We’ve currently been researching and writing a Book Lover’s Guide to Rome and in the process have uncovered or rediscovered more than a few Sicilian connections, not least of which was Leonardo Sciascia’s fascinating take on the Aldo Moro case. In the process of looking at playwrights in the city, we came across the history of the Teatro Valle in the street of the same name. The theatre has hosted many prestigious and innovative plays, including those those written by Luigi Pirandello, the Sicilian born in Caos. Although parts of his life did, indeed, become chaotic, his native chaos was in fact a suburb of Agrigento. In 1887, he moved to Rome to continue his university studies, before taking a doctorate in Bonn, Germany, on Romance Philology.
Back in Rome, by 1897 he was teaching at the Istituto Superiore di Magisterio whilst contributing to magazines. His fertile mind was pouring forth poetry, novellas and his first novels, but fate had something else in store for the maestro from Caos. Floods in 1903 affected the Sicilian sulphur mines in Aragona, causing heart ache for many and a financial collapse for the Pirandello family. Luigi’s father had not only invested his own money but also that of Antonietta, Luigi’s wife. The entirety of her dowry was washed away as the mining venture was ruined. The dawning catastrophe had not only a monetary effect, but also a mental one. The realisation of their parlous financial situation caused Antonietta to slip into a mentally detached state, from which she never truly recovered.
Pirandello, who would famously write on the subject of suicide, now contemplated that very act. Desperately casting around for monies to remedy the situation, he took on more private lessons in Italian and German in addition to throwing himself on the mercy of editors to whom he had previously given his work for free. In this febrile state of mind, a new novel started to take shape, namely Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal). Ground breaking at the time, the book features a man unhappy in his marriage who, on a spontaneous trip to Montecarlo, wins big at the tables. At the same time, a disfigured corpse is found in his hometown, which is mistaken for the missing Pascal. Taking advantage of this coincidence, Mattia reinvents his life as Adriano Meis – initially the perfect solution to all his problems. However, when Meis arrives in Rome, he begins to realise that he is a man of straw, a hollow man with no hinterland.
Il fu Mattia Pascal was Pirandello’s first great success and from the ashes of his own former life, a significant literary career began to form. When Pirandello started to publish in Corriere della Sera, his work became even more widespread. Novellas like Pensaci, Giacomino! (Think it Over, Giacomino!) and Mondo di carta (World of Paper) increased his fame. Sadly, things only worsened in his private life. The increasingly violent Antonietta, much to Pirandello’s anguish, had to be sectioned. She was housed in an asylum after the First World War. The war years, themselves, saw successful theatre productions of his works, leading to the 1921 staging of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) at the aforementioned Teatro Valle. The audience reaction, given his wife’s parlous state, would have cut Pirandello to the core.
Shouts from the audience became more vociferous, the most hurtful of which was “Manicomio!” (“Madhouse”), implying that Pirandello ought to be carted off to an asylum owing to the unusual nature of the work. The imposing four-tier boxes and gallery of the theatre, laden with angry spectators, despite some supporters of the play, prompted the writer and his equally upset daughter to slip out through one of the theatre’s side doors, thereby avoiding the clamorous crowds. The reason for the reaction was due to the meta-theatre aspects of the work. As the name suggests, six people crash a rehearsal insisting they are characters with unfinished stories who need someone to flesh out their lives. Their incomplete backgrounds are revealed to an increasingly fascinated director who agrees to stage their narratives, much to the chagrin of the actors who were there to rehearse something totally different.
The second performance in a Milan, perhaps more tuned in to the avant garde, was received with plaudits, a favourable reception that began to establish the play as a classic of modern theatre which would go on to be performed in places as varied as Hong Kong, Karachi, Christchurch and Cleveland. There have been at least 8 translations into English, each one updating the work for a new theatre-going audience. Milan also staged the premiere of Enrico IV, which once again proved to be a great success. With the rise of Mussolini, Pirandello, who initially supported the dictator, was given the directorship of another Roman theatre company, the Teatro d’Arte. However, the attention and meddling of fascist leaders led the author to rip up his party membership card in 1927. From that point forward, he was always treated with suspicion by the fascist authorities.
Pirandello received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 for his ‘bold and ingenious renewal of dramatic and theatrical art’. The medal he was given would disappear into the furnace in 1935. A conflicted Pirandello, nevertheless, donated the medal to a government initiative which asked the populace to contribute gold for the good of the patria. Post-Nobel, the secret services took an even closer look at the writer, suspecting some of his works of defeatism. Rather than defeatism, Pirandello was the master of writing about the masks we all wear in life, behind which we hide our true selves; in essence our public personas are waiting to be written, given the moment or circumstance, just like his six characters.
There is another site in Rome intimately linked with Pirandello – it’s his last house in the city in via Antonio Bosio, now home to the Istituto di Studi Pirandelliani e sul Teatro Contemporaneo (studiodiluigipirandello.it). It contains everything from an archive of his works to his own personal library and much more besides.
