Director Alessandro Baricco chooses actor Gabriele Vacis as the voice actor in "Tucidide. Atene contro Melo" with Stefania Rocca and Valeria Solarino, to Spoleto premiere

Spoleto, June 14, 2023 - Gabriele Vacis has been added to the cast of the new play by Alessandro Baricco Tucidide. Atene contro Melo, which premieres next Thursday, June 29, at Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto. Baricco, who is the author of the text and director, chose Vacis to perform alongside to Stefania Rocca and Valeria Solarino for the new production, which also features on stage the 100 Cellos, the prodigious ensemble of one hundred cellists founded from Giovanni Sollima. One of the most relevant musicians on the contemporary scene, Sollima, a cellist and composer, is also the author of the original music as well as a performer. Musical direction is also provided by to Enrico Melozzi.

"For health reasons, I will not be able to be myself on stage," Alessandro Baricco made known. "I wished and asked to Gabriele Vacis to interpret it, it is a perfect text for him and this allows me to concentrate on directing. I will be to Spoleto to direct it and bring it to the stage."

Gabriele Vacis has been permanent director of the Teatro Stabile di Torino, director of the Teatro Regionale Alessandrino and I Teatri di Reggio Emilia. He directed the actors and directors courses of the Paolo Grassi School in Milan and the Actors School of the Teatro Stabile of Turin. He founded and directed the Laboratorio Teatro Settimo, conceived and directed festivals such as Torino Spiritualità. He published, with Marco Paolini, Il racconto del Vajont, from whose show won three television Oscars. His film Uno scampolo di paradiso won the Jury Prize at the Annecy Film Festival. He founded the Institute of Theatre Practices for the Care of the Person. He teaches Institutions of Directing at the Catholic University of Milan.

to starting from the pages of Thucydides' Peloponnesian War , Baricco recounts the events that took place in 416 to.C. and the Athenian ultimatum to the inhabitants of the island of Melo, in the Cyclades: submit to their rule or perish. The refusal of the Melii gives rise to to an exemplary punishment, one of the most tragic episodes of the war: the destruction of the city, the killing of all the men and the deportation as slaves of women and children. The disproportion of the forces on the field was enormous, the overwhelming power of the Athenians obvious. Nevertheless, before giving the word to arms, Athenians and Meli met to negotiate the future of the island.

"Curiously enough," Baricco explains, "Thucydides recounts this meeting of ambassadors as if he had participated in it: he reports the exact words spoken by the ambassadors, and he reconstructs down to the last detail, and in a dramatically vivid way, the verbal clash between the two sides. Though he was a historian (indeed, the first of historians) he ended up in those pages writing about theater and beautiful theater. Therefore, bringing those pages to the stage seems almost a way of bringing them to to fruition, making them reach where they obscurely dreamed of going."