Carmelo Rifici directs Paolo Pierobon in De Gasperi: l’Europa brucia [Europe is Burning], a play written by Angela Dematté, which brings to the stage the historical stature and complexity, the lights and shadows of the man/statesman Alcide De Gasperi, who dedicated himself totally to his political task to such an extent that he no longer perceived the boundary line between himself and his Nation and personally shouldered its burden, thereby inevitably becoming both its rebuilder and its victim.

“As I speak in this world assembly, I feel that everything, except your personal courtesy, is against me”, declared Alcide De Gasperi at the Paris Peace Conference on 10 August 1946. “Honourable Ministers and Delegates: for months and months I have waited in vain to be able to express to you in a general synthesis Italy's thoughts on the conditions of peace and, even today, appearing here in the role of a former enemy, a role that was never that of the Italian people, before you become too weary from long effort or yearn for a conclusion, I have made an effort to contain resentment and carefully choose the words I use, so that it is clear to all that we are far from wanting to be obstructive, but we intend instead to constructively favour your work insofar as it contributes to a more just order in the world. Whoever represents the Italian people today is challenged by openly conflicting duties. On the one hand, he must express the anxiety, the pain, and the anguished concern for the consequences of the peace treaty and, on the other, he must reaffirm the assurance of the new Italian democracy that the crisis of war will be overcome and the world will be renewed with valid instruments of peace.”
This man who had been and still was an anti-fascist - imprisoned for two years in Rome’s Regina Coeli jail – took on all the weight of Fascist Italy’s history with the aim of leading his country towards new opportunities in order to redeem it. His language appears to be straightforward, solid and emotional, rather than political or, in any case, full of a positive and humble rhetoric that is very different from today's.
The show investigates a man in search of rational, concrete, pragmatic solutions that he has absorbed from his native land and from his mother tongue, taking an interest in his objective vision and his use of language which excludes the use of words of lies. De Gasperi: l’Europa brucia [Europe is Burning] aims to explore this fragment of Italian history in the narrow and deeply rooted perspective of the life of the man/statesman Alcide De Gasperi in relation to his collaborators and his personal life.