The Cantico dei Cantici (Song of Songs / Song of Solomon) is one of the most ancient texts of all literature.

Imbued with sweetness and care, scents and imaginations, it is one of the most important, perhaps one of the most mysterious texts; it is a hymn to beauty, both timid and complacent, a bolero between listening and engaging in a relationship, between abstraction and concreteness, it’s a balm to body and soul.

If you read it without any religious references or interpretative ambition, giving up on possible reading keys or parallelisms; if you read it almost unconsciously, if you utter it and not try to find other meanings, if you try to ignore who is talking, but try to pay attention only to what he is saying, regardless of chapters or role division; if you try to hold to its internal movement, to linger in its suspension, then its perfume suddenly discloses a dreamlike dimension -not a real dream, but something of that parallel, perhaps ancestral world, where dreams and words choose us and accompany us.

I did not translate its words word-for-word, even though I tried to remain as faithful as possible to the text.

What I translated to the letter is the feeling that always got hold of me while reading these pages. I tried to follow their flow, the tempo of their breathing, their voice, and their temperature.

I tried not to hold the words, so that I could speak them out loud, so that I could go after them in my body, keeping them in close proximity, on and around me; I tried to walk beside them, to take them by the hand, I closed my eyes and, weightlessly, I tried to sleep together with them.

"Please, do not wake up my sleeping love"

R. L.

Fortebraccio Teatro

Fortebraccio Teatro is a theater company recognized by the Italian Ministry of Heritage and Culture since 1999.

The main purpose of the company is to experience the contemporary and to revival the classics, through an original scenic writing. Fortebraccio Teatro lives through the collaboration of Roberto Latini, Gianluca Misiti and Max Mugnai.

ROBERTO LATINI
artistic direction

Actor, writer and director, studied in Rome at the Studio of Acting and Theatrical Research directed by Perla Peragallo, where he graduated in 1992.

Won in 2011 the Sipario Prize, the Ubu Prize 2014 and in the 2017 as Best Italian Actor and the Critic Prize 2015 awarded by the Italian National Association of Theatre Critics. He directed the Theater San Martino in Bologna (Italy) from 2007 to the spring of 2012.

Latini is the founder of the theater company Fortebraccio Teatro.

GIANLUCA MISITI
music and sound

Musician and composer, works for cinema and theater. He received in 2015 the Telesio D'Argento Special Award at the Festival “La Primavera del Cinema Italiano” for the soundtrack of the movie Noi e la Giulia directed by E. Leo.

He received the Ubu Prize 2015 and again in the 2017 for the Best Sound Project or Original Music.

MAX MUGNAI
lights and technical direction

He began working in theater in 1991, as a lighting technician at the Teatro di via Speroni (Rome).

From 1998 to 2001 he worked with Leo de Berardinis. He collaborated with several italian companies of theater and dance (Ilaria Drago, Le Belle Bandiere, Diablogues, Sistemi dinamici altamente instabili, Marco Manchisi, Farneto Teatro).

adaptation and direction: Roberto Latini
music and sound: Gianluca Misiti
lights and technique: Max Mugnai
with: Roberto Latini
organization: Nicole Arbelli
produced by: Fortebraccio Teatro
in collaboration with Armunia Festival Costa degli Etruschi
with the support of MiBACT and Regione Emilia-Romagna