{"id":216,"date":"2026-06-10T09:00:50","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T07:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.robertoalonge.it\/2026\/04\/29\/honor-to-elena-randi\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T11:44:04","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T09:44:04","slug":"honor-to-elena-randi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.robertoalonge.it\/en\/2026\/06\/10\/honor-to-elena-randi\/","title":{"rendered":"Honor to Elena Randi"},"content":{"rendered":"

Antonio Gramsci wrote unforgettable words in a paragraph of his entitled Le universit\u00e0 italiane<\/i>, <\/span>applauding the fact that “every teacher tends to form a ‘school’ of his own”, concluding in the end that “this custom, save for sporadic cases of camorra, is beneficial”. Alas, I fear that in the post-’68 Italian University everything has degraded. On the other hand, we cannot deny our roots of animal ancestry, at least if we believe Darwin. Ogne figghie \u00e8 bb\u00e8lle pe’ mamma soja <\/i>my mother used to say, a woman of the Foggia common people (whom I never loved, by the way, but it matters little, a private and overly complicated story). In the sense, naturally, that parents love their own children regardless<\/i>, and see them as beautiful<\/i> even if they are not in the least. The same principle \u2013 inevitably \u2013 holds for the metaphorical Italic university family, <\/i>in which access to a career demands that the father<\/i> become a godfather…<\/i><\/p>\n

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It is well known that normally the Master is besotted with his own pupil and pulls every string to push him up the rungs of the professional path, even when he is conscious of his modest or scarce ability: for the banal reason that he made him, son or daughter<\/i>, flesh of his mental flesh, he cannot but love his own creatures, <\/span>love is blind<\/i>. I am surely badly made, but I have never shared this. I confess I do not really know what love<\/i> is, but it seems to me it cannot exclude full and convinced esteem, that is, in this case, appreciation of the originality <\/span>of the disciple, because of popularizers and repeaters (not to speak of plagiarists) <\/span>we already have far too many, they are more than a thousand who sing all night long<\/i>, Boccaccio would have jokingly concluded. It may have been my fault, that I did not know how to take care of them, but I never had pupils, except one \u2013 brilliant and yet without authentic vocation, and moreover a quitter<\/i>, as they say in Tuscany, with no desire to commit, to suffer, so that at not even 32 years, if I remember well, she resigned from the University, <\/span>certainly not lacking encouragement and applause, on my part, <\/span>for the unusual, almost scandalous choice.<\/p>\n

Just to signify that I have always felt <\/span>envy and frustration at seeing my little friends of the <\/span>brotherhood<\/i> benevolently tend their pupils, and yet \u2013 of course \u2013 <\/span>only when the pupils also seemed truly talented to me\u2026 And in this, it must be recognized, Umberto Artioli was the best, the most ready to lose time and effort reading, rereading, correcting, recorrecting what his disciples produced. The one who knew how to forge the most interesting <\/span>intelligences, and Elena Randi would seem to me his ingenious pupil, by chronological accident the firstborn<\/i> but equally first<\/i> in the scale of values. It was he who directed her onto the road of directing, when he was preparing for Carocci a manual entitled Il teatro di regia. Genesi ed evoluzione (1870-1950)<\/i>, for which he deployed the valuable fan of his young most faithful ones. And here a curious detail is pinned: because the title of the book was already quite <\/span>tranchant<\/i>, <\/span>with the limpid and even slightly brutal sharpness of numbers, the theatre of directing that is born in 1870, that is, with the Meininger, but immediately, in support, the <\/span>need to reiterate, hammering from the very first line of the Introduction<\/i>, signed obviously by the Master: “The birth of theatrical directing, which occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth century, [\u2026]”. Those who knew him will remember it, <\/span>his charm lay in the opening of horizons, the capacity to read texts, not only the <\/span>dramaturgical ones but also the narrative ones (I think of the exegeses of the d’Annunzio novels), his elegant and personal eloquence, clear and substantial, but no less the confident tone of delivery, which did not allow for uncertainties, but rather imposed his interpretive truth, with a <\/span>strong, almost imperious accent. In short, it was difficult to oppose his convictions. Franco Perrelli experienced it on his own skin, <\/span>a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts of Lecce, a candidate without a godfather<\/i> <\/span>for an associate post, the last competition with local<\/i> recruitment, before the return to the national<\/i> one, <\/i>held in Florence in 1998. The <\/span>unfortunate man declared that he was <\/span>dealing with the birth of directing and that \u2013 consulting books written in Nordic languages \u2013 he believed he could imagine that perhaps the early-twentieth-century invention of Stanislavsky should be backdated by at least twenty years. In the preface to my Laterza-published Il teatro dei registi, <\/i>which turns twenty just this 2006, <\/span>I recalled the episode and the reply of the most combative of the five commissioners, all aghast at that blasphemy: I do not know this bibliography published in Nordic languages, but I dispute that one can <\/span>make such a rash assertion. Directing is born with the Meininger, and goes up and up, passing through Antoine, to arrive at Stanislavsky<\/i>. The captain courageous<\/i> had been Umberto Artioli: I did not write it then, because he had passed away just two years before, and besides it would not have been elegant, seeing that, <\/span>in the end, the Holy Spirit had enlightened him \u2013 him and three other commissioners \u2013 to pardon the impertinent young man come from the deep South.<\/p>\n

