Sicilianità 'greca' e italianità alla vigilia della Grande Guerra. Il caso dell'Agamennone

Abstract

At the eve of the Great War, on the 16th of April of 1914 at sunset, a group of around a hundred people, from actors to musicians and dancers mounted the stage of the Greek theatre of Syracuse (Sicily), a two-thousand-five-hundred-year-old theatre, to enact a tragedy just equally old: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Not only did this production revisit the tragedy in a unique environment and represent one of its first rehashes in Italy; it also inaugurated a now more than a-hundred-year-old Festival, the longest running festival of ancient drama. In this paper, I am going to talk about the powers at play in the staging of Agamemnon: a strong nationalism was combined with a cosmopolitan attitude, a combination that grounded another project which became culturally and politically relevant so as to inform INDA’s beginnings, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Latin-Mediterranean theatre.