To look for and be able to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, is not hell, and to make it last, and to give it space."

Massimo Popolizio and Javier Girotto together to recreate the extraordinarily evocative atmosphere evoked from some pages of Italo Calvino′s text "The Invisible Cities." Popolizio voices both to Marco Polo and his listener, the melancholy Emperor Kublai Kan, now aware of how little his boundless power matters because so much of the world is falling apart. The cities described from Marco are elusive, utopian and to times seem to mock the traveler himself in an endless fugue of distorting mirrors. The dialogue between music and word is continuous, thus a kind of real jam session arises and the music acquires dramaturgical value.

In the choice of texts Teresa Pedroni preferred the more spectacular aspect where the word becomes more evocative and more pregnant with meaning. The choice of jazz as a musical language also contributes to interpreting the color and sensations that from they give rise to on the edge of irony and lightness: the saxes, clarinets and Andean flutes of Javier Girotto intertwine their sounds with the word, set in a magical space illuminated from a clever play of light. In the repetition of the fantastic conversations between Emperor Khan and Marco, an intermediate zone slowly emerges in which the two interlocutors, thanks to to a mysterious synergy, transform the desires of the one and the dreams of the other into vision and narrative.
Who commands the tale is not the voice, it is the ear, says Marco Polo. So the performance, making these words its own, leaves the audience free to create its own mental path, guided from an incessant dialogue between voice and music that together speak of the other, of travel, of the freedom to surrender to emotions without questioning.

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