I permit myself to reveal it, now, the little arcanum, <\/span>before it is my turn to go away,<\/b> but because it intersects with the destiny of Elena Randi and allows me to observe that there was, in any case, in Umberto, that secret fund of humility that only great Masters always have. Humility is a most rare flower in all the university gardens of the world, but at least ingenious scholars \u2013 little or much \u2013 must cultivate it, this mysterious flower: because true intelligence is always awareness of the limit, and in primis<\/i> of one’s own limits<\/i>. <\/b>He agreed in fact to host in that book a contribution by Elena that drastically contradicted the four-square certainties of the Master, akin if anything to those of our enemies<\/i>, to indicate them with this somewhat old-fashioned term (but better to call them millers<\/i>, as Nando Taviani proposed, because they published with Il Mulino). Mirella Schino clarifies it well in her Laterza synthesis of 2003, La nascita della regia teatrale<\/i>, when she distinguishes (and never mind if with the posture of the little schoolmistress with the red pen) a principal strand that bets on the idea of directing as a twentieth-century phenomenon (Marotti Cruciani Ruffini Taviani Savarese De Marinis) and a parallel strand (but somewhat secondary\u2026) that, while agreeing on the premise, permits itself to recover some nineteenth-century instances of strong scenic direction, expressed precisely by Artioli. For the majority axis, let this pronouncement no less tranchant<\/i> by Nando Taviani suffice, who defines “the century of Directing” (with the capital, for sympathetic emphasis) <\/span>“a long century, emblematically opened <\/span>by the birth of the Moscow Art Theatre, in 1897; emblematically closed by the death of Grotowski, in January 1999″. Indeed, on careful thought, it is surprising how all these illustrious colleagues (Mirella <\/span>included, but also Umberto) could brazenly dream of directing sprung up like a mushroom, one fine morning, in some late-feudal little statelet of deep Germany, in the small duchy of Saxe-Meiningen, or in the peripheral Russia of Moscow, and not, rather, in the only metropolis of continental nineteenth-century Europe, in that Paris which has so many theatres and so many specialized newspapers, even if of a few pages, which inform every three days an evidently very wide public of reader-spectators: which was the more plausible hypothesis of the Nordic reflections of the teacher of the Academy of Fine Arts of Lecce and of the common-sense intuitions of the young Elena Randi.<\/p>\n

Certainly, one may ask whether Elena really arrived at such a conclusion on a purely intuitive basis, or whether she was not, in any case, <\/span>also helped by fortune. Because Umberto \u2013 <\/span>knowing well that it is not enough to declare that directing is the great novelty of theatre history, since one must also answer the question novelty with respect to what?<\/i> that is, with respect to a before<\/i>, <\/span>which however needs to be studied attentively \u2013 right in the years just before had unleashed his greyhounds, set his four damsels off to the four cardinal points of the European continent, in order to <\/span>investigate thoroughly the nineteenth-century system of actorial roles: to Simona Brunetti Italy, to Cristina Grazioli Germany, to Paola Degli Esposti England, and to Elena Randi France. So that by good fortune Paris fell to her, the principal European market for the staging of theatrical spectacles, but also the city where the Com\u00e9die-Fran\u00e7aise<\/i> is seated, “the oldest theatre existing in the Western world”, as Randi herself notes with subtle nonchalance <\/i>in her chapter of the book in question, recalling in support, that the living playwright (whose text is brought to the stage by the glorious institution) has the double privilege of choosing the actors of the cast<\/i> and of directing the rehearsals, <\/span>for a minimum duration of three weeks that can be prolonged up to a maximum of three months: as if to say \u2013 albeit in a respectful, considerate, reverent manner, almost timid but limpid, at least for those who wish to understand, there being none so deaf as those who will not hear \u2013 that in short, come now, perhaps, yes, one could even imagine that directing had appeared first in Paris\u2026<\/p>\n

