Paris – A traveling staged reading that weaves together poetry, food, and music to recreate the atmosphere of Alda Merini’s Milan: the Charlie Bar, her tenement apartment, the bedroom with notes and names scrawled across the walls. This is the performance Life Is a Scandal of Beauty. Alda Merini, an Indomitable Woman, starring Lucia Bensasson, Yasunori Sasa, and Matheo Rolland, with a script by Maria Antonia Pingitore, which will be staged today at 7:00 p.m. at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris.
The non-linear narrative follows recurring themes in Merini’s work—love, motherhood, suffering, music, men, Milan, poetry, vocation, family, mysticism, confinement—and unfolds across multiple settings: from the bar to the private room, eventually evoking the House of the Arts – Alda Merini Space, where her authentic voice still resonates. The performance will be presented in French and Italian.