"The city kept to moving around to me just as if I didn't exist..."
A gray misanthrope roams the streets of a Rome of a few decades ago. It is the usual deceptive Rome, of sunsets and monuments, of faccendieri, workers, traders, wasters of time, who go around
around to themselves. At the edge of this mellifluous buzz is a mythomaniac who cannot to make contact with this metropolitan "non-reality": he can only perform the tiny, abnormal, deformed
actions that his mania dictates to him, directing them to according to his sensations, the impertinent impulses he receives, almost always acoustically, from this noisy bubble outside his microcosm.
And in this sonic world there is room for everything, talking places and characters from human comedy, there is even room for a girlfriend who will end up murdered, with related police investigation and ending(?) from yellow.
Who is the culprit? Of what? Of the (non)behavior of the protagonist? Of the (non)behavior of others? Of the uncertain - then - visible drift of a society that was becoming dissonant? Of the insordination to the. truth? Of what truth? Advertisement.

The Beautiful Lies - or will a stamp trader be able to fly?
In this very unique anti-romance by Malerba, the protagonist - who since from childhood has been observing instead of participating like other children - "reveals" to us that in the present he is forced to "to practice solely imagination as the yardstick of the nothing that happens to him." In him, therefore, I immediately felt a sympathetic analogy with those who, living from sensitive arts such as theater, move in alternative worlds, with often wonderfully invented figures and sounds replacing to what for others are "normal" social relations.The first idea was to tell this story with its somewhat demodé settings, precisely because of its being on the borderline of the transition between an era (the story is from 1966 but we like to imagine itoscenically a few years ahead), that of the petty bourgeois settling of post-war Italy and that of the complete drift of those "musts" that were supposed to make the safety of this Italietta. And the starting suggestion could only be radio, that is, we thought of an original to episodes for radio: what medium is more suitable to a somewhat vintage "sound" tale? Television, cinemas, stores still artisans, neighborhoods still human, petty bourgeois routines with snake eggs ready to to hatch deconstructing themselves, antennas, roofs, churches with their domes. Still going to the sea or to seeing airplanes take off gave poetic suggestions and the "dream" had its motif, as did neon signs and flooding of the Tiber, and a traffic made of multiple Lancias and Seicentos. But already there was no more neorealism, the purity of the boys of life, and the country, crossed from various currents and accidents, was beginning to to cultivate a new "lie." In this climate the temperament in which I would grow up was being prepared, and what is in the story is also the sound of my childhood, as well as that of the protagonist's hallucinations. "Postmodernism" was coming and would pass, the discourse would begin to wrap around itself, those sounds would begin to to multiply to becomefrastuono. And so in this scenario the mind of the mythomaniac of The Serpent, probably -but not necessarily- already rehearsed from a bombing, (underground... and the bombs bursting on our heads) - retreats and works to itself: it is himself (or the author?) to directing it like a radar, taking the sounds of the everyday and making them the score of his own world (to invent these scenes one has to be carried) with characters of his own, in which every now and then appears the conviction that one day he, a stamp salesman, will soar. There are so many "auditory" metaphors in Malerba's text that make it a continuous recorder of sensations (the whole world is a kind of sound box where natural concerts resonate) It is a game,however,of making worlds from itself-for itself-that can get out of hand,and create suspicion.With Hubert Westkemper,we wanted to create a sound score,which sows the trail of precisely suspicious notes,and basically we went along with the protagonist who "obsessively" hears those sounds that seem to chase him and are of various kinds,a range from the natural to the supernatural. (...some things seem invented on purpose,they just stand there and talk, you just have to make them talk...) This whole story is told to us by an actor. From the theater. "to dint of talking about telling they will believe me ... a visionary".Franco Mazzi, with his brought joyciano, stationary to a microphone, reads the words of the thoughts of the protagonist of the story who wants to convince us (with thoughts?) that he is not standing still,but is spinning like a misanthropic flaneur, and we follow him and go along with him in his hearing and reporting the voices of the other characters as well. Even dreams, even shadows, using the field of possibilities that Malerba'sopera "almost open" offers us. Perhaps in this multiplicity of sounds and evocations lies the solution of the detective story, of the mystery that to a certain point becomes evident, with a crime. In an artifactual world sooner or later there always escapes excessive, even very bloody, action. Isn't that what happens in reality today? Advertising?!p.s.- to speaking of advertising... Two words about the interludes that create register contrasts through the use of a lexicon from almanac, irreverent and popularizing at the same time: they are our "commercials," they are the dedication to what was also the author of carousels and advertising, when this was done by "authors" to make ends meet.Gianluca Bottoni