BASILICO & altri rimedi to Vertigo

An actress and an actor, two suitcases and a basil plant. These are the ingredients of “Basil & other remedies”, the first unpublished show by Valentina Luporini, daughter of the renowned lyricist of Giorgio Gaber and master of Italian theater-song Sandro Luporini who has ensured his presence at the Saturday 30th replica.

“It is an honor for Vertigo – says artistic director Marco Conte – to have the great Sandro Luporini in our theater, a contact that has been carried on by our actor and teacher Alessio Pianigiani, who met him in a replica of Il Grigio precisely by Luporini/Gaber that he successfully interpreted himself. Pianigiani in Castelnuovo Magra”.

“Basil & other remedies” lands in Tuscany thanks to the production of Collectif Humagine !, a theater company based in Geneva that Valentina co-founded in 2023.

The dates are four: tomorrow night at Spaziofuoricentro (Lucca), November 29th at Teatro dell’Olivo (Camaiore – part of the Fondazione Toscana Spettacolo festival), the 30th of November at 9:00 PM and the 1st of December at 5:00 PM at Teatro Vertigo (Livorno).

The show is about a meeting between a boy and a girl: Pietro and Agata. Pietro (Cristiano Arsì) is insecure, sweet and clumsy, likes to make jokes – not always funny – and has never learned to tie his shoes like he should. Agata (Valentina Luporini) is instead disdainful and self-confident; raised with absent parents, she has learned to rely only on herself. As often happens to two such different people, they fall in love, and in this relationship they carry their own baggage, a trace of the experiences lived up to that moment.

It would be incorrect not to speak of the third character, perhaps the real protagonist: Basil, a small basil plant that accompanies the vicissitudes of the two characters from the beginning. Taking care of such a delicate plant is not simple – especially in the ups and downs of a love story: you have to speak to it gently, choose the right music, prune it following precise rules and always pay attention to where the sun shines. Basil grows, blooms, and suffers along with Pietro and Agata, silently observing them approach, play, share burdens and carry them along, as happens to every couple in love trying to make sense of it all.

In short, Basil & other remedies lives on the energy of these two actors who, in the mind of the Italian-Swiss director Rose Marie Gatta, tread, without interruption, a semi-empty stage, in a frenetic race through all the moments of a relationship, trying to find a way to solve their problems and lighten the burdens that each of them carries.