Don Giovanni chooses a piazza as a place for a lover’s tryst: a piazza that was once, in other times, a theatre of torture and death. The recurring vision of a wooden monument in flames, erected in the great piazza in memory of a man of free thought, is a source for Don Giovanni of constant disquiet, a frightfully terrible trial that evokes fear, anxiety, terror and horror. The image of the wooden monument burning keeps coming back to Don Giovanni’s mind, to the extent that it becomes an obsession, which in the end the great personage realises it somehow represents the inexorable tragic epilogue of his own life. A group of ten people, men and women, persecute Don Giovanni, the loathed seducer, manifestly seek revenge. Again and again they scorn and sully his senses, the source of his faculty of love, with the aim of crippling his sense of taste, hearing, smell, touch and sight. Deformed in body and humiliated in thought, Don Giovanni wanders the capitals of the world, desperate, now incapable of loving, doomed to die.
Cesare Vergati won a year’s high school study grant to the USA. He graduated in Psychology and Philosophy in Rome, studied Spanish literature in Madrid and Barcelona, attended the Berlin faculty of philosophy for a year and studied and worked for some years in Paris, where he won a doctorate in philosophy and psychoanalysis. He studied Russian literature in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Since 1988 he has been in charge of cinema for the French Institute in Milan. With ExCogita he published Trilogy of the Echo: Surprising, novel in poetry; Soldier in Veils, novel in theatre – theatre adaptation performed in Milan and Saint Petersburg; and Boy on pendulum, novel in music. The three books have been translated into Russian. Again with ExCogita he published the first door of Triptych of Shadow: Faust or the Unconverted – theatre adaptation performed in Milan, the second door of Don Giovanni or the inconvenient – theatre adaptation performed in Milan, (translated into English, French and Russian ) – the third door of Falstaff, or the Unusual (translated into Russian) and the first canto of Triangle of Waiting, the Wet Man. Diòcreme in chains. The illustrations in the works are by Bimba Selvaggia Landmann.