, policemen and psychiatrists.

In the centre we find the musical adaptation of Miracolo a Milano, created in collaboration with Giorgio Battistelli. This project has a unique body made of actors, dancers, acrobatic musicians and traditional singers.

Miracolo a Milano is the tale of the forgotten, outcasts living in the outskirts of an imaginary city, who have the misfortune to discover an oil well in their shanty town.

This fantastic event gives Zavattini the inspiration to write a story in which class struggle is bathed in a poetic narrative, made of fabled and absolute tones.

A warning for the world that is foreshadowed in the fifties of the twentieth century.

The journey continues in the contemporary, up to the dramas and contradictions of our recent history: from the child found in the garden under the leaf of a cabbage we arrive at the wake for Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian poet, sacrificed, like his people, to the supreme divinity of our economy; this is Petrolio – Ken Saro Wiwa poeta e martire, the story of the mock trial of the Nigerian writer, defender and leader of the independence movement of the Ogoni people, condemned to death by hanging.

In our recent poetic past, homeless people were evicted after the discovery of oil and flew into the sky aboard brooms; in the 1990s, the Ogoni people, with the sole “fault” of living on the Niger Delta, were exterminated by gases of oil that were burned in open air and by hanging in case of protest.