It is understood that they must have clashed harshly, the Master and the impertinent pupil who too, for her part, maintained that the happy event could be brought forward even to the early eighteen-thirties, and not forty years later with the Meininger, and least of all seventy years later, with Stanislavsky. And yet the Master too must have intuited something, at least in his inner forum, that that youthful pupil of his might even \u2013 perhaps, who knows, never say never\u2026 \u2013 also have some reason on her side, and let his manual \u2013 so categorical in resolutely fixing in the wall of 1870 the nail on which to hang the chain \u2013 begin with an initial chapter entrusted to Elena Randi. Which Elena <\/b>Randi <\/b>\u2013 who as a little girl must have studied at the private school of the Jesuits, learning the wisdom of honest dissimulation<\/i> \u2013 immediately invented a generic and broad, that is misdirecting, chapter title <\/span>(The beginnings of directing<\/i> in Europe<\/i>), then articulating the few pages at her disposal into three pseudo-innocuous paragraphs, the first dedicated to the Italian practice of the actor-manager’s theatre, the third to a brief account of the English and German scene and, almost hidden between the two, a little paragraph entitled prudently Avant-garde French stagings pre-1870, <\/i>where the cunning is noteworthy of putting forward not only France,<\/i> to conceal Paris<\/i> (perhaps too disturbing for the Master intoxicated by Meininger vintage 1870) but also the unproposable date, modestly concealed by the fig leaf of the Latinizing little formula ante 1870<\/i>. But how much ante<\/i>? A lot ante<\/i>, to tell the truth, although <\/span>the four slim pages of the little paragraph are cautious, letting filter discreetly, in round parentheses, only two dates, 1830 first performance of Hernani<\/i> and 1835 first performance of Chatterton<\/i>, barely recalling the pure name of Dumas p\u00e8re, perhaps to avoid the embarrassment of the even earlier date of the first performance <\/span>of his Henri III et sa cour<\/i>, 10 February 1829\u2026 <\/span>The disputes between Hugo and the leading lady are briefly evoked but carefully passed over in silence the <\/span>directorial posture of Alfred de Vigny, although the analysis fully valorizes the interweaving and interchange between script, scenography and actorial art legible in the spectacle. One names the sin but not the sinner<\/i>, and so no one notices that those four little pages are a bomb, so much do all seem to have <\/span>ham over their eyes, blinded by predominantly theoretical if not ideological explanations of the phenomenon. They do not even notice that the youthful scholar \u2013 arrived at the last page of her essay \u2013 can no longer manage <\/span>to hush up, cut short, cut short, hush up <\/i>and suddenly bursts out, it literally escapes her pen that at the level of the Parisian eighteen-thirties there is real and proper directing<\/i>, and not only that, she dares to go so far as to hypothesize that <\/span>“it is not to be excluded” that Vigny and the early Hugo arrived at producing a kind of creation <\/i>“that exists only in its becoming performance”, <\/span>and of which, in the texts, only “pale reflections” remain. Randi is thinking without doubt of the d\u00e9gringolade <\/i>of the protagonist down the stairs, in the closing of the pi\u00e8ce, <\/i>a most effective invention of the rehearsals, absent in the autograph manuscript and in the script, and present in the princeps<\/i> only because invented on the stage of the rehearsals (but the enigma remains of how the Master could have accepted so much academic insubordination\u2026).<\/p>\n

