Taste of sea

Genoa – Adventures scented with saltiness bring back to the surface, thanks to the theater, forgotten emotions, removed, in some cases as much linked to popular culture as unrelated to official culture. And they push us to question an Italian anomaly.

It is about “Captains courageous”, a project conceived by Sergio Maifredi with the support of the Port Authority System of the Western Ligurian Sea and the patronage of the Italian Mercantile Navy Academy, which leads to the symbolic place of the Genoese navy, Palazzo San Giorgio novels and sea ballads reinterpreted by great actors and musicians until 7 April.

The choice of the artistic director is not to transform all the stories into a summary (from “The old man and the sea” to “The black corsair”, “The treasure islands”, “Moby Dick”, “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea “ “Robinson Crusoe”, “Ulysses, Ahab Noah”. Instead, various possible paths were chosen among the pages with Roberto Alinghieri (in the photo) David Riondino, Giuseppe Cederna, Paolo Rossi, Andrea Nicolini and Moni Ovadia, to name a few of the interpreters.

And here we are. Why, among the texts chosen in this “strangely” original project in a country bordered above all by coasts, are the texts chosen, among which there is no shortage of those recognized as absolute masterpieces of cultured literature, are mainly foreign?

Because there is an actual production imbalance and critical attention to the literature of the sea between Italy, Spain, France, England which has its roots in the years of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that follow the great geographical discoveries and accompany the first colonizations. The political and economic chessboard of the boot is cut off from the great ocean routes that mix economic and cultural interests and create, as far as possible in times when illiteracy is widespread, pools of readers interested in exotic topics.

The travel reports of the missionaries from us do not translate into novels. What is certain is that when, at the end of the nineteenth century, a more than prolific producer of adventures such as Emilio Salgari also appeared in Italy, he had enormous success but, with the hundred novels, he earned the label of consumer author par excellence. In “Captains Courageous” we find him, only Italian in the company of the greats above all suspicion. Let us ask ourselves what sense he has, therefore, in a cultured theatrical-literary review, turning on the limelight on his “Black Corsair”, that is the lord of Ventimiglia who chases the killer of his brother among the buccaneers of Tortuga.