Monica Bellucci is stepping on an Italian stage for the first time, that of the Spoleto Festival, after making her theater debut last year, at the Studio Marigny in Paris, on the occasion of the publication of the book to edited by Tom Volf Maria Callas. Letters and Memoirs, published from Rizzoli.

From her modest childhood spent to New York to the war years in Athens, from her muted debut atOpera to the heights of an internationally acclaimed career marked from scandals and personal tribulations, from her idealized love for her husband to her overwhelming passion for Onassis, this unique account reveals, for the first time, the true story of Maria Callas behind the legend. to times reveals Maria to us as a vulnerable woman torn between her life on stage and her private life, to times Callas, the artist victimized by her own demands and in perpetual battle with her voice, and who, despite the Parisian loneliness of her final years, will continue to to work tirelessly until her last breath at the age of 53.

A deeply moving and fascinating self-portrait of the greatest voice of the 20th Century.

"This show is for me the result of 7 years of dedicated work to Maria Callas. In the film Maria by Callas (released in 45 countries in 2018) some of the letters were already there in the background.

They represented for me the most intimate voice of the woman behind the legend, more Maria than Callas. In the exhibition that bore the same name, once again some of these letters were there, this time physically inside display cases. With the book Maria Callas. Lettres & Mémoires, I felt I was adding the final touch to the construction of a huge and arduous multi-project through a common perspective: putting Maria's voice center stage and allowing her, through a series of unpublished documents and archival materials, to tell her own story, in her own words.

Simultaneously with the publication of the book, my meeting with Monica Bellucci gave birth to this latest project, on stage this time. It was a real challenge, to have the responsibility and ability to put Callas' life in writing, using only and exclusively her words, in a performance that lasts just over an hour. In fact, we are talking about 30 years of her life full of glory and pain, unfolding before our eyes. Her memoir, which is incomplete, opens and closes the show. Maria speaks directly to the audience and confides in them, revealing herself as never before. For the first time it is she to telling her story, no longer others to speaking on her behalf. And it is precisely through these numerous letters, addressed to people to close to her, some anonymous, some famous, that we come to to discover an unrecognizable and unknown woman; strong and vulnerable at the same time; full of ambition and dreams in her younger years; full of doubts and suffering in her later years.

The show was conceived in three parts, which follow one another chronologically, following the natural scanning of the three decades Callas traversed: the 1950s, her first stage performances and her marriage to Meneghini; the 1960s, her meeting with Onassis and their love affair, which broke off eight years later; and the 1970s, her last years, steeped in nostalgia and loneliness.

In the center of the scene is a sofa, an exact reproduction of the one that was in Avenue Georges Mandel, the Paris apartment where Callas spent the last 15 years of her life. Next to the sofa, a gramophone, with which Maria listened to her own recordings and excerpts from Bel Canto, a genre she so loved.

This music, as well as its recordings, can be heard at various times during the performance, as if they were a hyphen joining one letter to another, to signifying the passing of time, a voice that begins to gushing out with all the vigor of youth and which, to little to little, begins to to fade away, leaving behind nothing but a piano, playing in solitude, melodies lost from time.

Monica Bellucci wears a dress that belonged to Callas, loaned from the Italian My private Callas collection, which was closed for over 60 years, and never worn from anyone else. This dress and Monica's spectacular transformation, as well as the play of light and chiaroscuro, give the impression of really being in Callas' living room, with her spirit reappearing for a brief time to share, through Maria's own words, an intimate moment with her audience."

Tom Volf