Edition 2018 – Heartbreaking wondrous beauty of creation

Memory as the future

About a thousand years ago, in 1095, during the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II, with the cry of “God wills it!”, launched the First Crusade. The aim of the expedition was to defend the Holy Sepulchre and the Byzantine-held territories from the grip of the Seljuk Turks and Moorish armies, with the goal of conquering Jerusalem. A few centuries earlier, in 778, a rearguard of Charlemagne’s army, the Emperor of the Franks, which had led a punitive expedition in Spain, was annihilated in an ambush at the pass of the Pyrenees near Roncesvalles. The contingent of French soldiers was led by a knight named Roland.

Starting from the year 1000, medieval minstrels, jesters, and troubadours recounted this story, often distorting it. In fact, The Song of Roland, attributed to Turoldus, was intended to encourage young men of all social classes to enlist and join the First Crusade. That simple rearguard captain named Roland is elevated by the poet to the status of a hero, skilled with the sword, dedicated to the ideals of faith and chivalric honor, courageous, and devoted to his emperor to the point of sacrificing his own life.

Roland feels that his time has come to an end,
Facing Spain, he stands upon a sharp hilltop.
With one hand, he strikes his chest:
“God, my fault against your virtues,
For the sins, both great and small,
That from the moment I was born I have committed
Until this hour that I am here defeated!”
He stretches his right glove towards the Lord.
And angels descend from heaven to meet him.

Canto CLXXIV from the Song of Orlando edited by Mario Bensi translated (into Italian) by Renzo Lo Cascio – Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli 1998.

With Pope Leo III and the coronation of the King of France, Charlemagne, as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, which took place on Christmas night in the year 800, the fracture between the Western Empire and the Eastern Empire, that is, between the Kingdom of Constantinople and that of Rome, was definitively consummated. Other crusades followed: massacres, violence, grief, and despair heavily afflicted both Christians and the so-called pagans or infidels. There is much to say about the “holy” wars, given the countless damages they have inflicted on humanity. However, I like to remember Francis of Assisi, who during the Fifth Crusade ventured as far as Damietta in Egypt, in the illusion that he could stop the carnage. Cardinal Pelagius Galvani considered him a madman, but Francis, with the Gospel in hand, went to the Saracen camp to meet Sultan Al-Malik al-Kamil, who instead deeply appreciated the courage and great faith of the poor man of Assisi.

Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per quelli che perdonano per lo Tuo amore
et sostengono infirmitate et tribulatione
Beati quelli che ‘l sosterranno in pace,
ca da Te, Altissimo, sirano incoronati.

From Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures

But let’s go back to my story and the reason that prompted me to imagine our trip to Roncesvalles.
In February 1967 my father was invited to Paris to inaugurate the residence of the Italian ambassador. We left Palermo with a small company consisting of my father, his best helper, Giuseppe Arini, and myself. Puppets, scenes, posters and everything else needed for the staging of the play Orlando amoureux d’Angelica were placed inside crates, suitcases, parcels and packages that filled an entire wagon.
The journey was long and tiring. The train stopped countless times without anyone being able to explain why. I still remember the screeching of the ferry-boat on the buoys on the platform and the movement of the carriages as they went back and forth to position themselves on the tracks. The “Sun Train,” which passed through Rome and arrived in Turin, was crowded with poor people who worked at Fiat or had to get to the mines in Belgium. When we arrived in Turin things changed a little, the trains to foreign countries were more comfortable and reminded me of the ones I had seen in the movies; but, alas, this time too my father, in order to save money, had not taken bunks and we were forced to travel sitting down. When we reached our destination and set foot outside the Gare de Lyon, we looked like three plucked chicks that had fallen from the nest. The icy wind of that French February took us by surprise and suddenly we could no longer feel our hands, our lips, our faces, while small stalactites formed on our noses, which had stopped dripping.
At the station we were met by Professor Alfred Silbermann, a highly cultured stage designer and musicologist born in East Berlin but living in Rome, who together with composer Cesare Brero had organized the Paris event. After loading the many luggage onto a minibus, Silbermann called a cab to take us to the hotel where a coveted hot meal awaited us. But my father asked if, before we reached the hotel, we could spend a moment to see the statue of Charlemagne.