The manual coordinated by Umberto was published in March 2004, his last book. In early July of that same year he gets behind the wheel of the car, having set off <\/span>with his wife for a bit of vacation on the Veneto coast, but at a certain point he skids, manages to halt the vehicle on the edge of the road, exactly as Roberto Vecchioni sang, in a song of his that came out two years before, “Or while I am driving \/ I will hear it perfectly \/ playing as I skid \/ and I will not be able to confuse it with anything \/ because it has a damnably eternal sound \/ and then it is heard that one time only \/ the viola in winter”. At that time, for five or six years, Franco Perrelli has settled at the University of Turin, no one knows how or why, perhaps again thanks to the Holy Spirit. A few months later, February 2005, his manual would come out from UTET, La seconda creazione. Fondamenti della regia teatrale, <\/i>where the Nordic trail dangerously exhibited at the Florentine competition resurfaces. I do not know how it had come into the young Perrelli’s mind to study Swedish, but Swedish is Ludvig Josephson, whose treatise on staging, published in 1892, puts to fruit a thirty-year knowledge of the international scene, which allowed him to appreciate the modernity of the stagings of Adolphe Montigny at the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre du Gymnase<\/i> in Paris between the eighteen-fifties and eighteen-eighties. By accident I am deskmate with Perrelli, in the same Turin study on the second floor of Palazzo Nuovo, quite intrigued by the idea of moving back the hands of the directorial clock, from the 1870 of the Meininger to the 1850 of Montigny, and even more by the audacity of going back as far as the eighteen-thirties, as I seemed to understand from Elena Randi’s little paragraph. I have few virtues, but at least that of being a willing <\/span>student, ready to take possession of others’ good ideas. If my beloved Umberto has gone away and we do not know where, someone must indeed take care of his little orphans, and I invent myself to be the protective uncle<\/i>. I take care of the last arrival, the talented and kind Simona Brunetti, <\/span>but a bit also of Elena Randi, who is by now an associate professor but not yet confirmed. I often converse with her on the telephone and learn that at the Com\u00e9die-Fran\u00e7aise<\/i> they preserve precious annotations in the hand of the author of Chatterton<\/i> that show his directorial function vis-\u00e0-vis the actors of the first performance. In reality I have never done archival research, I am incapable of deciphering even my own handwriting, on a note taken by hand on some little sheet, but Chatterton<\/i> is a morbid and unhealthy text, enough to attract me, and besides I had a French wife and a house in Paris, a quarter of an hour on foot from the library of the glorious theatre, so I venture forth. <\/span>Prefacing Il teatro dei registi<\/i> I said that I would never have written it had I not had the stimuli in presence<\/i> of Perrelli at my elbow (and for this the book was dedicated to him), but no less decisive were the stimuli of Randi at a distance<\/i>. The one and the other, by different ways, forced me to look to Paris.<\/p>\n

Naturally I worked as a differently abled<\/i> person, only on books and journals, but it seems to me I have understood what <\/span>some colleagues struggle to understand, though often speaking of material history of the theatre<\/i>: <\/i>that nineteenth-century theatre is first of all a commercial enterprise, and that the most ancient livrets de mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/i> ascertained by Allevy (a scholar whose valuable book of 1938 seems to me little cited in the Italiote debate\u2026) are from 1827-1828. These are booklets of instruction<\/i> drawn up by the theatres that produced successful Parisian spectacles, which one hopes can be re-staged on the theatrical scenes of the province. A pure question of money, <\/span>ugly dirty but cash and at once.<\/i> In the booklets there is everything or almost everything one needs: list of characters with their respective actorial roles, description of costumes, scenographies, furniture, but also <\/span>arrangement of the actors on the stage, indications of their entrances and exits, where they must go and where they must stop. The springing impulse, the strategic exigency of such a kind of publication can be photographed even already a decade before, as I have demonstrated citing these lines of the Courrier des Spectacles<\/i> of 20 May <\/span>1818:<\/p>\n

