There's a website online where Sardinian theater breathes, tells its story, and shows itself. A sort of time machine ( www.mariofaticoni.com), a digital archive of Mario Faticoni, actor, director, writer, and living memory of the island's cultural scene.
The most precious gift for his eighty-eighth birthday, which will be celebrated tomorrow, is this: making public and accessible to all a lifetime of art, commitment, and passion.
The archive, recognized as being of particular historical interest by the Archival Superintendency for Sardinia, is the first officially protected theatre collection in the region.
It tells over forty years of history of the island's theatre , but also an important piece of social and cultural history, collected with method and heart by Faticoni and his assistant Simona Loddo.
Browsing the site's sections, you travel from the 1960s —with the first experiments of the CUT (University Theater Center)—to the birth of the Teatro di Sardegna and Il Crogiuolo, which Faticoni co-founded in 1983. Photographs, articles, stage materials, documents, video clips, unpublished texts, interviews: everything has been catalogued and now lives online, ready to speak to the new generations.
Among the gems, the interview with Costantino Nivola conducted by Faticoni in New York, and later published in the book Svegliatevi Sardi!.
The portal's graphic and technical design was curated by Alfredo Scrivani, with the goal of not only promoting a cultural heritage but also making it accessible to non-experts: students, scholars, enthusiasts, and the merely curious.
"With this website, I wanted to make my work and the memory of a theater that was also a civic, social, and political laboratory accessible to everyone," says Faticoni. "It's a way to pass on to new generations not only my works, but also a piece of Sardinian history."
(Unioneonline/Fr.Me.)
