After Pirandello’s Il berretto a sonagli [The Cap and Bells], presented last season, Gabriele Lavia - one of the most representative figures of the Italian theatre of the last forty years - is the director of this amusing comedy by Goldoni, Un curioso accidente [A Curious Accidental Event]

Among the works of Goldoni that are most translated and staged abroad, this play tells the story of the Dutch merchant Filiberto who finds himself hosting in his own home a penniless young officer, who falls in reciprocated love with his daughter Giannina. Faced with the idea of becoming related by marriage to a penniless man, Filiberto desperately tries to find a solution that would distract the attention of the penniless nobleman away from both his daughter and his estate. But the meek Giannina does not lose heart and she finds a way to deceive her father in a "curious accidental event" which allows her to marry her beloved officer without suffering punishment from anyone.
“This comedy”, as the author writes in the preface of the first edition, "is nothing but a true, very true story that happened, not long ago, in a Dutch city. It was told to me by trustworthy people in Venice at the Caffé della Sultana, in San Marco Square, and it was those people who inspired me to write a comic representation of it. The pure fact, in the manner in which it was presented to me, was so circumstantial that, although true, it seemed improbable, and all my greatest effort was to make it more credible and less fictional. So much so, that there are extravagances in nature, which cannot be represented on the stage, because they are too contrary to known characters, or they exceed the normal order of human conduct!”.