Passaggi Segreti hystory

On 2002 I viaggi sentimentali changed its name in Passaggi Segreti®.

Project “I viaggi sentimentali” born in 1997 by the collaboration between Fondazione Ippolito Nievo (founder of Parchi Letterari® in Italy) and La Bilancia Produzioni, and ended in 2001. The project used to start by a literary inspiration to find a site related to it. During years this direction reversed: historical place became the starting point. Historical and architectural patrimony becomes the main character, inspirating a literary and historical research.

Manifestation Passaggi Segreti® has been launched with three new spectacles:
- Villa d’Este - Tivoli - Una festa in giardino;
- Foro di Augusto - I fasti e le tristezze, theatre event and live music by Ambrogio Sparagna;
- Villa Pamphili - Imbarco per Citera.

Una in giardino - A garden party represented a double, unique and pecious event: Villa d’Este - for the first time reopend during night - became protagonist of a wandering theatre spectacle among its park and rooms.
The audience was invited to one of Ippolito d’Este great parties: while walking on its gardens and rooms you could listen to Tasso, Ariosto, Cellini, Michelangelo verses.

In I fasti e le tristezze - The glories and the sorrows the emperor Augustus is seen as the new morality in costumes and a new rationality in politics, while Ovid, that inspired the lyrics of the show, is the irreverent sensuality, the exorcism in verses of an era ungrateful to his lyrical spirit. The same stones that once saw them as antagonists turn into a big theater where the audience listen to those aspects and secrets of private life the Roman Rmperor had tried to remove: his endless love stories as well as his tricks to
court and conquer women. Then music by Ambrose Sparagna and his little organs's orchestra, with its Dionysian spirit, becomes the essential counterpart of this feast for senses, accompanying step by step with his exuberant whirlwind of sounds, this unique journey through the Forum of Augustus.

A show even more original was Imbarco per Citéra - Boarding for Cythera, a comédie-ballet elaborated for Villa Pamphili, where Ovid's versesare mixed with La Motte's ones, one of the eighteenth-century author. This is a comedy mixed with drama, farce and classic tragedy. On one side plays on the misunderstandings and jokes of classic eighteenth-century classic comedy, on the other it is immersed in mythology that has fascinated us since antiquity. In fiction that hides the real identity of characters, we learn Ovid's teachings. Inside the garden, the musical event "Matter and Symmetries" has also played thanks to Ars Ludi Percussion Ensemble.

Year after year these three new productions have committed the same artistic cast and technicians. This peculiarity of consistency and continuity brings to the realization of the event stableness and solidity. These three new productions have committed, in addition to the authors of the original texts, the same core and crew, which consisted of continuity makes the realization of the event from year to year more stable and solid.

Passaggi Segreti® continued also during fall with a new representation in Capitoline Museums: Dolce Rome - A Night in the Capitoline Museum. Immersed in an atmosphere that makes rooms, stairs and works of art lively and surreal, Giulio, an uninspired film director, starts a journey between reality and dreams. This path will lead him from the greatness of ancient Rome to the glories of the Renaissance popes. Following Giulio, the audience meets a group of quirky and ambiguous characters, belonging to antiquity as well as to our time and constantly poised between reality and representation: an intellectual prig, a spoiled diva, an arrogant politician, a foreign tourist, ending with Lucrezia d'Este and Pope Clement VIII.