The taxi driver, having no memory of this monument, consulted a guidebook and, finding no news, contacted the station; but even from there no one could answer. A radio repartee began between taxi drivers until someone said that perhaps it was the statue placed in front of Notre-Dame. So finally, deep in the fog, under the lush foliage of the trees to the right of the cathedral, we spotted the statue of Charlemagne on horseback, with two squires at his feet holding the reins. The King of the Franks, depicted in all his grandeur, with a crown on his head and a small cross on top, flowing beard and hair, a cloak on his shoulders and a scepter in his right hand holding the world, was finally before us.
My father stood motionless for a long time, staring at the statue. Arini, behind him, looked stuffed, I was moved to see my father fulfilling his dream of being able to admire, before him, the features of Charlemagne, whose every feat, every pain, every sigh he knew.
Then he asked Professor Silbermann if that river glimpsed beyond the little wall was the Seine, and when it was confirmed, he became inflamed and began to tell of Rhodomont’s siege of Paris and how the superb Saracen had succeeded in entering the city by crossing the Seine on the back of his steed. Silbermann, at one point, pointed out to him that it was getting late and we were in danger of finding the restaurant kitchen closed, so we headed for the cab. But my father, excited as a child, asked if it was not possible, along the way, to take a look at the church of St. Dionysius where, according to the puppet opera’s dvds, Charlemagne was married and received the crown. But the taxi driver replied that the church was far from Paris and was surely closed at that time anyway. At the table, during dinner, my father kept asking if he had been able to see the ancient walls of Paris before he left, in short, in his mind surfaced, one after another, the details of Charlemagne’s life, the places, situations and events recounted in the long cycle of the History of the Paladins of France.
The next day Professor Silbermann confided to me that he was moved by the naiveté of this artist, who, having lived all his life surrounded by Paladins, imagined that he would find many testimonies and, for that very reason, had not wanted to disappoint him by revealing to him that Charlemagne in Paris had not only never been there, but that Paris did not even exist in those days!
The relationship of esteem and friendship between Professor Silbermann, whom we began to confidentially call Moni, and my family continued uninterrupted throughout his life. Many times I had occasion to recall this episode, which for me presented an unforgettable page of life.
In those years I was very young. A month later, in Paris, I would have turned nineteen, and I could not fully understand the emotion my father felt in that city, always evoked in his performances.
Memories are the pages where our lives are written, sometimes they come on their own, sometimes they burst in as if a gust of wind had opened a book on a certain page. The recollection of this episode brought me back to today, to my existence, to my sensibility as a man of the theater who is deeply passionate about his work and the stories he tells. I thought that I, too, had longed to go to Roncesvalles, to find out if it really existed, and that I would like to involve not only my company, my students, some artist friends who have always followed me in my adventures, but also twelve cultural personalities whom I called “peers.” All together we set out, like Charlemagne’s paladins, but this time on a “crusade of peace.” Through my cunto we all became protagonists. Our small army of men and women, penetrating the fog of Navarre, gradually turned into a company of paladins. Some branches became poles for banners and flags, while the wooden sword made from a pilgrim’s staff, which I found along a path, became the pen with which to rewrite history.
The path to Roncesvalles starts in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, a small border village between France and Spain, a symbolic place for many travelers, unknown to most, except that the Way to Santiago de Compostela begins there. A fundamentally spiritual path.
For historians, that of Roncesvalles was a most negligible event, disappearing before the thousands of other Carolingian exploits, yet that battle has become a fundamental part of European literature, shared by peoples who today, despite adhering to a single parliament, are more divided than ever. An eloquent example of how legend, whenever it takes on strong symbolic value, can outclass historical truth.
When I first arrived in those places, I think I felt the same emotion as my father did in Paris: I had the impression of crossing paths with the paladins and hearing the echo of their voices in that fantastic forest that stretches all the way to Ibañeta, where I narrated the betrayal of Gano di Magonza and the death of the paladin Orlando in front of the memorial stone that recalls the legend.

Mimmo Cuticchio
Art Director