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We signal this work to the gentlemen directors of the province as a fortunate speculation; already numerous cities will tremble with fright and horror at the Chateau de Paluzzi<\/i>, and we believe we serve their interests by giving them some indication. This pi\u00e8ce<\/i> requires no expense either of scenography or of costumes, the ballets can be suppressed, and the music is absolutely not necessary except in the last scenes of the second act.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If it is true that r\u00e9gie<\/i> is a seventeenth-century term of administrative law, it connotes the management of a public undertaking, naturally royal<\/i>, in the monarchical epoch, the r\u00e9gisseur<\/i> is the one who administers, manages. That of the director is a new profession, induced by this development of the Parisian world of spectacle. A professional <\/span>of mediation, apt to translate into a spectacularly effective, that is pleasing, synthesis the instructions furnished by the livrets de mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/i> and by the specialized publications. Obviously, at the chronological level of the eighteen-thirties, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Alexandre Dumas p\u00e8re, Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny, positioned behind the firepower of the Com\u00e9die-Fran\u00e7aise<\/i>, offer a resounding added value. They take on a low<\/i> function, that of the r\u00e9gisseur, <\/i>but immediately determine a formidable leap forward of it. As authors of the scripts staged, they are the unique and authorized interpreters of them. Without for this wishing to see idealistically an abyssal discontinuity between the two registers. I have happened to cite two lines of a livret de mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/i> relating to a most modest text, with indication for the character of Louis XVI: “Leading actor (between 30 and 32 years). A certain dignity united to a certain bonhomie”. Little thing, certainly, but something it is, a light underlining, a psychological suggestion for the actor, who must reconcile a dignified trait, slightly haughty<\/i>, as befits His Highness<\/i> but mixed with good nature, with cordial humanity. <\/span>In short, directing as a creative art is certainly not reducible to the managerial figure of the r\u00e9gisseur <\/i>as a little demiurge of the livrets de mise en sc\u00e8ne, <\/i>but stands <\/i>on an evolutionary line, of which it represents the culmination. The acknowledgment of the change of pace will come only in the later nineteenth century, with the spread of a new term \u2013 metteur en sc\u00e8ne<\/i> instead of r\u00e9gisseur <\/i>\u2013 but the first metteurs en sc\u00e8ne<\/i> are the three playwrights rediscovered by Elena Randi.<\/p>\n

Which Elena Randi, two and a half years after my modest contribution, published in October 2006, publishes in April 2009 with the Edizioni di Pagina the dense volume I primordi della regia. Nei cantieri teatrali di Hugo, Vigny, Dumas, <\/i>which openly takes up the title of the chapter of the manual edited by Artioli five years before, shortened of the reference to Europe, which was precisely the fig leaf of which we have spoken. Sons and daughters love their fathers very much, but their passing is also a liberation, the moment of growth, of autonomy. Here finally the projector is wholly and exclusively pointed at the usual trio of authors, of whom two texts each are examined, staged by the Com\u00e9die-Fran\u00e7aise<\/i>: all similarly engaged in an unprecedented and mysterious practice, which Randi \u2013 in the introductory pages to the six chapters of the book \u2013 no longer hesitates to name by its name, highlighting (with just pride)<\/p>\n

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the role of directors carried out from the eighteen-thirties by three playwrights (Vigny, Hugo and Dumas p\u00e8re<\/i>) on the occasion of the first staging of their pi\u00e8ces<\/i> or translations; artists significantly active in Paris, <\/span>capital of Europe, and not, in the eighteen-seventies, in the peripheral duchy of Meiningen, where various scholars situate the birth of the directorial phenomenon.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Master has been dead for a lustrum, he is not at all forgotten, a most beautiful epigraph falls to him, six lines of a Pirandellian essay of his that fix Enrico IV in the profile of a god, satisfied but distant, who does not hinder the life of humans. The book is not dedicated to the Master (as it would have been logical to expect) but to Gustavo, Elena Randi’s dachshund<\/i>, who has always \u2013 with good reason <\/span>\u2013 preferred the non-speaking animals to the speaking ones of the planet (personally I detest dogs but adore cats, and so I can understand her\u2026). In such introductory pages, <\/span>not by chance framed under a ringing, eloquent (and polemical) title, Paris <\/span>capital of directing<\/i>, she definitively takes her distance from the Master, claiming the right to an idea of directing<\/i> that is not taken for granted, happily founded <\/span>on a mountain of archival materials. <\/span>The six chapters of the book are not analyses of the texts <\/i>(properly five, but the translation of the Shakespearean Othello<\/i> is as though it were the work of Vigny the translator), but rather thorough soundings of all the coefficients of the staging, insofar as documented in reference to the first performance, grasped in the light of a unitary perspective. If the r\u00e9gisseur <\/i>is the scrupulous <\/span>and inventive mind, skilled at bringing under his essentially organizational <\/i>control all the elements of the spectacle, the added value of the metteur en sc\u00e8ne <\/span><\/i>is of an artistic<\/i> type, consists in the capacity to articulate in a thorough way the meaning of the text, but no one better than he if the metteur en sc\u00e8ne<\/i> coincides with the author of the text, as happens precisely for our three musketeers of the pen in the Paris of the eighteen-thirties.<\/p>\n

