Malta – Theatre, cinema and music for the 150th anniversary of Pirandello’s birth

Luigi Pirandello has close bonds with Malta because Giovanni Ricci Gramito, his anti-Bourbon grandfather on his mother’s side, was exiled to the island in 1849, where he died from a cholera infection the following year, on 1 August 1850. He had brought his whole family to Malta with him, including his young daughter Caterina, Luigi’s mother. Pirandello talks profusely of the dramatic life of his grandfather in Malta in his “Lettere Giovanili” and in his fundamental historic novel “The Old and the Young” (“I vecchi e i giovani”). A note by the Italian Cultural Institute in La Valletta reads: “We started from this connection between the two Mediterranean islands in paying a tribute to the great Italian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934, by organising an event aimed at embracing as many as possible of the different aspects and fallouts of Pirandello’s production.” The event entitled “Theatre, cinema and music for the 150th anniversary of Luigi Pirandello’s birth” is scheduled to take place at 6:30 p.m. on 16 February in the auditorium of the Italian Cultural Institute. It was organised in partnership with the National Centre of Pirandellian Studies and the Pirandello Stable Festival of Agrigento, under the official patronage of the President of the Regional Assembly of Sicily. The evening’s intense programme of activities envisages the screening of a short film “Pirandello and Malta” (in an English language preview for the Maltese Islands), a chat entitled “Pirandello: Verità, Identità Relative e Ragione degli altri” (“Pirandello: Truths, Relative Identities and the Reasons of Others”), a lecture on “Pirandello and the Cinema”, the screening of famous films based on Pirandello’s works, a reading from Pirandello by a professional actor (in Italian with a foreword in English), and a performance of Pirandellian folk songs accompanied by Sicilian music.