The Turk in Italy

The making of the story

Alexandra Lacroix imagines Il turco in Italia as a virtuoso comedy in which the story is born before our eyes, driven by themes that remain strikingly relevant today: romantic relationships, money, women’s freedom and the fantasies projected onto the foreigner. The poet Prosdocimo becomes a writer-director filming a movie about Naples, framing, editing and reshaping reality itself. A question runs throughout the opera: where does observation end, and where does staging begin? And what does this gaze reveal about those it seeks to capture? Naples becomes far more than a backdrop: it is a city of contrasts, movement and shifting thresholds, where splendour and decay, surface and depth coexist. The set design follows the same logic, imagining an editing space filled with cameras, layered images and parallel trajectories in which the characters cross paths, run into each other and and lose their way, as though caught within the machinery of a narrative greater than themselves, swept along by Rossini’s dazzling energy.

Exploring further:

L’amie prodigieuse (Elena Ferrante, 2011): Naples as a space of social determinism, symbolic violence and thwarted emancipation. A powerful echo of the themes of women’s place in society and the power dynamics that run through the work.

La Main de Dieu (Paolo Sorrentino, 2021): In 1980s Naples, steeped in the legend of Maradona, a teenager sees his life swing between personal drama, the awakening of desire, a passion for football and the discovery of cinema. A coming-of-age story in which the city becomes at once a setting, a memory and the stuff of fiction.

Event in partnership with Le Hall du Livre Nancy: Fri 11 June at 7pm