Then, once having taken to the open sea, Randi no longer stops. In 2012 <\/span>Siro Ferrone hosts in the series he directs at Le Lettere a great Randian tome of 552 pages, dedicated to Angelo, tyran de Padoue<\/i> by Hugo, a coplanar critical edition, that is, intended to show several versions of the text, one beside the other, instead of hiding the variants in the notes: where the autograph, the script of the prompter of the first performance, the princeps <\/i>and the last edition prior to the <\/span>death of Hugo are set side by side. And here the scholar properly reigns supreme, demonstrating how the script is in every respect authorial<\/i>, contrary to what is usually held, precisely because Hugo, as director, chooses every word for the scenic version, moreover quite different from the printed one, perfectly aware of the difference between fruition in reading and fruition in the theatre.<\/p>\n

Lastly, this Victor Hugo regista <\/i>that closes the circle, with a title that is an unexpected and joyously trombone-like drumbeat, the affirmative and high-sounding declaration of a Hugo director<\/i>, almost a century before the mythical metteurs en sc\u00e8ne<\/i> dreamed of by the big theoretical and ideological <\/i>professors, as the great Sirus defines them (so surnamed by me in the dedication to a Goldonian incursion of mine). <\/span>A book that takes up a theme investigated for almost a quarter of a century, which naturally puts together essays already written previously, revised and corrected, and chapters written ex novo <\/i>(and so, by force of circumstance, the mastodontic apparatus of Angelo, tyran de Padoue<\/i> is scaled down).<\/p>\n

 
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Four Hugolian stagings are analyzed therein, besides Le roi s’amuse<\/i>, a failed spectacle perhaps precisely because of Hugo’s absence from the rehearsals. In this case \u2013 facing a chronological arc comprised between 1830 and 1835 \u2013 not only the stagings given at the Com\u00e9die-Fran\u00e7aise, <\/i>but also at the Porte Saint Martin<\/i> are taken into consideration, as proof of the fact that the state theatre does not constitute an exception with respect to the overall early-nineteenth-century Parisian situation.<\/p>\n

What to say, in the face of so many results? That I cannot conceal \u2013 first of all \u2013 the little satisfaction of <\/span>having known how to appreciate in good time the originality of the Randian researches (if only because some of them came out over time in the journal “Il castello di Elsinore” which I took care of for 38 years). On 9 January 2007, reviewing her 2006 book, Percorsi della drammaturgia romantica, <\/i>I noted that “Randi, in a series of studies for the moment still partial, has begun to highlight <\/span>with force and intelligence (but also with good will, going to work in the Parisian libraries) that a first nucleus of directorial practice<\/i> is in truth grafted in fully forty years before the Meininger, with the Parisian stagings of Hugo, of Dumas p\u00e8re, of Vigny”. On 3 June 2009, then, before the publication of I primordi della regia,<\/i> I too came out with a trombone-like start, entitling my review Hebemus Papessam<\/i>. (Both reviews on the site TurinD@msReview<\/i> which I animated for a certain number of years, deluding myself that I would thus get pardoned for two mandates as an overly tyrannical Dean of Faculty: a site currently deactivated, I imagine because no longer funded\u2026). Naturally, I found it quite appreciable that the different dating of the origin of directorial praxis was tightly interwoven with the sagacious examination of the dramaturgical text. As if to say that even a typically spectacular<\/i> problematic is more comprehensible if one knows how to use the scalpel that penetrates into the living flesh of an author’s writing. That the first directors are Hugo Vigny Dumas p\u00e8re, that is three playwrights, well, a marvel of a conclusion, almost to doubt that it can be too good to be true<\/i>\u2026<\/p>\n

