Mitologia del Principe
**
Written for
Prémiere: 19 March 2018 Palazzina Liberty, Stagione Rondò 2018, Milano, Italy. Divertimento Ensemble.
Duration: 12 min.
The construction of the anatomical machines, the marine carriage, the killing of seven cardinals in order to make from their bones and skin chairs, the marbling of draperies and the Cristo velato, the perpetual lamp and the reproduction of the blood miracle of San Gennaro. These are just some of the myths and legends that revolve around the figure of Raimondo di Sangro Principe di Sansevero, esotericist, inventor, alchemist, mason and academician, brilliant and ambiguous mind of the Neapolitan XVIII century, and that, in an overlap of popular beliefs and real scientific experiments that the Prince performed to try to unveil the secrets of Nature, they went to feed what we can really define as a mythology.
The piece is almost a sort of homage to this mythology, starting from the sacredness of the Sansevero Chapel and the sinister noises of machinery that came from the basement of the Palazzo Sansevero – palace that was already the residence of Gesualdo da Venosa and theater of the famous murder – transfigured in one place, passing through the Marine Carriage, with which he used to sail the waves of Capo Posillipo on Sundays of July 1770, ending with his death, arrived on 21 March 1771 due to, it seems, the contagion of an “active ray” emitted from a luminous mineral received as a gift from the king of Prussia and that he had worked alchemically.