Cardinal Ravasi: “A particularly suggestive and significant experience”
“The theater as an opportunity for redemption, the prison as a place of redemption and no longer just detention, Dante’s pietas as viaticum for a different life “. This is the message of the recitation of three cantos of Dante’s Inferno, by as many inmates under maximum security who, for the first time after almost thirty years, they left the Rebibbia prison for three hours and under escort to stage today at the Roma Tre University an extract of ‘Dante Alighieri Florentine fugitive’, directed by Fabio Cavalli. The authorization was granted in the form of external work and not of the prize permit, for recognition of the rehabilitation function of the theatrical activity in prison. “We believe in the practice of theater in prison as an instrument of redemption, as a decisive element in building a bridge between the penitentiary community and external society”, he explains the rector of the University of Roma Tre, Luca Pietromarchi.
On stage, the three inmate-actors acted in their native dialect the songs that Dante dedicated to Count Ugolino, Ulisse and Paolo and Francesca. Three translations in Neapolitan, Calabrian and Sicilian to make the parallelism between the condemned and the damned even more realistic. For Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, “in the civilization of every people, theater has always occupied an important space. It has been in art through representations, in religion through liturgy, in society itself with its public rituals. This is why the experience is particularly suggestive and significant. of the theater in the Rebibbia prison“.
Source-www.adnkronos.com