“Joppoliana”, a special project of the Ministry of Culture, organized by the association Il Castello di Sancio, with the artistic direction of Roberto Zorn Bonaventura, will remember Beniamino Joppolo from Monday 13 October in Messina until 26 October in Naso. The event is sponsored by the municipalities of Messina and Naso.
On Monday (10am – 1pm, Vittorio Emanuele Book Shop) there will be a meeting in which Giovanni Joppolo, son of the writer, will take part, with the participation of Vincenzo Bonaventura, theater critic; Lucio Falcone, Pungitopo editions; Angela Pipitò, Italia Nostra, Presidio Nebrodi, former director of the Provincial Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Messina; Dario Tomasello, university professor; Maurizio Puglisi, former interpreter of “I Carabinieri” in the Vittorio Emanuele theater; Roberto Bonaventura, former director of “I Microzoi” in the Sala Laudamo. Readings by Monia Alfieri, Gerri Cucinotta and Giuseppe Giamboi.
In the afternoon of the same day (3pm – 5pm), in the Cospecs of the University (Sala Cinema, via Concezione), we will talk about Joppolo’s best-known theatrical text, “I Carabinieri”, staged in 1962 by Roberto Rossellini in what was the only theatrical direction by the great director (with sets and costumes by Renato Guttuso) and from which in 1963 graphic designer Francesco Calogero.
From the 23rd to the 26th in the Alfieri Theater in Naso there will be a workshop dedicated to Joppolo’s theatre, open rehearsals and stage readings with contributions from Monia Alfieri, Gaspare Balsamo, Roberto Zorn Bonaventura, Ninni Bruschetta, Gianluca Cesale, Giorgia Di Giovanni, Pierfrancesco Mucari, Michele Sinisi, Carla Tatò, Togo and others.
Beniamino Joppolo (Patti, Messina, 1906 – Paris, 1963) represents a unique case in the Italian artistic world. Playwright, narrator, poet, essayist, painter, he was able to excel in each of his activities, even if perhaps the theater was his most lively vocation. It should also be remembered that it was he who wrote the first manifesto of Spatialism, together with Lucio Fontana and Milena Milani, and was also a leading theorist-artist of the Corrente group, which also included the painter Giuseppe Migneco, who had been his schoolmate in Messina in the Maurolico high school. Many of the episodes relating to the years spent in the city of the Stretti are contained in the autobiographical novel “The double story”, originally published by Mondadori and recently revived by Pungitopo, which is meritoriously republishing Joppolo’s texts, including the theatre, of which two volumes have already been published.
«Joppolo – his son Giovanni recalls in a writing – lived his childhood in a small village in the Nebrodi, Sinagra. His mother was from a noble family from Patti, a coastal town overlooking the Aeolian Islands. His father was a professor of Italian literature, Latin and Greek at the Maurolico high school in Messina. He was born into a family of expired nobles, descendants of the counts of Naso, related to the Piccolos, the family of the poet Lucio Piccolo.
«At the beginning of the century these mountain villages of the Nebrodi chain (Sinagra, Ucria, Naso) were remote places, isolated from the coastal centres, with burning social and economic problems. There are precise hints to this reality in novels such as “La giostra di Michele Civa” and “The double story”, in theatrical works such as “The waters” and “I carabinieri”.
«But the vision of Sicily in Joppolo’s work does not hinge directly on history or cultural anthropology. His research is not related to that of writers such as Brancati and later Sciascia. Joppolo has his own particular way of contextualising, where the physical and mental geography of the Nebrodi is present and reconstitutable but voluntarily abstracted. Perhaps because Joppolo’s concerns were more anchored in the post-war utopia, that is, more avant-garde, more universalistic than identitarian or, as has been said for some years now, postmodern. Joppolo, on the other hand, is totally modern, fully participating in the avant-garde utopia of the fifties.”