Is it still possible to sing, after having wounded the city, mutilated childhood and lost memory?
From the painful question of what remains of singing, when the world is plundered of beauty and justice, Nabucco_Canto del Mondo mutilato takes shape, the new site-specific creation by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, conceived on commission from the Verdi Festival for the Petitot Gallery of the Pilotta Monumental Complex.
Lenz Fondazione's new performative and visual work makes the famous ‘Va’, pensiero’ of Verdi's Nabucco contemporary material for reflecting on a present riddled with predatory dynamics, which are leading to the destruction of entire communities and ecosystems.
October 12-13, 8:00 PM + October 14-15, 7:00 PM
Monumental complex of Pilotta
Special Commission for the 2026 Verdi Festival
Lenz's dialogue with Giuseppe Verdi's musical opera continues, having begun in 2014 with contemporary theatrical translations developed for various editions of the Verdi Festival: Verdi Re Lear_L'opera che non c'è, Autodafé dal Don Carlos, Paradiso_Un Pezzo Sacro, Verdi Macbeth, Apocalisse Requiem, Disdemona_Cattiva Stella.
The Nabucco_Song of the Mutilated World develops from two central themes, war and exile, which in Lenz's creation dialogue with the history of the place: in Pilotta's wounded architecture, a world mutilated by the violence of war is represented. The Pilotta Monumental Complex was deeply affected by the bombings of May 1944: over 15,000 volumes of the Palatine Library, the Farnese Theatre and numerous parts of the building were destroyed. As a reminder of the danger, a sign of the ever-present possibility of destruction, a crack remains that has not been erased by reconstruction.
It is in this violated space, on whose body the signs of devastation are still visible, that Verdi's Va, pensiero resounds raw, immature, stammering, stripped of all rhetoric, in the voices of 27 girls and boys from the Voci Bianche Choir of the Teatro Regio in Parma, the voice of the voices of broken, forgotten humanity. Along with them, Valentina Barbarini, an iconic figure of Lenz's most significant creations, and the very young Agata Pelosi, who joined the artistic ensemble as a child with Kinder, a 2016 creation about the deportation of Parma's Jewish children to extermination camps.
For the part of the Jews held captive in Babylon, the famous chorus becomes the voice of a humanity forced to deal with flight, fear, separation, and the need to find a home. The voice is not only that of an ancient people, but belongs to children and - in full - to fugitives, to the fragile, to exiles, to those who lose their place and, together with it, their identity. Singing is not just beauty, it is a form of memory and resistance, which wants to remember_bring back to the heart everything that has been lost - to recreate and relive it.
Nabucco_Canto del Mondo mutilato is part of the Atlas of Violence, Lenz Fondazione's three-year dramaturgical and visual culture project 2025_2027, which, through a complex program of contemporary performative rewritings, aims to poetically transcribe themes such as conflict, oppression, impiety, and the violence of our time.
Entering a space/time, that immanent world of creation home to every versificatory possibility or intuition, triggered, ignited by the imaginative process, and then made real, whose path is marked by “going back, taking up something that is in the poetic past and re-proposing it, finding new words to say it”, to sing it together, a chorality of singularities in which each inhabits his own past and builds his present as already experienced, in nostalghia for places, sounds and silences, in his own internal and external homeland.
Me in the middle of the chorus, a solitary corporeal verse, a decasyllable of the only Poetry that holds us together, that makes us equal before the divine. At a certain point in our lives we live in the space of the past, that is, memory becomes a place to be inhabited in a physical sense, of which we are prisoners because that is precisely where we continue to live. A prison of memories.
In Nabucco, two central themes of the work determine the network of relationships between the characters, war and exile.
The destruction of entire communities and large masses of exiles have long been present in our time, violence seems to be progressively part of everyone's daily life despite the signs of destruction still being present in many Italian cities, including Parma and its most representative monumental complex, the Pilotta.
The signs of the bombings at the end of the Second World War are still widely visible on this great citadel of knowledge and art, a wound still present as a warning of what has been destroyed which, paradoxically, amplifies what has instead been rebuilt, recovered, built.
A mutilated architecture, just as war mutilates bodies without distinction and the past becomes a refuge of memories, memories of spaces lived as they once were, before the disaster.
Then we reconstruct, we restore the meaning of the collection of knowledge and creations, history through works, objects, and the forms of writing, but the crack remains, testifying to the danger that still looms.
‘Our work aims to be an agitated testimony to a double violence, a double loss, a double mutilation: that of childhood and that of cultural heritage’ declare Pititto and Maestri. ‘Hundreds of small stuffed bears occupy the Sala del Sapere, the Sala Petitot, to protect the borders the choir delimits the access of adult spectators, sentinels of a new territory occupied by childhood without violence and war’.
Site-specific creation commissioned by the Teatro Regio di Parma | Verdi Festival 26
Dramaturgical exfiltrations from the lyric drama in four parts from libretto by Temistocle Solera, from the drama Nabuchodonosor by Auguste Anicet-Bourgeois and Francis Cornu, lyrics by Salvatore Quasimodo and Friedrich Hölderlin
Dramaturgy, imagoturgy_Francesco Pititto
Composition, installation, costumes_Maria Federica Maestri
Choirmaster_Elena Scamuzzi
Singing and performing actions_Coro Voci Bianche del Teatro Regio di Parma
Performer_Valentina Barbarini, Agata Pelosi
Music consulting_Adriano Engelbrecht
Music assitant_Lorenzo Marchi
Curating, organization Elena Sorbi, Ilaria Stocchi
Production manager Giulia Mangini
Press office Elisa Barbieri
Promotion Alessandro Conti
Technical care Alice Scartapacchio
Technical assistant Tiziana Cappella, Dino Todoverto
Media Amedeo Cavalca, Niccolò Morelli
Intern Anghelina Tiberneac
Production Lenz Fondazione
With the support of Ministry of Culture, Emilia-Romagna Region, Municipality of Parma, SIAE
Première October 12, 2026
October 12-13, 8:00 PM + October 14-15, 7:00 PM
Petitot Gallery_Monumental Complex of Pilotta
Special Commission for the 2026 Verdi Festival
Duration: 40 minutes
Parma Royal Theatre Ticket Office
Tickets can be purchased online on the Teatro Regio website or on the evening of the events, starting one hour before the performances, at the ticket office set up at the base of the monumental staircase of the Pilotta Complex
To view this content, you need to enable the “experience” cookies using the corresponding toggle. You can do this by clicking the iconat the bottom right.
