"It is very vivid even today, in the dormant and most recondite echoes of the peasant consciousness, the memory of their revolt, an inhuman revolt, which starts from death and knows only death, where ferocity is born from despair, where, without illusions, the peasant civilization defended its own nature against that other civilization which is against it and which, without understanding it, eternally subjugates it" (Carlo Levi)

1861-2011: Italy celebrates 150 years of national unity.

In the year dedicated to the celebration of what was certainly the realization of a political dream shared from statesmen, artists and intellectuals, however, it cannot be forgotten that Italian unification was a difficult and painful process that left many victims on the road, men and women who vigorously opposed to a political project they could not share: in fact, unification meant that for many peasants in southern and northern Italy it was impossible to build a decent future.

Faced to with a unity that was being achieved by force of arms, armed resistance could only be organized, a resistance that was destined to to go down in history as brigandage.
The brigands - ruthless, rebellious, heinous - found themselves to to be the instrument of shifty and ambiguous powers, used and then abandoned by the masters of all time, those barons and landowners always ready to to change flags. The desperate rebellion of the brigands was stifled in blood, mocked by treachery, repressed from armies and special laws: in fact, the newly formed Kingdom of Italy deployed half of its entire army against the peasants, and the number of casualties in what was to for all intents and purposes a civil war is higher than the total number of the Wars of Independence.

Marco Baliani and Felice Cappa, for the dramaturgy of Maria Maglietta, read in the story of the bandit Carmine Crocco the emblematic history of a misunderstanding, of a civil defeat, of an absence of political farsightedness that still heavily affects the history of our country today.
The lives of brigands thus become the red thread through which to reread and investigate the history of a country that, at birth, was nourished by the popular enthusiasm aroused by Garibaldi′s promises, but then failed to to guarantee minimum rights for a dignified life.

On stage Marco Baliani, to retrace the events, to reconstruct the circumstances and to illuminate the places that the protagonists of those events consigned to history. Accompanying the narrator's words on stage are other characters, two commoners, a baron and a Piedmontese soldier, who thus contribute to to complete the mosaic of the story.

"The succession and overlapping of words and images is an operation of excavation in the history of Italy, which uncovers uncomfortable truths and leaves on the field remnants of an unreconciled country, of an unreconciled land, where the losers of all time are left with only the last necessary humiliation: to become foreigners to themselves, losing themselves in the innumerable figures of emigrants" (Marco Baliani and Felice Cappa): this is in fact the fate of eight million peasants, men and women from southern and northern Italy who in the years of the birth of the new Italian state are forced to to leave the country, lest they be killed, lest they die of hunger, famine, and despair.

Forced or voluntary migration and the struggles of those who claim fundamental rights are themes that cross all eras: for this reason, the narrative remains anchored in our present, characterized from conflicts that cannot be forgotten, and restores the echo of the pain of so many migrants who yesterday and today are forced to to leave their countries, facing the hardships of a journey that very often ends tragically.

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