Giovanni Truppi - La lunga fiaba di sabbia

A journey with Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Calvino and Giovanni Truppi

In 1959 Pier Paolo Pasolini drove along the entire Italian coast. He writes The Long Sand Road, a travel diary that is together reportage, dream, document. A changing Italy, showing itself in a swimsuit but still bearing visible wounds. Pasolini's words collect life on beaches, in faces, in bodies. And a real journey, made of heat, sand, and political insights.

A few years earlier, in 1956, Italo Calvino made another journey: in Fiabe italiane he collected and rewrote two hundred popular fairy tales from all over Italy. A symbolic and archaic map emerges: Italy seen through myth, transformation, fear, hunger, desire. Italian fairy tales are an atlas of the collective voice of our past.

The long sandy fairy tale brings these two worlds together: the epitaph to the peasant world written by Pasolini in dialogue with the testament of this world, which Calvino has secured.

Each stop on Pasolini's journey corresponds to a fairy tale from the same region. The geographical journey turns into a poetic journey. The Italian coast becomes a narrative line where reality and imagination speak to each other.

Performing this score is Giovanni Truppi, singer-songwriter and author of the travel book L'avventura, inspired by Pasolini's La lunga strada di sabbia. 

In this reading, accompanied by the performance of a handful of pieces chosen from traditional repertoire and songs written by Pasolini, Truppi strips himself of his repertoire to lend his voice to a collective narrative. He is not the protagonist, but the intermediary.

The result is not a concert, nor a theatrical performance, nor a reading. And a hybrid, evocative form, in which the oral word becomes geography, the song echoes, the fairy tale becomes body.