Simone Cristicchi tells the story of the years after that Peace Treaty, of the exodus of Italian citizens (more than 300 thousand souls) from the lands, the journey aboard the Tuscania, from a Yugoslavia that did not want them to an Italy that did not want them. They were, as the actor and singer tells, fishermen, artisans

 An hour and a half of history, without discounts and without ideologies. With no parts to defend, except the stories, the many small stories of so many poor people: exiles or thrown into sinkholes, condemned to concentration camps or forced to embark, towards hostile lands. An hour and a half of deep emotion with a Simone Cristicchi who is truly even more imposing and great than he already is, yet delicate in approaching stories, tales. His Exodus is a journey that starts in the 20s, and even hints at before, when Slavs and Italians lived together in Istria and Dalmatia, a land where different cultures met. It starts from fascism, from the violence of those who wanted - and did not make a drama out of it - to erase the Slavic populations from Istria because it was Italy. The story begins there and then proceeds step by step, held together by a deep darkness, by an infinite sense of death and – after 1947 – by an infinite return to Warehouse 18, to what is now a museum in the Old Port of Trieste that preserves thousands of names, thousands of stories, thousands of everyday objects, thousands of black and white memories of people forced to leave.

They were Italians then, when Tito's partisans liberated that land from a dictatorship by establishing another. There is the history of the foibe, the history of violence and abuse in the name of a plan that saw Tito's great Yugoslavia 'purged' of Italians, just as Mussolini had seen that strip of land purged of Slavs. War is war. And the dead are dead, whether they are the Slavs of the 20s, or the Italians of the following years, those of liberation, those after the Peace Treaty of 1947 that recognized Yugoslavia, as compensation for the war and punished defeated Italy, Istria and the coastal lands.

History will have to be revised one day, freed from ideologies, freed from preconceived schemes. Seen from the side of the last. Who are men and women, children, boys who happened to be in the middle, who are families with their poor furniture and work tools stored in a warehouse in the old port of Trieste and left there forever. A name engraved and a deep, heavy silence. A very small, appreciable attempt, Simone Cristicchi makes it, and he deserves credit for it. He is a philosopher, not a historian, but it doesn't matter. The mere attempt to reread a history in which opposing ideologies clash on the side of those who have only suffered that history is a merit, regardless.

Simone Cristicchi recounts the years after that Peace Treaty, the exodus of Italian citizens (more than 300 thousand souls) from the lands, the journey aboard the Toscana, from a Yugoslavia that did not want them to an Italy that did not want them. They were, as the actor and singer recounts, fishermen, artisans. They were students and elderly people. They were babies in swaddling clothes or – like Sergio Endrigo – 14-year-olds forced to leave with the few things they could carry with them, with the memory of a native land to which they would never return, with the trauma, which will never abandon them, of a deep hostility breathed in a country that certainly did not welcome them with open arms. They were public employees, teachers, workers. They were children like the one – just one year old – who died of exposure in a collection camp on the Trieste Karst. The photos pass on the screen. A particularly hard story, even to listen to, emotionally strong. Cristicchi brings it on stage alone, sometimes accompanying himself with the guitar, other times with the images that scroll on the screen, but most of the time with words alone.

Asola on Friday night brought to the stage a truly intense, hard and engaging show, truly capable of telling a difficult story that we tend to forget or erase in the name of an ideology. Whatever it is. The show that begins with a suitcase and ends with empty chairs, and names, and stories that mix, of Slavs, of Italians and again of Italians who left forever, put aside, badly tolerated even in Italy. Stories of ordinary forgotten people. The actor's last appeal is not to forget. A sort of 11th essential commandment entrusted to her by an elderly exile after the show was revived in Trieste. Not to forget that the plant of extremism and war always produces an unhealthy fruit. Empty chairs, black and white photos and a deep pain, difficult to erase and forget...

NC
Source: OglioPoNews – 13/02/2022