Gabriele Vitella - Apollineo e Dionisiaco

Every so often, a city makes a just gesture.
Not because it truly repairs an omission — omissions remain — but because it retrospectively signals an error of perspective.

Naming a small square in Bari after Nicola Saponaro does not serve to “remember” him. Saponaro does not need remembrance, but reading. Rather, it serves to acknowledge that Italian theatre of the second half of the twentieth century has been poorly narrated: too often as a Roman or Milanese affair, ideological or avant-garde, while the pulsating heart of dramatic writing was beating elsewhere — in provincial cities, in company theatres, in those margins where the text was born for the sake of the stage, not the page.

Saponaro was one of these authors.
And precisely for this reason, he never fully entered the canon.

Not because he was minor, but because he was uncomfortably central.

An author without alibis

Nicola Saponaro was born in Bari in 1935.
His biography, at a superficial glance, contains nothing novelistic: studies, work, family, theatre. No bohemian pose, no mythology of the cursed artist. And yet it is precisely this absence of alibis that makes him a rare case.

Saponaro could never take refuge in the idea of “art against life”.
His theatre is born within life: in the city, in work, in spoken language, in social conflict. The son of a family connected to commerce, raised in a concrete, non-idealised Bari, trained in economics, Saponaro knew well the workings of power relations, material mechanisms, money, authority. Nothing in his writing is abstract.

This fact is decisive.
Because it explains why his theatre was never “ideological” in the impoverished sense of the term. There are no slogans, no pedagogy, no political catechism. Instead, there is a lucid awareness of conflicts, translated into dramaturgical structure.

Saponaro does not write to explain.
He writes to put things on stage.

The “company poet”: a non-innocent definition

The formula most often used to describe him — company poet — is anything but neutral. On the contrary, it is a radical definition, which today sounds almost subversive.

To be a company author means renouncing two widespread illusions:

the illusion of the self-sufficient text;
the illusion of the author as sovereign centre of the work.

Saponaro writes thinking of actors, voices, bodies, rehearsal times, the material limits of the stage. His dramaturgy is born in dialogue: with directors, performers, spaces. It is no coincidence that many of his texts exist in multiple versions, adaptations, rewritings. The text is not a monument, but a living organism.

This places him close to a powerful European tradition — from Brecht to Müller — but with a decisive difference: Saponaro does not theorise.
He acts.

And it is precisely this continuous, humble, stubborn doing that kept him out of theoretical salons but inside real theatre.

Civil theatre, without rhetoric

Today it is convenient to define Saponaro as an author of “civil theatre”. But one must be careful: in Italy, civil theatre has often become a form of rhetoric disguised as commitment.

Saponaro is the exact opposite.

When he writes about workers’ struggles, the Risorgimento, the mafia, the South, he does not do so to “denounce”, but to complicate. His characters are not spokespersons for theses: they are contradictory figures, often defeated, sometimes ambiguous. Conflict never resolves into a clear message, because reality is not clear.

Consider his texts dedicated to southern history.
Saponaro never indulges in victimhood. The South that emerges from his works is not an innocent, oppressed South, but a territory traversed by responsibilities, guilt, removals. It is a South that thinks, errs, struggles, contradicts itself.

In this sense, his theatre is profoundly anti-moralistic.
And precisely for this reason, it is political.

Language: between speech and construction

One of the most underestimated aspects of Saponaro is his linguistic writing.
Those who read him inattentively risk mistaking it for a simple, almost flat language. A mistake.

Saponaro’s language is constructed with extreme precision, yet it masks its own artifice. It is a language born of speech, but it never slavishly imitates it. It works by subtraction, by minimal displacements, by rhythms.

There is never dialectal complacency.
There is never folklore.

The South, in his language, is not a local colour, but a mental structure: a different relationship to time, authority, memory. Saponaro knows that the true issue is not which language is spoken, but how language organises thought.

In this sense, his theatre is profoundly modern.
And it withstands time far better than many “experimental” texts of the same years.

Saponaro and history: rewriting without pacifying

One of Saponaro’s great merits is his relationship with history.
He never uses it as a decorative background, nor as a celebratory pretext. History, in his texts, is always a battlefield.

When he addresses the Risorgimento, he dismantles its rhetoric. When he speaks of the mafia, he avoids heroic simplification. When he stages historical figures, he strips them of monumental aura.

This choice places him within a minority but decisive line of Italian theatre: the one that refuses reconciliation.
There is never, in Saponaro, a history that “ends well”.

And this is a crucial point: his theatre does not console.
It forces the spectator to remain within discomfort.

The relationship with institutions: inside and against

Saponaro worked with theatrical institutions. He founded them, animated them, supported them. And yet he was never their functionary.

There is in him a constant tension between construction and critique. On the one hand, the necessity of creating structures — theatres, consortia, archives, prizes. On the other, the awareness that every institution tends to stiffen, to normalise.

The fact that he donated his archive is not an act of vanity, but of responsibility: Saponaro knows that theatre is ephemeral, and that without material memory it dissolves. But at the same time, he knows that memory, if not critically interrogated, becomes empty celebration.

Dedicating a public space to him only makes sense if it is not turned into a mute plaque.
Saponaro is not a street name. He is an open problem.

Why Saponaro is more necessary today than yesterday

We live in a time in which theatre risks two opposite and equally sterile drifts:

on the one hand, aestheticising self-referentiality;
on the other, performative moralism.

Saponaro belongs to neither.

His theatre is concrete without being banal, political without being preachy, learned without being elitist.

Reading him today means calling into question certain comforts:

the idea that commitment must be declared;
the idea that the South is an identity category;
the idea that theatrical text can live separated from the stage.

Saponaro reminds us that theatre is a collective practice, and that writing, without this practice, empties itself.

Bari, at last

That Bari should recognise Nicola Saponaro today is no detail.
Because Saponaro was never a “local” author, but he was profoundly of Bari in the highest sense: rooted without provincialism, critical without contempt.

His Bari is neither postcard nor myth. It is a real place, with its contradictions, its energies, its removals. Naming an urban space after him means — at least symbolically — accepting that culture is not ornament, but the structure of the city.

Nicola Saponaro is not an author to be rediscovered.
He is an author to be put back into circulation.

There is no need to celebrate him. There is a need to read him, stage him, discuss him, contradict him. To make him return to being what he always was: a voice that does not ask for consent, but for attention.

If Italian theatre has the courage to do this, Saponaro will cease to be a “memory to be protected” and will return to being what he has always been:
a necessity.