I confess in short, not being in the habit of hiding behind a finger, that my Pindaric hymn to Randi was not (and is not, even less today) innocent and gratuitous, but because \u2013 as I wrote at the head of my Laterza book of 2010, Goldoni il libertino. Eros, violenza, morte <\/i>\u2013 the castellans<\/i> studied and published perceiving themselves as “the bad boys of P\u00e1l Street, for a quarter of a century companions of games and of infinite most joyous academic wargames<\/i>“, in a close confrontation with the millers<\/i>, and so the excellence of Elena Randi seemed with just reason to reverberate on the group to which she belonged, which worked a great deal around the important theme of directing, albeit in a different way, <\/span>even squabbling within its own bosom, not only writing but also inventing initiatives, like the many conferences with contemporary directors on Lake Garda, organized by the dynamic Paolo Bosisio. And the Victor Hugo regista<\/i> currently in the course of printing (alas no, there will not be a paper volume, let us say in the course of computer processing), published by the University of Bologna, affixes the final seal to a long, fruitful and original commitment of excavation.<\/p>\n

<\/span>How to conclude, however, beyond any petty narcissistic complacency? It had seemed to me (wrongly) that, at the last, <\/span>Elena Randi had lost herself in the territories of dance, that she had yielded to the fascination of the theatre without word<\/i>, as I wrote in my farewell from the “Castello di Elsinore”, but evidently I was mistaken. <\/span>Dance does not present itself for her as a late acquisition; reading her scholarly output attentively, one discovers that it was, if anything, the first love<\/i>. In short, we must have the rare courage of truth, recognizing that <\/span>we did not see her coming<\/i>, <\/span>but because Elena Randi has an extra gear<\/i>, represents the best of what the small ancient world within which she was born and grew up was able to express: <\/span>capable of thorough exegeses on dramaturgical texts, like her Master and the best of the castellans<\/i>, but equally expert in <\/span>dance, that is in non-verbal languages <\/i>dear to the millers,<\/i> and at the same time an indefatigable documentarist and a mouse of libraries and archives. More fitting therefore to close this all too prolonged <\/span>panegyric of mine with a fragment of an old most savory review <\/span>by our Siro Ferrone, when he mounted on horseback, lance at the ready, against “the habit of our theatre historians \u2013 above all those operating around the twentieth century \u2013 of reasoning, reflecting, theorizing and meditating around their ideas confronted with the ideas of theatre-makers in turn measured against the ideas of other theatre-makers, in the last analysis with the velleities of the one and the other”: finally concluding incisively that in the case of the book by the castellan<\/i> he was signaling <\/span>\u2013 of which he appreciated the recourse to direct sources and the analysis of the variants between original manuscript, script and printed edition \u2013 “one founds oneself on works and not on chatter”. In truth Siro Ferrone’s review is prior to 2009, that is to the first decisive book of the three by Randi dedicated to the motif under discussion, but I am sure that Ferrone <\/span>presaged what the scholar <\/span>would write, and for this he was then glad to welcome into his series the imposing critical edition of <\/span>Angelo, tyran de Padoue<\/i> by Hugo, so that he could write today the same words to honor the fundamental work of Elena Randi. And in any case \u2013 also to tie myself circularly back to the incipit<\/i>, of Apulian-dialect flavor, thus at the same time paying homage to my friend Perrelli, Apulian by adoption) we can say as the curate said (of whom my unloved Foggia mother used to tell me), when they warned him that he had blessed the wrong coffin: sliding his eye from the one to the other bier, without in the least losing his composure or being embarrassed, the prelate calmly said: Benedizione, l\u00e8vete ‘a ‘dd\u00f2 st\u00e9 e vien’te a mett\u00e8 cc\u00e0!<\/i><\/p>\n

(2 April 2026)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Antonio Gramsci wrote unforgettable words in a paragraph of his entitled Le universit\u00e0 italiane, applauding the fact that “every teacher tends to form a ‘school’ of his own”, concluding in the end that “this custom, save for sporadic cases of camorra, is beneficial”. Alas, I fear that in the post-’68 Italian University everything has degraded.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays"],"yoast_head":"\nHonor to Elena Randi - ROBERTO ALONGE'S BLOG<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.robertoalonge.it\/en\/2026\/06\/10\/honor-to-elena-randi\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Honor to Elena Randi - ROBERTO ALONGE'S BLOG\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Antonio Gramsci wrote unforgettable words in a paragraph of his entitled Le universit\u00e0 italiane, applauding the fact that “every teacher tends to form a ‘school’ of his own”, concluding in the end that “this custom, save for sporadic cases of camorra, is beneficial”. 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