The stock cube, as we know it today, wasn't always like this. The one who "invented" it, in the classic form of cubes and packaged in cardboard boxes, was a Bolognese lady tired of losing freshly purchased glutamate, loose and crumbled, in a packet on the street. It was 1957 and Signora Maria asked her husband Natalino Corazza, a worker and a qualified technician, to help her improve the situation. From that spark was born the "Corazza", a thriving packaging company with which all the food brands in the world had to compete, a company purchased in 2010 by one of the contemporary giants of the sector, the Ima group, also from Bologna.
This story has become a stage play, entitled "The Mary of stock cubes", signed, directed and performed by Marinella Manicardi, an artist who together with his partner Luigi Gozzi (now deceased) has been animating the local theater scene for more than 30 years. It is an exemplary story, one of the many that can be gathered in the packaging valley, but through which Marinella Manicardi wants to give body and voice to a sort of "genetic" predisposition to the mechanics of the Petronian territory.
“I thought of doing like Troisi – explains the actress – and that is to start over from three. In an economically bleak moment, I have decided to stage the good things in Bologna. First the packaging, but first the engines and even before the silk, are important successes, because they are the result of that 'know-how' that has always belonged to the city. To talk about Signora Maria, I started from afar: from the epic story of silk, mills and mechanical spinning with which Bologna anticipated the birth of the textile industry by centuries”. Bologna was the world capital of silk from 1200 to 1700. To process the precious yarn he opened canals and mills and to trade the product he made these canals navigable as far as Milan and Venice, opening the doors to Europe and the Orient. At the same time it freed the slaves and was probably the first city in the world, in 1256, to put the abolition of slavery on paper in the Liber Paradisus document.
“Apart from other reasons, Bologna needed workers for silk – argues Manicardi – while the servants were workers in the countryside and could not even enter the city. Thus the Municipality abolished slavery and exempted from paying taxes for 8 years those who bought a loom and began to weave”. The decline came several centuries later, when the "Bolognese veil" became so famous that France decided to start making it on its own and, given that the rich French claimed the original, the cousins from beyond the Alps put the “Velo di Bologna” brand on their imitations, giving life to the first brand plagiarism.
Difficult times came for the city, but all was never lost. However, there was the University and a certain scholar, Ferdinando Marsili, who lived until 1730, who founded the Institute of Sciences and had the idea of uniting scientific laboratories and painting, a seed from which technical drawing and planning sprouted. Knowing joined again above all to do after the Second World War, when engines and mopeds began to be built for poor transport which then became rich (think Lamborghini).
The story is tasty and the moral is that the passion for mechanics has its roots in the centuries, nothing comes by chance. If the motor valley no longer roars as before, the packaging valley is instead prolific and Bologna has been "packaging" the whole world for years. But she can still learn a lot about herself by listening to the story of Signora Maria who, to give life to her dream and have her husband build the first machines, borrowed one million six hundred thousand lire from the same butcher who sold her the glutamate. Access to credit in that case was at home.
Reruns are until April 22nd and it is probable that Maria Corazza will also go to the theater, who is now 92 years old, enjoys excellent health and seems to keep some ideas in her drawer.
On stage, with Marinella Manicardi, there is the author of the original music Daniele Furlati who plays the piano; the staging is by Davide Amadei. Federica Jacobelli collaborated on the text. The production is Arena del Sole-Nuova Scena, repeats until Sunday 22 April.
