ROVERETO. They say that reality often surpasses fantasy. Especially in the bad. And the painful story of an ordinary man, of an ordinary country who manages to embody in one life all the possible evil that happened in the Novecentro is not fantastic. Guido Parteli, farmer-worker from Sfruz (Val di Non), is the protagonist of this tragedy. From his life, discovered a few years ago, was born the show «Guido Parteli, the subversive of Sfruz» dedicated to April 25th which will be staged tomorrow evening – Wednesday 24 April – at 8.30 pm at the Zandonai theater in Rovereto. The direction is by Michele Comite, the text and screenplay by Diego Leoni and Sergio Baldo.
The show tells the simple life of Parteli which led him to move within historical tragedies. «He left an indelible trace – say Leoni and Baldo – of himself in the archives of that power that spied on him and recorded him doggedly and methodically with the sole aim of erasing him and, when the time was right, of annihilating him (even the only photograph of him found it is that sign, which a compassionate and careful hand recently placed on the tomb of his brother Dario in Sfruz)”.
As soon as he became an adult, Parteli was enrolled in the Austro-Hungarian army: it was 1914, it was his first uniform, with which he fought against the Russian enemy on the fields of Galicia. Subsequently, he wore eight more uniforms: as a prisoner of the Russians, as a volunteer in the Savoy Battalion in Siberia, as an Italian soldier in the Expeditionary Force in the Far East, as a republican fighter in Spain, as a prisoner in the French camps, as a prisoner in Ventotene , as an internee in Bolzano, as a deportee to Dachau.
Between one and the other, Parteli lived very little in civilian clothes: a couple of years in the village once he returned from the East, a few more years in emigration between France and Luxembourg, a few months from the fall of fascism to the deportation .
Here, in its nine uniforms and in that terrible and mocking archival paradox all the evil of the last century is contained. «Once the war was over, the camps were opened, democracy was restored, about Parteli, as well as about all the “dark and infamous men” like him – we read in the presentation of the show – no one and nothing remembered and talked about, disappearing from public memory ( even from the valley, even from the village, even from the family sometimes), obscured in institutional memory, expelled from the future, even expunged from the resistance story: in August 1945, Francesco Dessimoni, Mansueto’s father, volunteered in Spain like Parteli and then, like him, deported and ended up in ashes in Germany, he asked the Provincial Patriots Commission to recognize his son’s contribution to the cause of Liberation, at least some money in exchange for his life. The response was prompt, it only took eight days, but it was negative and without appeal, because his story – we read – “has no connection with the partisans”.
Thus, with that practice the memory, of him and of the others, was also archived, which began to resurface only much later, at the dawn of the new century, when the patient, compassionate and stubborn hands of the researchers of the Rovereto History Laboratory began to recompose it: life by life, face by face, object by object, photo by photo.”
And then it became a public story, and now it is proposed again, through the life of one for all, so that the memory of evil never fades, since for us, as for the poet-prisoner Vittorio Sereni, “it is not about retaliation or rancor./ But of an inflexible memory”.
Wednesday 24 April 2024, 8.30 pm Zandonai Theatre, directed by Michele Comite. Narrator voices: Michele Comite, Alessandro Zanetti, Screenplay and editing Sergio Baldo, Diego Leoni.
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