Sermo humilis and lyricism in Italianesi by Saverio La Ruina

Abstract

The article discusses Italianesi, the theatrical monologue composed in 2011 and performed by Calabrian storyteller Saverio La Ruina, that presents in first person the life story of Tonino Cantisani, born in 1951 in an Albanian prison camp to an Italian soldier and an Albanian mother. Although Tonino is a fictional creation, through his protagonist La Ruina gives voice to a true story, a postwar tragedy of denied identity that official histories on both sides of the Cold War have preferred to forget. Suspected of subversion because of their ties to Italy, mother and son are incarcerated by the Albanian communist regime for over forty years, until the death of dictator Enver Hoxha opens the borders and compels Tonino to migrate to Italy. But while he had spent the first half of his life ostracized as an Italian in Albania, he discovers that his new homeland marginalizes him as well, shunning him as an Albanian in Italy. But Tonino and those he represents are redeemed through the profound, haunting simplicity of the Calabro-Italian dialect that La Ruina has invented for him, inserted in a narrative architecture based on a rhetoric of reticence and modesty, where words and silence joined to minimal, essential gestures and movements create a unique, organic discourse of great evocative power.