Bored at home yet? Come to the village!

One of my favorite things that happens in our village is the local musical play, called Tovaglia a Quadri, performed every August in a tiny piazza filled with long tables. The plays are written a month or so before they go live and tackle current and controversial topics ranging from how Amazon touches village life to the Genoa bridge collapse. Tovaglia a Quadri is satirical, introspective about the village, and broadly performed, but hard to experience for non-locals as the dialog is in Italian and the local dialect, and tickets are almost impossible to get.

As with most things this extraordinary year the fate of Tovaglia a Quadri’s summer play was not looking promising — it wasn’t just the restrictions against crowds gathering in close quarters but also a prohibition against serving food at theatrical performances, which put a damper on the three-course meal. But this is the 25th anniversary of the play and the show must go on. The intrepid creators, Andrea Merendelli and Paolo Pennacchini, decided to make a movie instead.

The movie will be subtitled in English and available to stream from August 24 – Sept. 6th — ten nights just like would have happened in our parallel “normal” universe. I can’t give too much away, but the plot is a humdinger. While Andrea and Paolo were writing the play there was a positive case of Covid-19 in our village. The person involved was a healthcare worker who had returned to Anghiari for the weekend from a city where he worked when he received the positive result. The reaction of several of the villagers was surprisingly extreme. Andrea and Paolo wove parts of this event right into the play. Their fictional character has to flee to the village rooftops to live, in fear for his life should he descend. Meanwhile the rest of the village is gathered around a community bread oven rediscovering the joy of making bread despite the shortage of flour and yeast. The title, as always, is a pun: Pan de’ Mia, which refers to the pandemic as well as means “My bread”. It’s a clever glimpse into one way that Italians are processing the horror of the epidemic with grace, creativity, and humor.

I’ve been at some of the shooting and the movie looks like a treat. Not only will be it entertaining but it’ll serve as a nice little escape to our village. There is a 15€ fee to stream the movie which helps to cover expenses. You can buy tickets here. A couple of production shots…