It takes ideas to feed the mind and that of Bruno Damini it is certainly delicious: these are interviews with men and women of entertainment who have "hunger" as their central theme. A selection of these will be broadcast starting tomorrow, Sunday 8 July, on Radio 3 Rai, at 16 pm, within "Pantagruel", a program curated by Laura Palmieri and Daniela Sbarrini. The title of Damini's space is “The tables of the stage. Stories of an actor between hunger and fame” he protagonists of the proposed selection (in all there will be 9 episodes) are great showmen who have now disappeared: from Marcello Mastroianni to Vittorio Gassman, from Nanni Loy to Carmelo Bene, from Gino Bramieri to Leo DeBeradinis, from Giorgio Gaber to Paolo Poli to Luca De Filippo.
Bruno Damini collected these testimonies as communication director of Nuova Scena, a cultural and theatrical reality in Bologna. They are "historical" pieces recorded on audio cassette and transferred digitally, to be usable even with modern instruments. They have the merit of making us meet again these great protagonists of our lives and of offering us a fascinating and fun sieve to get to know them better, taking in the essence and leaving out the bran that often pollutes relationships.
We talk about the hunger that gives the bites in the stomach, but also of the one that makes us run to reach a goal and perhaps glory.
Damini began to deal with food as a culture and a metaphor before everyone else did, in the 90s. “I was fascinated by the atavistic hunger of the actor, by the theater as a long journey of liberation from hunger – he explains – and from this starting point long free-wheeling conversations arose which allowed me to get to know these great characters better. The interviews I have collected are about seventy and 40 are of important names. With Radio Tre we have decided to give space to the disappeared, because they are unrepeatable documents. The selection also took place on the basis of the sagacity and significance of the answers".
The best known story is that of Mastroianni, that in the boarding house where he rented a room near the theatre, usually with a colleague, in the evening he prepared a fried egg in a pan, a gift from his mother, cooking it with an invented "camp" stove inside a Brill box, old shoe polish.
Memorable also the jokes of Nanni loy, the one who made the "soup" with his croissant in someone else's cappuccino in a bar in the center of Bologna, secretly filming people's reactions. “He told me – remembers Damini – that a gentleman politely asked him: why does he do it? And he is serious: because if all of humanity allowed itself to be soaked freely there would be no more wars”. In Loy's memoirs also the meeting for a film with Totò “after explaining the script to him, the director tried to go into details, but Totò asked him: is my character hungry? Yes. And does he sleep? No, but it can be fixed. Then that's fine, if he's hungry and sleepy, I'll do it ”.
Together with hunger there is the poignant chapter of smells, again of food. “Gaber he told me that during the war they were so poor that they went to get a free soup from a public body. Here, he told me she, all along the way I smelled its perfume… and I liked it too ”.
Bramieri instead he rediscovered hunger in middle age, when he weighed 133 kilos and passed to 80: "after this great effort he realized that those 53 kilos lost were like the disappearance of a family member". In short, it is the portrait of an era, a truly ingenious filter for meeting, remembering, rejoicing and gently melancholy, for feeling that languor that sometimes we don't know what it is. But what's the point of talking about hunger in a civilization that no longer knows what it is? “I'm not convinced of this – concludes Damini – just read the statistics on poverty. And then the time has come to also talk about the hunger of others”.
