CECILIA AND VIVALDI

These days I’ve been reading an Italian book that has recently won an important prize here in our country, “Il Premio Strega”. It is a melancholic, but beautiful, short novel by Tiziano Scarpa, STABAT MATER. It is set in Venice at the end of the 17th century but it really seems not to have time or space . Unfortunately, if you are not Italian or can’t read Italian, you must wait for a translation which has been planned but not yet done.

Now, I’d suggest to you to start the music in the player here below and, only after doing that, read my short review.

You’ll understand why. Hope you'll enjoy it.

It’s night, the orphanage is plunged in silence, darkness and sleep. All the girls sleep, apart form one, Cecilia, 16 years old. During the day she plays the violin in the church, behind the impenetrable thick grating which gate the believers out of her life , impeding them even to see the girl's face. At night she feels lost in her deep solitude, gets up and secretly gets to her hidden place where she writes to the most intimate but at the same farthest person in her life: the mother who abandoned her in that asylum, the Ospedale della Pietà di Venezia.
Music is to her a routinely habit as many others, a dull repetitions of sounds. But Cecilia feels and writes: “The world wants us to be silent”. In her lyrical and philosophical nocturnal reflections she has also another addressee, her own Death, who appears to her as a black-snike haired woman she doesn’t fear at all.

But one day things start slightly and slowly changing: a young music teacher and composer arrives to substitute old Don Giulio. He is a young priest, with a big nose and copper hair. His name is Antonio. Antonio Vivaldi.

Thanks to her complex stormy relationship with music, Cecilia will find her way with an unexpected choice of rebellion, freedom and self-determination.

Good story, isn't it? And very well written, too.
I’m stunned at the writer’s ability in feeling such distant (to him) desperate loneliness and conveying it to us with so much strength and sympathy.
I particularly liked these lines among others: ( my translation from Italian ) “Since I was born I’ve had to do what I’m told in here, so all the things which counts to my heart, I must be able to put them in the small spaces left, in the small empty cavities left by chance”. This is writing to her: completely alone at night, on pieces of papers already written shrivelled and thrown away by the nuns or the girls ... in the small white spaces left... to a mother always dreamt about and never really experienced.

Related posts & sitesSPEAKING OF VIVALDIby Ms Lucy at ENCHANTED by JOSEPHINE