Mercantia 2022 - The voice of the moon

“LTruth lies not only in a dream, but in many dreams…”
(“Arabian Nights” Pier Paolo Pasolini)

“If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet… maybe we could understand something…”

This suggestion is put forward by Ivo (Roberto Benigni) in The Voice of the Moon (La voce della luna), a film by Federico Fellini, the genius director to be featured in the 34th edition of Mercantia.

To listen to the voice of the Moon, we need to keep quiet and block out all the noise, worries and confusion that surround us and are resonating in our lives.

Just like it used to be, it’s back: in the streets and squares of Certaldo, Mercantia will be here again from 13 to 16 July 2022, returning on time as a major festival in the calendar. Before one of those magical nights falls and the curtain rises, thank you in advance to everyone who has worked hard and will be doing so just as much to make this happen…

The lights will go up, a magnificent full moon will rise, we’ll all be on tenterhooks. Then a voice will appear in the distance, an operatic aria: Casta diva by Vincenzo Bellini, an ode to the Moon… Look around you, the singer might be on a balcony or looking out from a window, who knows?

Talking about the Moon is too commonplace, with all the artistic references to it, in classical and pop music, theatre, cinema and contemporary art. Poets, farmers, the tides, expecting mothers, astronomers professional and amateur alike: they must all deal with the Moon. You will too as our audience, and with the werewolves you might meet at Mercantia! Nor can you escape from listening to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, nor from that awful light music that exploits our beloved satellite. Some may walk a tightrope to get to it, but it's there, full and majestic, among the towers of the medieval town of Certaldo.

I'd now like to debunk a few urban legends about our little satellite.
As everyone knows by now, mankind didn't really land on the Moon. It only happened in a film.
There is life on the Moon, but its slightly lunatic inhabitants like to remain hidden, so they decided to live on the dark side of the Moon.
The Moon is flat, it’s just a façade, a forgotten film set in the sky…
The Moon is made of cheese and it's right there waiting to be devoured!
The Moon is a deity with many different names…

Leaving the scientific perspective behind, these evocations become literary material, full of creative stimuli that will become spaced-out ideas and plans for the upcoming edition of Mercantia. For example, a local company labels their pecorino with reproductions of original paintings; an idea will definitely arise out of this, a project created as a result of that idea. This is only intended to explain how the ideas and stories for the Festival come about…

Le tre notti della luna piena (‘the three nights of the full moon’) is a lyric from a Neapolitan song, Canzone per luzzella, a favourite of mine that I listened to many times in the early days of Mercantia. Why settle for a single full moon? Maybe we’d like to fill the roofs with 33 moons, the same number as the previous editions of Mercantia since 1988, when the first Festival was staged.

I never stop looking up at the skies and have written many short stories and lines of verse to the Moon. For a variety of reasons, I also appreciate the words of Nichiren Daishonin, born 800 years ago this year: The companions with whom we composed poems praising the moon on autumn evenings have vanished with the moon behind the shifting clouds…

We’ll be holding a big party, we all need one, but of course I'd also like to commemorate all the artists and our loved ones who are no longer with us…

This year, for the latest edition of Mercantia, I would like to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Pier Paolo Pasolini, in a Secret Garden the three enormous paintings adorning three of the town’s towers will be inspired by Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life; the three respective painters of The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights will be an artist from Certaldo, one from Canterbury, a city in the south-east of England twinned with Certaldo, and an Arab painter.

My hardliner days are gone though, I don’t say that Mercantia is the only festival out there anymore, that our theatre is the best, that our town is the most beautiful one. But like in The Little Prince, we’ve now taken our own rose to heart too. We’ve tamed the way we think about Mercantia, which is like our own child, so it's only natural that it's the apple of our eye…

There isn’t only one teaching, only one truth, only one way of showing our love, only one race. There is a whole garden of flowers, there are four seasons and there are 365 days in the year. When Mercantia blossoms during the festival, we fall in love and even more so if there’s a full moon, as there will be this year!

As we all know, this is the era of the millennials, when the feminine and its values are taking power from an overly warmongering, competitive and obscured masculine. The Moon is feminine, calm, welcoming and sensitive. It's true that the Sun gives us life and food, but the Sun and Moon alternate and have found a balance, one we must also find within us, within human beings that were all once androgynous! We now have good and evil, masculine and feminine, rich and poor, humans and nature (however devastated…). That’s all coming to an end, it’s only a matter of time, especially when the die-hard materialists and their obscured power are becoming more and more violent.

Listen to the voice of the moon!

It isn't all about percentages, but I’m committed to there being a greater proportion of female artists and companies for this edition of Mercantia, as a symbol to prepare the way to highlight the value of the Moon.

I haven’t yet decided when the Moon should set, but to let the Sun rise. With it will come the festival we all know well, with each of its rays now a show, an artist or an installation. We must be patient, it won't be the August sun yet, but maybe the spring light, a sun of the future (as the song goes) that must be allowed to grow a bit more each time…

Mercantia used to be a festival tied up with the exuberance of theatre, although in all its plenitude and wide range of shows and visual stimuli, it also became consumerist. This time, the offerings at the Festival will be there to be savoured and appreciated, little by little, one by one…

I’d like to conclude with another quotation from the scriptures of Nichiren Buddha, “the journey from Kamakura to Kyoto takes twelve days. If you travel for eleven but stop with only one day remaining, how can you admire the moon over the capital?”

This philosophy of life, which has kept me going and given me impetus through all the editions of Mercantia, has also made me grow as an artist.

Take courage, let’s keep going, dreaming, battling, living…

Alessandro Gigli