Here they are, having landed in Calabria. They will be on display until October 23rd in the noble rooms of the Castle of Santa Severina (Crotone), a village halfway between the Ionian Sea and the Sila, in the exhibition «Pirandello drew. The chaos between the lines. Unpublished drawings and books by Luigi Pirandello.” They are sketches, images, “puppets” drawn in pencil or black Indian ink between 1898 and 1922 by the “son of Chaos” Luigi Pirandello during the exam sessions, on the margins of the pages of the registers of the official minutes and on the grade tables reported by the students, when he taught Italian Literature and Stylistics at the Istituto Superiore Feminine di Magistero of Rome (now the Roma Tre University): in commission with the great playwright of Girgenti there were illustrious colleagues, including the Sicilians Ugo Fleres, from Messina and a close friend, Giuseppe Aurelio Costanzo, as well as Maria Montessori and also the original teacher from Santa Severina Nicolò D’Alfonso.
The “corpus”, presented for the first time outside the academic context, also includes three original registers in the display case with sketches in which Pirandello portrayed, among other things, “praying” candidates, animals such as flies, cats, dogs, owls, and the members of the commission themselves. And then photographic reproductions of the minutes on panels, Pirandellian publications and frontispieces of newspapers printed in the first decades of the 20th century.
The credit for the discovery of the drawings, exhibited at the Roman University last October, goes to RomaTre university professors Giuseppe Crimi, Manuela Riosa and Monica Venturini, present at the inauguration. «These unpublished drawings largely attributable to Luigi Pirandello – explained among other things the prof. Crimi – they tell us that the writer allowed the creative part of himself to emerge in the graphic sign.”
The implementation of the project, sponsored by the Municipality of Santa Severina with the contribution of the Calabria Region with CAP resources 2014–2020, Action 6.8. was made possible thanks to the “Fabbrica delle Arti” association, in collaboration with Skené Cultura and the Roma Tre University, with the support of the Aristippo cooperative, managing body of the Santa Severina Castle, and the Pro Loco Siberene. The Crotone composer and theater director Franco Eco is artistic director of the project.