With “A Candy Carol,” the first act of a complex installation born from the vision of Manuel Marotto, his ColorArt, and the artisanal hands of the AsaraArt group, the historic center of Tempio finds itself at the starting point of a singular visual journey with the evocative title: “With LOVE... Charles Dickens.”
Chupa Chups and spiral lollipops on colorful firefly sticks, bright candies, glittery gift packages sprinkled with rainbow sprinkles, and fluorescent sheets in the colors of tropical fish interspersed with pure expanses of cotton candy: this is the iridescent carousel that revolves around Tiny Tim, a soft 9-meter fir tree flocked with pure pink joy that, from the late evening of December 7th, dominates a Piazza Gallura illuminated by colored films.
"Anyone who has already explored the pages of one of the most famous Christmas stories of all time," reads the illustrative text by Luana Giannotti, accompanied by videos and photos by Giacomo Prasciolu, "will remember little Tiny Tim, a tender Dickensian character with a minor but instrumental role in the extraordinary conversion of old Scrooge, the miserly, stone-hearted protagonist of 'A Christmas Carol.'" In the colorful square in the heart of Tempio Pausania, Tim, gravely ill and an innocent victim of the social unrest rampant in Victorian England, enters into an ideal dialogue with Scrooge's arid and selfish heart, represented by a large, shocking pink heart already renewed and made permeable to human suffering, especially that of the most vulnerable." This is 'A Candy Carol 2025,' "the idyll of innocence, the good place of respected and carefree childhood, an island that defends every child's right to be a child," Giannotti's text emphasizes.
"A four-act compendium of the master lecture on the true spirit of Christmas that Dickens consigned to history in December 1843, 'With LOVE... Charles Dickens' seeks to represent the contemporary value, free from geographical and cultural boundaries that make 'A Christmas Carol' an extraordinary, timeless morality tale," the statement continues. "A skillful blend of social novel, allegorical fable, and Gothic tale, the setting of 'A Christmas Carol' immerses us in the midst of Victorian times, a contradictory era of bourgeois excess and working-class deprivation, in which the logic of utilitarian philosophy crushes and unworthily suffocates that age of innocence to which Dickens, also for autobiographical reasons, had so attentively devoted his writing."
